A dremel with a wide assortment of rotary burrs, needle files, emory cloth & patience.

It's always an amazing feeling when you get done pulling apart an engine. Messing with the timing. Getting it all put back together. Having it fire up & run the first try.

And then promptly run out of gas..... Son of a damn bitch.

After a trip to the gas station to fill up my 5 gallon fuel tank, he runs again. Still need to mount the MSD 6al box & tidy up the wires, but at least that cluster fuck is done. Now it's back to putting in the new fuel tank & hopefully remembering to to buy an air cleaner finally.



Did piss me off though. I wanted to use the 4160 Holley since I thought that the Edelbrock was jacked. What with fuel pouring out of where it shouldn't have been. Left overnight to deal with today & wouldn't ya know it, it sealed up & all was right with the world. After I managed to find a rebuild kit for the Holley locally.  Oh well, it'll go on the Bronco eventually now & probably work better on the 351m than the 400 anyway.

All mounted up, cleaned up & tidy. I need to play with the timing some more, but I've got to color fill the timing marks on my balancer. I just can't see that well. Could probably use a new set of metering rods as well maybe. I hate tuning an Edelbrock, I've had so many people over the years tell me that an Edelbrock is so much easier to tune than a Holley.  But I've just never developed the knack for an Edelbrock. Crank the mix screws all the way in, back them out a full turn & start from there. Turn them in, engine dies. Turn them out engine dies.  And it goes on & on & on. Maybe I should try a vacuum tune for a change, not sure since I don't have the vacuum advance anymore.  1405 Edelbrock, I'd think that 600cfm would be plenty for a mostly stock 400 Ford.



Then went for a little ride through the backyard. We'll at least the flat part of it, I still have to do the front driveshaft. I'd like to put a Detroit or Yukon Grizzly locker in the rear of this thing before to long if money allows.  

One of the best things I did to my 71 F100 that someone put a 400 in, was ditch the Edelbrock for a Street Demon.

Can agree with that. Unfortunately it's just not in the budget right now. Maybe I can sneak a cam & carb into my stocking for Christmas.

I learned something unpleasant about my preferred model of Ford trucks. In 1978 - 1979 Ford in their infinite wisdom used 3 separate types of brake booster & of course none of them interchange & all of the differences is in the rod from the pedal to the booster.  The first two are almost identical,  just a matter of whether or not the eye of the bolt is offset or not & they're both not that expensive.  But the third type has a short little rod & a retarded system to get it to the pedal & cost three times as much.

Guess which one I needed for the 3/4 ton. Yup, $360 for a brake booster. But damn does it ever have nice brakes now. For a 45 year old truck anyway.  

I'm no professional school taught mechanic, but I'm pretty sure that when shit starts falling off / out of the booster it's a good sign that it's bad. Just a wild ass guess. A "mechanic" put that master cylinder on before I bought it, you'd think he'd have noticed. Maybe.


And the new Chineseium hotness.


This one goes for a new windshield this week & them hopefully tags.

Now for the brakes on the 1 ton. I have absolutely nothing nice to say here, nothing.

The brakes on it have been just about completely rebuilt & were complete garbage. I suspect that it came down to two separate problems. 1: the master cylinder was just about shot. The rear brakes were just about no existing at best & the front weren't much better.  2: I suspect someone may have put a cam in it at some point.  I sounds a little lumpy but more importantly  I put a vacuum gauge on it & it's not enough vacuum to run the brake booster.  The booster wants 16 - 18 inches of vacuum pressure, I'm not producing 16 inches. More like 10 to 14.

But fear not! For there is a solution.  I now use the same braking system as a 2000 something super duty.

Hydroboost.



The wife installed most all of it too.


This just about almost worked out perfectly. Except for one tiny little oversight on my part. I've still have the old Thompson steering pump & I didn't order fittings for said pump and I sure as hell won't use one of those garbage ass Ford C2 pumps. It's either get fitting for a pump I planned to replace with a Saginaw conversion later or just do it now.
New pump & the conversion fiddly bits will hopefully be here this week.

@Mattgunguy - how are the two 1959 Fridges coming along?

Past picking up some little odds & ins, essentially they're not yet. I've been having the itch to drag the one with the Y-block out & at least try to get it started. Found some new points & condenser for it right after I bought some. Got a rebuild kit for the factory Holley that's on it, still got the plugs & wires I bought years ago and a new fuel pump that may or may not be the right one.

Found the new Chineseium 2150 I bought for the 302 in the red one something like 5 years ago, along with the brakes & associated fiddly bits. All the hard lines on both will be needing replaced, so I got one of the fancy hydraulic flaring tool. Would ya believe it that they used a hydraulic clutch in 1959. Granted all the fluid pots on both are toast.

I've probably got enough stuff together to get one at least dirt road driveable. Probably won't be messing with much of anything for a while, need to get some house projects done. Little things like walls & insulation need doing.

So much to do. So little time & money.

Guess I should update what's gone on with the truck as well, didn't realize that it'd been so long.

Due to an unfortunate event, I spent a lot of money. About a month or so back my 1405 Edelbrock became an Edelbroke at a really bad time. Long story short, it's developed a stalling out problem on hills. I have a particularly heavy little army trailer behind the truck on a rather steep hill & I stalled. Then lost it trying to get going again. Backwards down the hill. Was extremely fortunate,  but it was a shit day.





Another member here came & saved my ass. I can point out his thread about it if ya like. I couldn't even get myself off the trailer due to the open diff rear-end & no front driveshaft at the time.

So due to that bullshit the wife decided that a few things were needed. I'm a big fan of mechanical lockers, not lunchbox lockers but full carrier replacements, be something like a Detroit or Yukon Grizzly.  I had put a Detroit locker on my Amazon list many months back & promptly forgot about it,  we'll she didn't. She got the part number & went shopping.  





So I got that in & then was under orders to get the front driveshaft built finally.  I'd bought a new one months back and hadn't go to welding up. Got that done & installed,  so of course the axle shaft U-joints are absolutely fucking shot.  Yet one more thing.

And to address the wonderful Edelbroke carb. I'm not a huge Edelbrock fan, I've just always had them. But they don't offer a real off-road carb. So I got one of these Holley's. Except that it hasn't shown up yet, more than a month later. Maybe tomorrow, unless Ups screws it up, again.



But in the meantime, the wife has a clearance shopping problem  & did you  know that Holley has a factory refurbished section on their site for a healthy amount of money off. Plus the 3/4 ton could use a new carb too.



There is a problem with that though. 4bbl carb on a can you guess it, 2bbl intake. And I absolutely refuse to use one of those dumbass adapters. So that necessitated an new intake. Ignore the old 4150 in the picture,  it's broken.



I haven't gotten around installing that yet. I elected to use the carb on the 1 ton for now & learned something very important in the process,  I knew exactly dick about setting up a Holley.  Seriously,  an Edelbrock is like the simple man's carb. Slap it on, adjust the mix & you're essentially done.  Now a Holley, good lord. I had to read a book & watch a lot of YouTube. Transfer slots, power valves, jet sizes, cams, accelerator pump springs, curb idle, fast idle,  squirters & the like all kicked my ass for a while.  Now I know why all the cool guys when I was a kid all ran a Holley,  ya can tune the damn however you need too once you figure it out.
But get a load of this. At the end of my first day of getting my ass kicked by a carb, the engine was running.  Albeit running like crap, but still running. The next morning,  NADA, NOTHING,  ZILCH! No run at all. After diagnosis and trouble shooting, my Msd 6al box bit the dust. I'm pissed off at this point & sick of throwing money at it, so I wasn't buying another box & the Msd distributor needs a Msd box to run it. I'd gotten a new distributor for the 3/4 ton so it robbed it & made a harness out of bits & pieces of several duraspark harnesses, found an old child from somewhere & got it going again.  Fought with the carb for another weekend and finally got it right. Even though it'll be coming right back off.



Runs right good now though.

Now back to the 3/4 ton. It had been running like crap & was ridiculously had to start & then wouldn't start. Back to the diagnosis and trouble shooting.  Fuel, compression & spark.  I had misdiagnosed it earlier and thought the moron mechanic had done the carb in with some of the janky stuff that was done to it, which is part of reason the wife got a new carb. Well I was wrong. I went through the 2bbl for grins and it was definitely delivering fuel. Checked compression and timing, both were good. Multiple ignition boxes are good. Coil is good. Distributor that I had just robbed the replacement for, not good. Hello head, meet wall & off to buy another replacement distributor.  



Swapping that out nearly became another broken distributor nightmare,  but a few hours soaking in Free all, then some kind persuasive love of a hammer and probably and it came out. New plugs & dropped in the new distributor & VROOM!  Fired right up & runs great. I was ready to beat my head against a tree or something.  But I've got an extra intake & carb now.

Gonna hopefully go get a bed for it in the next week or so.

That's a awesome project.
Your Experience with msd is a mirror of ever one I've owned.  I would never buy one again

It's super frustrating too.

I might try a Mallory setup at some point. Hell, I might try to find a points distributor too.  

For me it half about getting all the wiring neat & tidy. Having wiring everywhere drives me up the wall. The front mounted distributor is one thing I both love & hate about a Ford. So much easier to work on than a Chevy, but so much more ugly with all the wires running around.  Maybe someday I'll find about a 1970 or so K20 that doesn't cost a kidney I can play around with.

About damn time. Only took 6 weeks to show up.





Holley 670cfm Truck Avenger.  Supposedly good for a 40° ascent, 30° off camber angle & 30° descent. We shall see, because I've got most all of that in the backyard.  Hopefully it'll be worth the money.  

Be a couple of weeks before I get to try it out unfortunately.

You’re not the first person that I’ve heard that was surprised about the hydraulic clutch. I’ll message you from time to time. I have my late-grandfather’s ‘59 that I’m working on.

Have you seen that there were aftermarket oiling upgrade kits for those old y blocks? Mine has one that feeds to both sets of rockers from the bottom of the block.