Abandoned 351w Foxbody - Lunch Break Revival/Build (Spring 2021)

like all things a lot of the universe is if you get excited about something and think it's going to be fine it never is so i'm hopeful here but just had to go and run my mouth get overly excited oh we're in for a good time yay and the moment i've all been waiting for and it looks good [Music] oh absolutely howdy and welcome to the channel today i'm luke thunderhead289 here on youtube and i'm here with my co-worker alex here during our lunch break and uh he went ahead and bought this mustang it's been sitting for quite a long time and uh i don't know supposedly it has a wiped cam lobe and that's kind of why it got parked so he went ahead and bought how did you buy it first of all that's pretty that's pretty funny uh using uh gamestop money i got on stocks so it's essentially for him a free car so i don't know what he paid like 2500 ford or so and it's a so i don't know it's like an 8283 fox body it's not all that rusty it has a 351 windsor swap in it and still has the original four speed so anyway i guess we're gonna dig into this thing hard to say what we're gonna get into but we'll get the hood popped and see what's going on with the engine someone so conveniently pushed it right next to that pole oh hey wait a second wait a second we just gotta get the hood open right you don't have to get in it here open the door and pull the hood prop with that thing i bet you can do it if you can get the door open that's scary oh yeah nice oh no your paint it's so nice is it gonna work well don't don't pull on the oh that works hey i was like gee whiz don't pull the dash plastic off like all fox bodies the doors shut immaculately this is a t-top car which is pretty amazing it's been sitting out here for quite some time and it's never leaked and we've had a lot of rain so let's see this thing here help me out with the hood prop that definitely looks like a 351 windsor kind of some pretty aggressive hackery someone put a new radiator in it but i don't see any cooling fan i can't remember the story it looks like the heads were very recently boiled but they're pretty well not not that rusted up really for being bare um i don't know i kind of wonder if they installed this engine got it all set up went to break in the camera whatever had like maybe an insufficient cooling system this looks pretty oh that's nice looks like the valve cover bolts already out you want to see if you can pull that valve cover off i can't remember does it have well there's a push rod and rocker arm in the passenger seat so that kind of fits with the narrative oh yes the thousand hoses of doom on the old fox body it looks like old school 351 windsor cylinder heads with the guided rocker arms press and studs but it's real clean you know like it's been boiled not too loose i assume that's obviously the bad cylinder i guess we need to find a bucket and drain the coolant time to pull an intake manifold so what we did find is one of our r d pieces it's a clear ford valve cover that we were working on doing um at our job here so i don't know that'll that'll work just fine it's probably a little less clear now it's fine it's fine oh look at that mint beautiful there you go is that even coolant or is that rust water so i know we designed that to be a tall style ford valve cover but uh you know i don't think that there's supposed to be enough volume in the valve cover to hold the full contents of an engine so ah it's looking so good this is great let's get a look at what that stuff looks like it looks disgusting that is that is not a lot of coolant [Music] all right so here we are day two um i think we've determined that we're just going to pull the whole top end of the engine down and see what's going on and just fix whatever we find and get it put back together so today's tear down day it's sunday so we have a little bit more time on our hands on a typical lunch break and i guess let's not mess around and jump right in here looks like under the air filter housing here we have a very cliche uh holley 600 vacuum secondary cfm kind of a dime a dozen there someone tried pretty hard they got a spacer on here and everything to insulate it from the heat it's like they marginally knew what they were doing all right carbs coming off here let's get our washers off got some sitting over there i'm very curious because i preach on this whole transfer slot thing and i did see it was hooked a ported vacuum but it looks like it's done a lot of backfiring granted it was missing a cam load pretty much at that point and transfer slots are way overexposed so i'm sure i had some pretty dang late ignition timing on it all right so the next thing get that ignition coil off and then there's a little distributor hold down right here you can kind of see it so you'll want to take that all the way out and we're going to eat that distributor well alex is over there pulling the distributor out i'm going to start getting all the intake bolts out the one nice thing about this engine is someone did assemble it very recently so typically with stuff like this everything is super terribly tight but luckily for us everything's coming apart real nice and easy this is a dura spark unit which in my opinion is one of my least favorite things that ford ever did and i just totally whacked my funny bone now it should come all the way out just fine looks like it's a cast gear which it should be it's a flat type of cam it shows super minimal wear which does fit with the narrative that was put together very recently so those are at least all good signs so even if anything was wrong it wasn't wrong for that long i guess so hopefully we get lucky here and if you've ever worked on ford engines this is the feeling of success here where you can get the end intake bolts off without any issues because those are actually exposed to the elements on the other side of the cylinder head and typically they rust up and snap off so we're two for two and that is all four of those corner bolts loose still fitting with the narrative here oh you got your wrench stuck yep i did still fitting with the narrative here that this thing was very recently assembled or has very low hours one thing to note about these ford intake bolts or really any v style intake is when you're torquing it down you want to go around and around even when you get to your torque point that you're going for you still want to keep going around it's a wedge design so it likes to kind of walk around and oftentimes like say you're torquing it to 25 foot-pounds it'll probably take you about 10 cycles at 25 before everything clicks off at the first moment it's just one of the biggest mistakes folks make when installing these v-style intakes and just like with this one everything is very loose so it's probably you know when they installed it they didn't necessarily go about it in that way like this one i was able to take out just my bare hand almost meanwhile i'm pulling a derrick move here and using vice grips because i did not have a 12 point tada all right why was there this and this on the same terminal right there uh does this go back into the pigtail here so that is probably for the dura spark on the positive side um that's your keyed source and then the negative works in conjunction with the distributor to interrupt the ground and this anomalous black lead that runs into the cab was probably spliced into the tachometer usually off a tachometer it's a green wire but maybe they didn't have enough length or that was cut out of a different car most likely yank your distributor wires off over there on the on the head they plug into the spark plugs on the side of the cylinder head so just twist them when you pull them and they'll come off poor alex like i said he uh um i kind of got him into all this junk because i'm always driving some old 70s 60s whatever carbureted car and you know you make enough money on gamestop stock and then someone convinces you to spend it very poorly and here we are luckily i have womanly hands you can get in there easy all right this should be free want to help that along there grab this guy i got a all sorts of tangle it's conveniently parked you know in hindsight we probably should have moved it before we started it's a nice safety feature no one was gonna i see why they left it there no one was gonna steal it i'm amazed you can get in there i absolutely can't fit nice our little mustang storage unit here very very carefully there you go obviously nothing can be super easy we're going to just try and torque coolant sensor out we see how that goes i just really wanted to leave this in there it's kind of weird it's like sat in the bottom of an ocean for a thousand years so rusty probably from an older 60s car it's usually not recommended to put your coil in that orientation that whole assembly had been together for a long time that's an oldie excel super stock it's a vintage unit all right that's off now we can pop the intake so i don't know if ford left this here on like the water pump is a leverage point or what it's very convenient if you want to break the seal on intake you can go right up here under the water neck now if you push down that lever this intake should work itself up yeah there it goes ain't nothing but a thing normally i take everything off the intake but we're just trying to just a little pressed for time today so i'm going to carefully maybe break the gasket sealer on the china wall back there out she goes oh look at the carnage the lifter actually exploded so typical flat tap it hydraulic lifter unit there is completely confetti are we going to get lucky and be able to get it out this is one of the biggest things i was worried about i'll check that out dude so remember when we looked at the valve adjustment it was way way way wrong i mean that's clean that's not peened over at all or anything huh i wonder if that lifter just explodes hard to say because this one's loose too but look at all that lifter carnage in there but that was seriously what i was worried about being able to pull that lifter out is usually when you wipe a lobe you know it smushes the back side of the lifter over and you're just completely out of luck that was very convenient these are actually the rockers that you're supposed to torque down these are the weird year where it's like a shoulder you can always tell because the rocker nuts are loose as opposed to being like a locker style nut ford did some weird stuff with valve train over the years let's see if we can get lucky and get that other one out i'll check it out that one's completely confetti also probably can't see it from that angle but it's it's all half exploded you can see where's my finger at right down in here you can see part of the lifter and the push rods all sideways i'm really glad we didn't try and run this that would have been very bad come on here we go see if are we going to get lucky on a second one come on fingernails okay and they look really good if we pull them all out this might have just seriously this might have actually just been a case of misadjusted valve train maybe they were trying to set preload and these are torque down style but they're confusing is there studs um so i mean it's looking pretty good i mean that the cam lobe probably is not all whacked out i'll i'm probably gonna eat my words we'll cross our fingers because then we don't have to do a cam swap if i didn't make you pull the whole timing cover off all right so i'm going to go grab a magnet and try and get all these metal shavings and filings out of the lifter valley here and alex what do you say you want to pull that valve cover on that side and then we're just going to fully disassemble our valve train and try and get all of our lifters out but like i said i'm glad we didn't take any of the front of the engine apart because we honestly might not need to hopefully i can get a look down at those uh at the cam lobes there and they're all right look how loose all of these are takes zero effort almost this one's compressed under a valve so that's a false narrative there oh now this one's decent here these first two i literally went whoop and they just came right off so who knows what went on here probably adjusted things at the wrong time i'm very curious i'll bet you a gas station burrito that this push rod is uh completely bent maybe we should like actually go eat normal food for lunch boy watch your head there mate [Music] how's how's all that wiring treat me over there oh i love it just imagine if it was a modern car don't want to get that dirty but all right [Music] so close look at that bad boy all sorts of wonky oh i owe you a gas station burrito somehow at least it doesn't look that bent if it's bent somehow that's a miracle that's why i don't make bets i just lost [Music] so these get torqued down through specific pressure right i think so i've actually this is a first for me i've never owned an engine like this or set the valve train up but i do know this shoulder here denotes that it's a it needs to be fully seated so see if any of those other ones are loose there obviously valves that are compressed they're uh normal lefty loosey yeah see like that's that's just not quite right yeah they shouldn't be that loose i'm pretty dang sure so i'm not surprised it ate a cam or well hopefully didn't eat the cam at least destroyed the top into the lifters all right i might have spoke too soon here this one i cannot get out with my bare hands it is very tight check this out i can't get it to move oh no that one might be bad that's what i expected with all of them but i'm not sure what's going on there you should be able just to slide them across there i forgot they're very powerful oh hey you got your lifters [Laughter] we're trying to get the metal shavings out of here those are some of the magnets i use for the proc sensors you might want to use one maybe just one you get that one see if it'll come out [Laughter] oh yes one is much better i don't think we have a vacuum here that works all right you can see i've partially shattered that lifter already which i don't want to do that to the whole thing is that i'm completely out of luck notice how clean this engine is you know we're still fitting with the narrative that it was a very fresh rebuild like all things a lot of the universe is if you get excited about something and think it's gonna be fine it never is so i'm hopeful here but i just had to go and run my mouth get overly excited so i think if i can just induce some sort of a spin and pull up at the same time just maybe is it rotating or is it a oh it's just sliding my vice grips that's awesome obviously i can't grab on too tight with the vice grips because it's hardened and circular so it's just going to shatter and do a thousand shards maybe come on just turn oh we're in for a good time yay that is i expected it to be hard but not not that issue per se obviously our opposing valve here is at max lift so what i should do is turn the engine over until this guy is at max lift or else we're just gonna hammer it right back into the engine which we don't want i don't know if i brought the engine wrench i might have to take the spark plugs out no this is fine this is fine eating the spark plugs out so we can turn the engine over by hand here curious to see if we'll find any carnage in the cylinders the original plan was to pull the cylinder head off but maybe i'm still hopeful i'm just going to be hopeful for once it's not completely ruined obviously it was running very very rich which kind of fits the whole narrative of the way the carb was set up and how i assume the ignition timing was there's no oil on them though so that's good at least from what i can tell cylinders might be okay boar scope would be handy right about now which i have at home not here of course pretty okay all right so that's a good sign able to get those out okay yeah but the dipstick is right in front of the other one oh fun all right good news is it does float with the camshaft to some degree so it just oh i need to take a breather it just came up again and so maybe at least it can't go down now so we might be able to put a twist on it and pull it out instead of trying to fall back in the bore oh boy okay after a lot of effort and breaking off the side of the lifter so we had something to grab onto putting that lobe to max lift and the moment i've all been waiting for and it looks good amazingly so all i can figure is that lifter cup you see that in there that little guy twisted in there and puckered out the lifter and made her really tight and ugly look at all those cracks through that thing so that was a near miss i'm gonna count that as a victory in my book i think the other ones are all loose so we'll make sure we got all of our metal shavings out and pull those out of there and somehow we might be okay so those are the destruction units there i'm almost kind of wondering after seeing this one if they put the intake on and then slid the push rods in and they weren't aligned with the center of the lifter cup and then at that point they torqued it down and just messed everything up i mean i've never seen anything quite like this one before so pretty unique and they all came out do you want to get those all out yeah gee whiz i mean the ones that they seated correctly all look like they're in good shape now normally when you pull lifters out you want to keep them in order but in this case we're probably going to buy a whole new set of lifters and then just kind of re-break them in i guess just to see what we have i just fully expected you know usually when they're wiped you can kind of see the little hardened area there um usually this is all peened over and completely junk and these all look good they come out good a nice indicator they come right out you know they're not all messed up so good news you got lucky i never get that lucky i mean these are clean you normally can't do something like that those are super fresh units so i'm just wiping these off to look at the bottom of them but the difference between roller lifters and flat tappets is actually the cam is a little angled on each lobe and it's supposed to induce a spin on these lifters now when you wipe a lobe is actually when it quits spinning it sits flat and i mean it just confettis in a hurry but all of these look i mean they're looking really good really fresh and so normally i don't like putting new lifters on old cam but in this case i mean this is like zero run time very minimal and even our bad ones let me take a look at those i mean these are the ones i'd expect to have an issue and i mean even they're good usually you'll find them all concave where you can't get them out but i mean the bottoms the only reason we had trouble getting this one out is obviously that's twisted in there so it was puckering out the lifter and once we got it past that top point it slid right out no problem so i'm just putting the push rods on cylinder one and the lifter a couple lifters back in and so really quick what i think someone did is they might have dropped them in and they were off center somehow maybe like that where it's hung up on the keeper and then they went ahead and tried to torque it down and then just confetti the lifter right at the beginning but i'm very curious i'm gonna throw a couple of rocker arms on there and if i don't take the rocker arms into the next county here they will move them like i said these are the ones that down on the stud they do not you know from appearance if you don't know that i could see where you could misinterpret their design so what i'm looking for here is when you have a high lift cam i mean your bearing journals are all the same size you can't change that so when you have to have more lift and more duration and all of that what you have to do is have a smaller base circle on your cam and that's why when you install an aftermarket cam often you have to get aftermarket push rods because because of that smaller base circle to allow for the higher lift the push rods have to be longer to take up that extra clearance all right so this is how i typically adjust pal train we have our cylinder one intake is it max lift you can actually see it here with the lifter up it might be a little dark in here at the moment but this guy this lifter is all the way up it's at max lift meaning our exhaust valve is going to be on the base circle of the cam so all i'm going to do and a hydraulic lifter needs 20 thousandths to 50 thousandths of preload which i can't remember what the tpi is on a 5 16 so like you know an arbitrary full turn at least would give us an idea so we're going to go right we're going to spin the push rod and turn the rocker nut until we feel the slightest bit of drag that's where we're at zero lash so right now we're at zero lash so just for the sake of all of you guys here so that's roughly square so we're going to go quarter of a turn you can feel the preload on the lifter there's a half turn there's three quarters of a turn what i'm looking for is actually when it bottoms out there's a full turn and there we are just past a full turn now it's starting to take torque at this moment so i think our push rods are the right length um they're at least within reason being that this is 5 16 so it will take more turns to get the same preload that you'd get out of a 3 8 which is like a 24 threads per inch so a full turn on those is 40 thousands i can't remember offhand what 7 16 is but you know that seems within the realm of reasonability for lifter preload and with our push rod length and everything so i think that's good it i don't know it's i don't know what someone did but they messed something up along the way but at least that stuff checks out i think we could almost just buy three new lifters i wish i would have taken these out and put them in order but i didn't think they'd be that good honestly and probably because they're so good we can just run them again but uh i don't know we could just put three lifters in it reassemble the valve train reseal the intake and fire it up and see what we have with the rest of the engine before we just go tearing down the rest of the thing and find out the blocks cracked you know way later on so i don't know that sounds good to you yep all right i think that's where we're at with the thing all right my friends i think that's gonna do it for us today we went ahead and just set the intake and the valve covers back on so a bunch of dirt doesn't get inside and really to figure out what's in the rest of the engine or what we have with the rest of the car i think we're just probably this is some hackery we're just gonna buy three new lifters and put them all back in you know we don't know where they came out of re-break in the cam and just see what we have but uh at the moment you seem to be like the luckiest person ever with a small block ford engine so we'll cross our fingers here but i think that's gonna do it for us today and we'll catch guys for the next [Music]

Channel: ThunderHead289

Views: 108,837

Keywords: vice grip garage, junkyard digs, revival, old car revival

Id: TDqI-sfj4Pg

Length: 29min 10sec (1750 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 23 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/beyawnko]

That would be a fun project car post MOASS

[u/KrazieKanuck]

I would love for this car to become the equivalent of the 10,000 BitC pizza 😂