Flatisfaction And Other Tangents.

so a new crank rather than a complete engine wrecked.

you had some good bad luck rather than real bad luck i think.

you need to take thre positive from it and count your blessings.

Yep, that pretty much sums the situation up!



Indeed.
Also showing your age there… 🙂

The Holley carb being a different shape and lower profile caused some clearance issues with the air filter housing going back on.



The first contact points were the corners of the rear fuel bowl.
Some localised heat and a ball pien created the clearance dimples.



The next issue was the fuel inlet banjo and fuel line which was now at the front corner of the carb.
I tried the same method but I didn’t really get anywhere with it.
In reality I was being lazy and was trying to avoid patching it.



I rolled up a piece of 1mm and used that as a template to cut out a hole in the filter housing.





I left it deliberately oversize and started to tack it in place.



It was then a case of trim and tack until finished.



I had a previous clearance hole that was now redundant.



I started with a CAD template.



This proved to be harder than first thought as there were multiple curves and angles to replicate.



I got it about 90% there and started tacking it where it fitted and pulling it into position where it didn’t.



And filled the gaps to finish.



All this finally allowed the filter housing to drop back on.



The rolling road had said to get a set of vacuum springs for tuning and a quick change housing cover for ease of changing said springs.
This turned into a faff because of the usual story of parts that are advertised as being in stock but aren’t.
Being up against it with time I managed to source what I needed locally.
They weren’t genuine Holley parts but from a brand called AED, basically Chinese copies.



The cover was quality and identical to the Holley part. The springs on the other hand, which are the important bit, didn’t leave me with a lot of confidence.
Two springs both used the same colour code and were impossible to tell apart and one spring didn’t seem to wound correctly, the one that isn’t standing up!
By this point I’d actually received a genuine Holley spring kit from the previous attempted order and instead of sending the Holley spring kit back I used the best bits from the two.



The reason for the quick change cover is that one of the factory cover screws sits under the air horn of the carb so the whole canister has to be removed to change springs which is a fiddly job at the best of times but especially so on the car when under pressure on the rolling road!
Another issue I didn’t realise until I removed it was one of the mounting screws sat behind the now fitted manual choke linkage so that would need to come as well with every spring change.



The covers changed over with no issue and the newly fitted choke cable bracket discarded as it wouldn’t fit anymore. All the quick change covers have a moulded in choke cable clamp.





I got on the rollers and went through the usual setup motions.
The only adjustments were to slightly richen the primary main jets, the secondary mains were fine and a lighter vacuum spring to open up the secondaries quicker.
We went for the power run and the car suddenly died. I looked over into the engine bay and saw a shower of blue sparks bouncing all over the engine.
The end of the coil lead was laying on the inlet manifold!
It had sheared clean off from the terminal.



It was a quick easy fix to re-terminate the coil lead.
I was actually glad this fault finally showed itself as I’d been having some weird intermittent issues that I couldn’t locate but was obviously due to this broken lead and must have been broken for some time.

One power run and done!
It went so quick I only got this one photo!



Here’s the two rolling road printouts to compare.
The one on the left is 2 yrs ago, fresh engine and Edelbrock 500 Carb. The right is now, a lot of road miles, a lot of race miles but with the Holley 390.



Blue line is torque curve; red, power flywheel; green, power at wheels and yellow at the bottom, air/fuel ratio (AFR).
The problem as I mentioned at the beginning was the massive dip in the torque curve as seen on the left. This can also be seen to a lesser extend in the power curves and the erratic AFR’s that flop from lean to rich.
All three events happen at the same exact point, which is the point when the secondaries would start to open on the Edelbrock.
The new printout shows the dip gone, a fraction more area under the curves and nice consistent AFR through the whole rev range.
It was also nice to see that no horses had run off in the past 2yrs!
A successful outcome making it all worth while.

While the Flatty rotating assembly was away I thought I’d better get on top of some prep work, namely looking for junk left over from the bearing shredding itself.

Remember that the Flathead has no oil filter so any debris is free to circulate around.
Amazingly the oil was completely glitter free but the sump had some larger debris laying in the bottom which I’d all ready throughly cleaned out.
Junk had definitely gone through the engine as all the main bearings and big end bearings had debris damage.
Apart from the sump everywhere else around the engine was spotlessly clean still.
Chasing down any remaining debris I started with some easy wins.
First up was the oil pump.



This was stripped down. No damage to the gears or body and apart from stuff caught in the pickup screen was all clean.



All the old shells removed and the caps and hardware cleaned up ready for reassembly.



I removed the oil pump drive cover.



And the idler gear. Again, all clean.



I poked and prodded all around the engine and down the oil ways and couldn’t find anything.

The rotating assembly was finally ready to be picked up from the balancers.
I immediately did a Banzai run to Reading to pick it up in the Falcon.



The block was prepped with new shells and glueing the seal retainers back in.



Dropped the replacement crank in for the first time to check the end float and nothing. No clearance at all.
I had a look around and found the problem.



The back of the thrust face on the crank seemed to not be fully machined into the fillet of the journal creating a step which was jammed up against the seal retainer.
Ok, so this was an issue to be dealt with but I really wanted to get on and check the actual end float.

Out with the freshly fitted retainers with aid of heat as I’d used the Loctite raspberry jam.



With the retainers out the way I could finally check the end float… 0.017”… say what now?
That’s 0.017” on a 0.006” max tolerance and almost as bad as the previous crank that I’d just scrapped because of the excess end float!

I was fuming… 😡

Mad at myself for not checking the basics before I pushed on with the replacement.
6 weeks in the hole, all the travelling and of course the expense and I was back to square one.

I took a short break before I launched the whole thing into the nearest hedge.

Going back, my three options were,

Replace the crank (Again)
Build up one of the thrust faces. Time consuming and uncharted territory.
Find some poor quality wobbly children's play pony doo doo bearings with oversized thrusts.

The bearing option was the easiest IF, and it’s a big IF, I could find some but I had nothing to lose trying.
My best thoughts on finding some was a parts supplier in the States that only deals in NOS Ford Parts.
I sent off an email of my unusual request fully expecting a knock back but instead got “Give me a couple of days”

Of course, I still had the retainer clearance issue to deal with.
All I needed was the step nibbled away. It was purely excess material on the backside. It didn’t need to be perfectly concentric, it’s not a bearing surface and the seal doesn’t run on it either but most important I didn’t want spend another penny on this crank.
If I could squeeze the crank onto the lathe I could do it.





To say the lathe was maxed out would be an understatement, but we have clearance, Clarence.



With a ludicrous amount of tool stick out to get passed the spinning counterweights I removed as much material as I dare without cutting into the journal fillet.



I tried the crank back in the block and clearance had improved but was still hitting and hitting right in the corner.
Another look at the crank showed the fillet in that corner to be undersized compared to all the others. I even checked the old crank and that had a large radius fillet like all the others.
It really was like this crank had not been fully machined in this area creating these knock on effects.

The crank went back in the lathe and I grabbed some tool steel and ground it into a radius that matched the other fillets.



I setup the tool so I could plunge into the corner and it worked rather well.



And got me the clearance I needed.



In the mean time I got a email reply with this…

Keeping the fan is a good idea, alternators can get quite hot when working hard. If there's decent airflow through the engine bay you "might" get away without it, personally I'd always keep the fan.

Ideal conditions to get a lot of heat into it could well have cooked the diode pack and/or VR ( if its integral) Might be worth getting it refurbished as a spare, depending on price vs a new one ?

Looking forward to hearing it running

Remember the coil wire on the Falcon that was burnt out and had broke on the rolling road?
Well… I still hadn’t replaced it since it was bodged back together and it had always been my intention to buy a ignition wire kit and replace the whole lot as the plug wires are all sorts of wrong lengths but I just hadn’t got around to it.
What the repair had proved was the coil wire was at fault with all the strange intermittent issues the car had been suffering from just before going on the rolling road.
Anyway… while looking for something else I came across my bag of ignition lead offcuts and leftovers and realised I had enough bits to make up a complete new coil lead.
I caught it just in time as well as the lead had already broken down again. It must have been burnt a fair way up the insulation as it’s just charred and brittle.



10 minutes had a new one made and fitted.
That takes the pressure off for a while and the fear of the coil lead giving up again.



I left the last update with the Flathead back together and ready to drop back in.
This time the engine and bellhousing mated up beautifully without any outside forces. 🙄



Everything went back together quickly as the hard work had already been done.

I was pretty much there when I got this bout of man-flu going around and it kicked my for 3 weeks in which time I went nowhere near the car or garage.😔

Getting things moving again there were a few issues that I never got a chance to address the first time round.
First was the breather situation.
The mark I version, where any hole was piped with -10 line into a catch can was a complete disaster.
You can actually see it working or not as the case may be in the first start video I posted previous.
The “internet experts” had great glee in informing me of my “heavy breathing”.
It wasn’t actually oil vapour but water/steam. Condensation burning off from all the attempted starts and failed running prior to that video.
What it did show was a lot of erratic pressure spikes trying to vent. I also found what I thought was an excess of oil in the catch can for how little run time the motor had at this point.
So all this got removed.



The Mark II version was to go back to a PVC system in some way to create an actual ‘breather system’ rather than venting to atmosphere and hoping for the best.
First was to remove the sealed oil fill at the back of the inlet and replace it with the original up-stand and breather cap.



I picked up a GM style PVC valve. These were pretty much fitted to everything.
This one was listed for an early 70’s C10 V8 pickup. I only went here because I knew these had a 90 degree end on them which I needed for clearance.



The grommet was a lucky find. It’s a Motorcraft one for a Cortina/Escort/Capri/Sierra/Granada etc etc. The centre hole fitted the PCV and the external dimensions , with a little tweaking, fitted the breather hole at the front of the inlet manifold.
I couple of UNC set screws took care of the redundant mounting holes.



What I had now, when there is a draw on the PCV valve, air would enter via the breather at the rear of the inlet manifold. This intake of air passes through the valve chest by the baffle tube that sits under the up-stand and into the rear area of the crankcase.
The air then moves to the front area of the crankcase where it goes up through an internal passage into the valve chest and is sucked back out via the PCV valve.

Ahh… but it’s turbocharged so they is no vacuum source anymore?

I hadn’t actually thought that far ahead at this point!
The best I came up was to dangle a length of vacuum line from the PCV valve to as close to the turbo inlet as I dare.
Though not a vacuum source per se there should be a degree of draw here.
No photos as it was quite a low point in workmanship. 🫣

I was ready to start it up again.
It had been starting on the button previous and nothing had changed but all I was getting now was a few weak coughs.
Time to go back basics.
I’d broken my number 1 rule, not starting with fresh spark plugs!
This whole time I’d been running a set of spark plugs I’d taken from the previous motor.They were old, dirty and of unknown health. No excuses. I even had a fresh set in the cupboard.
I’d also noticed that the battery voltage was barely holding 12 volts and on cranking was dipping as low as 8.
All viewed on the laptop of course from the comfort of the drivers seat.
I couldn’t remember how old the battery was and it had took some abuse in recent times.
Time for a new one then.
I pulled it out and the date sticker said Aug 16!



That’s over 7 yrs old and it’s only just started causing issues.
Problem is it’s been so long that these batteries have now almost doubled in price and they weren’t cheap then either!

With a fresh battery and now seeing a healthy 12.8 volts I rechecked the TDC offset angle in the software.
This is the correlation between what the ECU thinks is TDC and what is actually TDC on the engine.
It was out.
That readjusted and with a fresh battery and plugs she fired up instantly. Yay!

Back to where we were 3 months ago.

Now it was running I could double check the timing again as it’s easier and more accurate with the motor running.
It’s was 20 degrees out.
No amount of adjustment would remove that 20 degree discrepancy.
Pulling my hair out over it I eventually sought advice and it’s obvious when you know!
I’m on a wasted spark ignition system which means I have one driver from the ECU triggering two coils.
In this case cyl. 1 is paired with cyl. 6.
When cyl. 1 is firing on the compression stroke cyl. 6 is firing on the exhaust and vice versa.
Which of course means that each plug fires twice per cycle not once.
This tricks the timing light into thinking the engine is doing twice the rpm it’s actually doing and all values are now doubled.
I have the tach function on my timing light and yep 1000rpm idle, 2000rpm on the timing light tach!
So that 40 degrees advance on the timing light is actually 20 degrees in reality.

Doh!

The engine had always shown really low vacuum readings on the MAP sensor, as low 3 Hg sometimes but generally around 6-7 Hg.
Checking for the obvious and not finding anything it was a possibility that the MAP sensor which is built into the ECU was potentially not giving an accurate reading.
I purchased a vacuum gauge kit and plugged it straight into the inlet manifold.
It read the same as the MAP sensor.
I’ve since found out the vacuum readings are normal for my cam choice. 😆

One of those Mishimoto clone catch cans caused me massive headaches on a Saab/ Ford V4 engine. It worked fine at first, but after a while the engine started running like sh¡t, and I couldn't work out why until I noticed oil leaks from the RHS rocker cover. I've removed the can and all was fine again, so I'm assuming it was just too restrictive and the sump pressurised as a result.