Do you also have 1:1 project cars?

[RSchnell]

Flew out to California to wrap up the deal on the '55 Fordor last week. I didn't have a lot of time but also managed to pickup a few pieces for the '55 Ford Convertible I bought out there back in June.

The Fordor has been off the road since '79, and is pretty unmolested. The original factory inspection stamps are visible under the hood, still has the original rubber floor mat which I've only seen twice in the 40+ years I've been messing around with '55-56 Fords. No rust through except one rear floor pan has a hole the size of a silver dollar which I attribute to the rubber floor mat, they just trap moisture. Overall a very solid car that exceeded my expectations. The surface rust will get hit with some DX520 once I get it here in FL in a week or so. The single exhaust is going away, in favor of dual exhaust. The old Holley 94 will get replaced with an Autolite 2100 carb & the Loadomatic distributor will get replaced with a '57-up style distributor. That should wake the old Y-block up a bit & add a few easy HP at the same time. Both the engine oil & transmixer fluid looked & smelled good, I have no doubt it'll be a runner. 

 

[Rodent]

Sorry we didn't get to hang this time. Glad you are happy with our selection of project cars out here.

[RSchnell]

24 minutes ago, Rodent said:

Sorry we didn't get to hang this time. Glad you are happy with our selection of project cars out here.

I'm likely headed back out in late March to get some more stuff from Dave and make another pass thru the yard. The rain kinda messed up plans this trip!

[Mattilacken]

I got my Caddi out on the road and it psssed inspection with flying colors. Only thing that have happened since is that the ecm have acted up so I can’t start the car with the key. Wired a start button but was ceaping out on buying a ugly black starter button for 25usd so I used a one this to have… well that fried something between the starter and generator so I have to dissasemble the harness and go through it. 
 

Some pics when I had got it together.

[espo]

16 hours ago, RSchnell said:

Flew out to California to wrap up the deal on the '55 Fordor last week. I didn't have a lot of time but also managed to pickup a few pieces for the '55 Ford Convertible I bought out there back in June.

The Fordor has been off the road since '79, and is pretty unmolested. The original factory inspection stamps are visible under the hood, still has the original rubber floor mat which I've only seen twice in the 40+ years I've been messing around with '55-56 Fords. No rust through except one rear floor pan has a hole the size of a silver dollar which I attribute to the rubber floor mat, they just trap moisture. Overall a very solid car that exceeded my expectations. The surface rust will get hit with some DX520 once I get it here in FL in a week or so. The single exhaust is going away, in favor of dual exhaust. The old Holley 94 will get replaced with an Autolite 2100 carb & the Loadomatic distributor will get replaced with a '57-up style distributor. That should wake the old Y-block up a bit & add a few easy HP at the same time. Both the engine oil & transmixer fluid looked & smelled good, I have no doubt it'll be a runner. 

 

I haven't messed with the Ford Y-Block engines for many many years. I had owned a few '57-year model Fords and a couple of '56-year model F-100's in the past, and this is one of the reasons I've been paying attention to your adventures with these cars. You mentioned trying to get a little more power with minimum modifications and this reminded me of something you may or may not be aware of on these engines. One inexpensive, at least at the time, thing I had done in the past was to get rid of the factory exhaust manifolds as they weren't all that efficient at the time and the manifolds used on some heavy duty Ford trucks with the Y-Block engine used a far more efficient manifold that would bolt on with no problems. In appearance they can resemble the famous Chevrolet Ramshorn style small block exhaust only a little larger. At the same time there are some good Headers available as well. The "Dump Truck" manifolds we used to use are cast iron and do not add to any additional engine noise if that's an issue.    

[Rodent]

20 hours ago, RSchnell said:

That should wake the old Y-block up a bit & add a few easy HP at the same time.

I see red paint. Do you know what engine / year it is? I would expect some yellow paint somewhere if it is a '55 272, but I don't know a lot about these.

[RSchnell]

5 hours ago, espo said:

I haven't messed with the Ford Y-Block engines for many many years. I had owned a few '57-year model Fords and a couple of '56-year model F-100's in the past, and this is one of the reasons I've been paying attention to your adventures with these cars. You mentioned trying to get a little more power with minimum modifications and this reminded me of something you may or may not be aware of on these engines. One inexpensive, at least at the time, thing I had done in the past was to get rid of the factory exhaust manifolds as they weren't all that efficient at the time and the manifolds used on some heavy duty Ford trucks with the Y-Block engine used a far more efficient manifold that would bolt on with no problems. In appearance they can resemble the famous Chevrolet Ramshorn style small block exhaust only a little larger. At the same time there are some good Headers available as well. The "Dump Truck" manifolds we used to use are cast iron and do not add to any additional engine noise if that's an issue.    

The Ram horn manifolds used on the F-350 & larger trucks won't fit passenger cars for a number of reasons. I'm using a set of the "wide" manifolds used on 57-60 Y-blocks. the '55-56 Dual exhaust manifolds are narrower and to me don't flow as well as the later ones. 

53 minutes ago, Rodent said:

I see red paint. Do you know what engine / year it is? I would expect some yellow paint somewhere if it is a '55 272, but I don't know a lot about these.

I'm pretty sure it's the original 272 the came in the car. Ford trucks used yellow paint, Mercury used green in '54 and a cream/yellow in 55-56. Ford stuck with Red for passenger car & T-bird from '55-58 or so. 

[espo]

1 minute ago, RSchnell said:

The Ram horn manifolds used on the F-350 & larger trucks won't fit passenger cars for a number of reasons. I'm using a set of the "wide" manifolds used on 57-60 Y-blocks. the '55-56 Dual exhaust manifolds are narrower and to me don't flow as well as the later ones. 

I'm pretty sure it's the original 272 the came in the car. Ford trucks used yellow paint, Mercury used green in '54 and a cream/yellow in 55-56. Ford stuck with Red for passenger car & T-bird from '55-58 or so. 

The manifolds I mentioned I put on my '57 Ford two-door with a 312 and 3-speed & OD. I bought them out of a wrecking yard and can't remember if I even know which model of truck they came off of. Would it be possible that they were from an even larger model truck? I found another set a few years later that went on an otherwise stock '56 F-100 that I'm pretty sure was a 272 engine. 

[Falcon Ranchero]

Officially put the car to winter slumber last week; I mean it's been snowing for about 3 weeks now so we hadn't taken it anywhere but we put a car cover over it last weekend. Sad that it's over now till spring, but I finally got my full graduated "G" lisence about a month ago so over winter we'll get the insurance sorted out so next spring I can finally drive it. Lots of good things to happen to the car next year, istallation of the radio/antenna, hopefully get an A/C unit going (car came factory with air) and at least front disc brake conversion, as it still has the original drums on all four corners. Cosmetically, in the long term, is to eventually make the car like a blue version of this orange "Demonstrator" (pictured below) '68 Tempest (has '69 front and rear) that was basically used as a test preview of the GTO Judge. So the plan is to get, eventually, the chrome front and rear bumpers, and make that same sort of stripe, and get rid of the "Sprint" stripe it has now.

The Tempest article if you want to learn more about this one-off Tempest: 1968 Pontiac Tempest - High Performance Pontiac Magazine 

[Bills72sj]

My 72 Grand Prix is still running on the original 455. Q-jet, points and R-12 in the A/C. After only 133,000 original miles, it still runs very well but has some ring blowby. I have been crutching it with an oil separator system plumbed to keep the crankcase evacuated but it only works if there is always manifold vacuum. I can no longer open the secondaries unless I want to bathe the engine in oil via the dipstick tube. My solution is to do a low budget rebuild of my spare 455 I have been lugging around since the late 90's. The engine only had 20K on the last rebuild before it suffered an engine fire which totaled that car. Unbeknownst to me, there was two cylinders that had water in them from the fire dept. Anyway, two sleeves and 8 new pistons later, I now have a shortblock. I did not need to touch the crank and I am reusing the Crower RA IV hydraulic flat tappet cam as they are both in excellent condition. I did the obligatory new bearings throughout and all the clearances are actually on the tight side of the acceptable range. I still need to determine which set of heads are going on it. Anyway here are some pics of the car and the shortblock.

[sfhess]

Nice.  Did you polish the freeze plugs?

[espo]

12 hours ago, Bills72sj said:

My 72 Grand Prix is still running on the original 455. Q-jet, points and R-12 in the A/C. After only 133,000 original miles, it still runs very well but has some ring blowby. I have been crutching it with an oil separator system plumbed to keep the crankcase evacuated but it only works if there is always manifold vacuum. I can no longer open the secondaries unless I want to bathe the engine in oil via the dipstick tube. My solution is to do a low budget rebuild of my spare 455 I have been lugging around since the late 90's. The engine only had 20K on the last rebuild before it suffered an engine fire which totaled that car. Unbeknownst to me, there was two cylinders that had water in them from the fire dept. Anyway, two sleeves and 8 new pistons later, I now have a shortblock. I did not need to touch the crank and I am reusing the Crower RA IV hydraulic flat tappet cam as they are both in excellent condition. I did the obligatory new bearings throughout and all the clearances are actually on the tight side of the acceptable range. I still need to determine which set of heads are going on it. Anyway here are some pics of the car and the shortblock.

Did you take the opportunity to dial in the heads or were the doner heads all good? 

[Bills72sj]

14 hours ago, sfhess said:

Nice.  Did you polish the freeze plugs?

Polish no. I did buff them with 600 grit Dremel attachments.

[Bills72sj]

13 hours ago, espo said:

Did you take the opportunity to dial in the heads or were the donor heads all good? 

I have a set of #96 heads from a '71 400. They were on this engine after the first time I rebuilt it. They had 96cc chambers which on a 455 bumps the compression from 8.2-8.4:1 to supposedly 9.5:1 or so. Well since the block was bored .060" over, the increase of cubic inches from 455 to 469 calculated the C.R. to around 9.8:1. The ONLY gas it liked was AMOCO 93 octane premium. I was ok with feeding it that at the time.

So this go around, I removed the "eyebrows' from the combustion chambers and polished them as well to both decrease the C.R and reduce the ability for carbon build up to have a purchase on the surfaces. I recently measured them to be 99-100cc each. While I was at it, I gasket matched the intake ports and cleaned up any roughness inside both the intake and exhaust. I improved on the oil drain back as well. The heads have new stainless valves, exhaust seats  and dual springs. The screw in rocker studs were upgraded from 3/8" "bottle neck" to 1/2" ones. The stamped steel 1.5 rockers have been upgraded to 1.52 stainless roller tip rockers.

With all that done, I am actually desiring to AVOID installing them on this engine. I have two goals. The long term one is to pull and rebuild the numbers matching 455 at my leisure with the #96 heads and step up to a roller cam. My short term goal is to install the short block above and reuse the stock 7M5, 114cc heads from the running engine. This assumes they are in good enough shape to keep the car on the road for a couple more years. I want to be able to run cheap in either engine. If that does not look like it will work out, I will put the #96 heads on this engine and hope the compression has dropped enough to run today's gasohol formula.

[espo]

10 hours ago, Bills72sj said:

I have a set of #96 heads from a '71 400. They were on this engine after the first time I rebuilt it. They had 96cc chambers which on a 455 bumps the compression from 8.2-8.4:1 to supposedly 9.5:1 or so. Well since the block was bored .060" over, the increase of cubic inches from 455 to 469 calculated the C.R. to around 9.8:1. The ONLY gas it liked was AMOCO 93 octane premium. I was ok with feeding it that at the time.

So this go around, I removed the "eyebrows' from the combustion chambers and polished them as well to both decrease the C.R and reduce the ability for carbon build up to have a purchase on the surfaces. I recently measured them to be 99-100cc each. While I was at it, I gasket matched the intake ports and cleaned up any roughness inside both the intake and exhaust. I improved on the oil drain back as well. The heads have new stainless valves, exhaust seats  and dual springs. The screw in rocker studs were upgraded from 3/8" "bottle neck" to 1/2" ones. The stamped steel 1.5 rockers have been upgraded to 1.52 stainless roller tip rockers.

With all that done, I am actually desiring to AVOID installing them on this engine. I have two goals. The long term one is to pull and rebuild the numbers matching 455 at my leisure with the #96 heads and step up to a roller cam. My short term goal is to install the short block above and reuse the stock 7M5, 114cc heads from the running engine. This assumes they are in good enough shape to keep the car on the road for a couple more years. I want to be able to run cheap in either engine. If that does not look like it will work out, I will put the #96 heads on this engine and hope the compression has dropped enough to run today's gasohol formula.

Sounds like you're doing everything right on the new engine as well. I have seen your postings on this car before and really like how it looks. 

[Bills72sj]

10 hours ago, espo said:

Sounds like you're doing everything right on the new engine as well. I have seen your postings on this car before and really like how it looks. 

Thank you, I get compliments on it every time I drive it. While it looks great and runs well, my most enjoyable part is the sound system. 15 speakers (though I only use 9), 11,000+ watts (if you are foolish enough to believe the written spec) now being powered by a 330Ah LiFePo4 battery which gives me HOURS of engine off play time. I could share the details if anyone is interested.

[Mattilacken]

I started on a custom grill for the CTS earlier and got it a step further yesterday. Still need to take it off and glue it with an other glue and also close of some holes in the border and then paint both this and the upper part in a gray tone.

like this more than the stock CTS-V grill since it’s a bit deeper and this mesh I believe to be good looking.