Braking The Park

From day 1 the parking brake has been missing in action. The previous owner told me it didn't work and he was right. I wasn't very optimistic about this being an easy fix since I have rear disc brakes and they probably weren't going to just bolt up to the stock parking brake setup. First thing I noticed was that one of the brackets was pretty bent.

It wasn't too hard to straighten out the bracket somewhat but I couldn't get the cable housing under the clip at the top of the photo. My car wasn't jacked up high enough to use two hand so I had to zip-tie it for now. You can also see return spring, which is actually pulling in the wrong direction. It's supposed to pull that lever towards the rear of the car, not forward, to keep slack out of the cable and help return the parking brake handle. When I researched the proper spring setup I found it attaches to a hole in the frame rail. My car has sub-frame connectors welded in so that hole appears to be covered up. I had to leave this spring off for now--it doesn't even look to be the right one.

Here's the rear disc caliper showing how the parking brake cable attaches, right behind the coiled spring. Since all this looks like it's hooked up correctly, including the new cable, I'll assume everything is good to go and just needs to be adjusted. Before I started working on this the parking brake handle would just come all the way out with very little resistance. It did hold the car but only on a flat surface. So all I did was tighten up the equalizer bracket to take out most of the slack in the cable. Bingo! Now the parking brake works, as well as it was designed to work. All I have left to do is fix the return spring.

You can also see in the first photo that the exhaust pipe (among other things) is covered with oil. It's a very heavy, clean oil that I'm certain is coming from the transmission. I haven't been able to pinpoint where it's leaking, but I'm hoping it's from the top cover. I was told the transmission has been recently rebuild and it's common for Ford Toploaders to leak if the wrong top cover gasket is used. The top cover has a vent hole in it that needs to be baffled by the gasket or else it will leak. So I'm hoping that either the gasket is wrong or even absent so my leak is relatively cheap to fix. The problem is I will probably have to drop the transmission in order to replace the gasket. This also involves removing the exhaust and driveshaft which doesn't sound fun. I've read it may be possible to actually reach the bolts on the top cover while the transmission is still in place. I'll have to check it out next time I jack the car up high enough.

Hold The Brakes

Before I took my car out for its first run in 6 weeks I did a quick check of the lights. Uh oh. No brake lights. When the rebuild the brake pedal assembly I noticed a loose terminal on the brake light switch. I ordered a new one along with new plastic bushings. When I installed the new switch the new bushings got rid of all the slop. However, the switch design relies on a certain amount of play. As the brake pedal moves forward the master cylinder push rod resists for about 1/16" which depresses the spring in the switch. Without that 1/16" of play the switch wouldn't work.

First I tried making a shim so the master cylinder push rod wouldn't have to move as fas to hit the switch. I cut apart the old switch and salvaged a plate that I stacked on top of the same plate in the new switch. But when I installed this new setup the brake lights stayed on all the time. There just wasn't enough play in the linkage. So I took the switch back out and removed one of the plastic bushings, more like a sleeve actually, that went in the hole in the push rod and slid over the pin on the brake pedal. With this bushing in place there was zero play in the linkage. This time when I put the switch back in it worked. I left the shim in place and the switch is pretty sensitive--it doesn't take much pedal pressure to activate the lights. I'm concerned the brake lights might accidentally stay on but I'm not sure there's enough movement without the shim. The master cylinder push rod is a newer replacement and looks nothing like a stock push rod.

Contributing to the problem is the fact that I have a power brake booster. I have searched and searched online for the manufacturer and installation instructions but have been unsuccessful. It could be because my setup is at least 10 years old and is either not produced anymore or has been updated so mine doesn't match any photos. It came with a bracket that mounted on the brake pedal and moved the mounting point for the master cylinder push rod. The reason for this is to reduce the pedal travel. However it has two negative side effects. First, it increases pedal effort by almost double, and second it creates a severe misalignment in the push rod. When I reassembled the brake linkage I left this adapter off so that's probably why I had so much trouble getting the switch to work.

Here's a shot of the old setup. The adapter is the silver chunk of metal to the left of the brake pedal. The gold master cylinder push rod is attached to the bottom left of the adapter. As you can see the adapter moves the end of the push rod about 3/4" to the left, putting it out of alignment with the master cylinder.

Good Carb, Bad Carb

The big Holley is probably at least 10 years old and has been sitting for most of that time so it's probably due for a rebuild. Even after spending the time and money to rebuild it I'm not confident it would ever perform well since it's so big. So I bit the bullet and bought a new carb. I wanted to stick with Holley, specifically a smaller double-pumper, because I like the looks and I could keep my fancy braided dual-feed fuel lines. I also wanted to keep my manual choke setup. The smallest 4150 double-pumper that Holley makes is a 600 cfm. I ordered 0-4776S which has a manual choke and silver finish.

The shiney new carb bolted right in since it's externally identical to the older carb. I need to replace that glass fuel filter soon--too much of a fire hazard. The engine fired right up since I had primed the primary bowl. I was able to set the idle down to 800 rpms whereas before with the older larger carb I couldn't get the idle below 1100. The engine sounded great and revved nicely but it would put out a bit of black smoke when I gave it a lot of gas so I think it's running rich. I took the car off the jack stands and backed it out of the garage for the first time in 6 weeks. Right off I noticed the clutch shudder was still there. As a drove around the neighborhood I also noticed the throttle response was actually too much. It was hard to accelerate smoothly. It reminded me of when I installed a twist throttle on my Honda ATV. I mistakenly hooked the cable to the two-stroke position instead of the four-stroke. This caused the throttle to open way too quickly. Now my Mustang felt the same way. Time to look at the linkage.

I had connected the throttle rod and return springs the same way they were on the old carb. The rod is attached to the carb so close to the pivot that there is only about 1.5" of travel with poor leverage near full throttle. So I swapped the attachment points for the rod with the return springs.

Now I'm getting about 2.5" to 3" of travel giving a much slower throttle opening with easier modulation. I still need to find a bushing for the end of the rod. A lot of other setups have the return springs attached to the bottom of the throttle linkage, pulling from the right. I might look into switching my setup that way since it looks cleaner. Although, right off it seems that having the rod and springs both pulling from the same side puts added tension on the throttle shaft causing addition wear.

Intake Manifesto

Gaskets? Check. RTV? Check. Expertise? Yeah, right. Replacing the intake manifold on a small block Ford isn't really that hard to do. It's basically only six steps: remove the distributor, remove the carb, remove the manifold, reinstall the manifold, reinstall the carb, reinstall the distributor. Of course, each step actually involves many other little steps, but who's counting. As long as you perform each step "correctly," then there won't be any leaks later on.

Step one: Remove the distributor. Easy. Remove the cap, unplug the vacuum line, and take out one bolt. But not so fast. The distributor can go back in with the rotor pointing in like 20 different directions and only one will work. The best way to ensure that it goes back in oriented the same way it came out is to turn the crankshaft to TDC so the rotor is pointing at the number one plug wire. That way you know where it's supposed to be pointing when your done. Google told me this points the rotor towards the driver at about 1 o'clock.

As you can see mine's more like quarter to 12. Not a big deal except that the vacuum advance canister isn't pointing to the front like it should be. The gear on the distributor causes it to rotate when you lift it out.

The rotor rotated to about 10:30 so if I line it up to where it originally was then it should rotate to the customary position.

Step two: Remove the carb. Pretty straightforward. Remove the linkage, remove the PCV hose, disconnect the fuel line, and undo the four nuts. Before I lifted off the carb I checked that the linkage was adjusted to the right length. I opened up the carb linkage all the way and tried to reconnect the linkage. It wouldn't fit even with the loud pedal all the way to the floor. So, something to adjust when it all goes back together.

When I opened up the throttle it sprayed a bunch of fuel through the carb. Removing the carb revealed a lot of fuel had seeped past the gasket. Hopefully this is just a leaky gasket and not a leaky carb. You can also see that I have an open spacer on top of the Edelbrock dual-plane manifold. It should really be a 4-hole spacer that keeps the two sides of the plenum separate.

Step three: Remove the intake. Starting at the rear, I disconnected the water temp wire, the power booster vacuum hose, the heater hose, and lastly the thermostat housing. After removing the 12 bolts the manifold lifted off with very little prying.

Flipping the manifold over I saw that the front cork gasket was out of position. This cutout is right behind the distributor and someone had applied a lot of sealant from the outside in an attempt to seal this area. Needless to say, I will not be using the replacement cork end gaskets.

When I looked down in the lifter valley of the engine I was a little surprised. The block casting says "HECHO EN MEXICO." Obviously this is not the original block. When Ford stopped making the 289 in 1968 they started up production of a replacement block down in Mexico. This new block was designed as a 302 with a heavier casting and beefier main bearing caps like the Hi-Po 289. So it's possible I actually have a 302 instead of a 289--depends on what crankshaft I have. The only way to know for sure is to pull a head and measure the stroke.

There is what I assume to be a partial VIN on the rear of the block which looks to be 2K526084. I think the K means it was assembled in Kansas City but that's all I can figure out for now.

Two things in the above shot. First, it pays not to skimp on antifreeze. This car had been sitting for a long time and desperately needs a flush. Second, the old gasket cutouts looked a little big for the intake ports. Sure enough, when I checked the old gasket it measured 2.067". Then I moved the calipers over to the new gasket. 

The new gasket is the correct 2.00" so you can see the difference. In an ideal world I'd have the heads and intake ported to match the gasket, but that would involve removing the heads.

Step four: Reinstall the intake manifold. Whoa, not so fast. All mounting surfaces must be prepped first. This is the most time consuming aspect of the whole deal. If the surfaces of the heads and intake aren't clean then the gaskets won't seal. I was a little disappointed that I couldn't pinpoint the exact area the manifold was leaking, but it was probably leaking in multiple places since the surfaces were wet in many places. So I definitely need to take the time and get the surfaces as clean as possible.

While I have the manifold off I wanted to address the paint.

Someone painted the manifold a nice silver (I hope it wasn't Edelbrock), but obviously didn't prep it right so the paint bubbled badly. I'll see what I can do to smooth things out before painting it a nice Ford blue.

Well it's not perfect, but it's definitely better. I followed the directions for the paint and sprayed on three coats, waiting 10 minutes between each one. The can says for the paint to fully cure you need to place the manifold in an oven for an hour at 200 degrees. Since my wife will probably read this I didn't do that. I swear. I'll let the engine heat cure it when I fire it back up.

I went to dry fit the gaskets and check the clearance under the manifold when I ran into a snag. The gaskets I ordered from Amazon were Fel-Pro 1250S-3. They are listed on Amazon and the Fel-Pro website as fitting a stock head 289. Lies I say.

The opening for the water jacket is so big it overlaps the edge of the head.

How does a big company screw this up? Luckily, the local Autozone had a different Fel-Pro gasket MS90103-1 in stock that was supposed to fit my engine. This new gasket fit way better but it had the heat riser cutout which the other gasket didn't have. Living in Florida I definitely don't need hot exhaust gases heating up the manifold.

Amazingly the black 1250S-3 gaskets came with block-off plates even though there wasn't a hole to block. That was very fortunate since the blue MS90103-1 didn't come with any. I had to use my Dremel to cut the block-off to fit.

Here a shot to show the differences in the water jackets of the two gaskets. While I was prepping the heads I found more characters "1M9L" stamped in the block by the distributor.

One of these days I'll have to pull the starter so I can read the casting numbers and finally figure out where the block came from. With the headers on the way it'll be a bear of a job reaching the starter.

Here's the spruced up manifold in place with a new 4-hole spacer on top. I finished putting everything back together and the engine fired right up--yeah, dream on. So far in this project, whenever I've taken something apart and put it back together the same way I've run into hidden problems.

The first snag was reinstalling the distributor. I knew this was going to be a beyatch from past experience. The problem is re-aligning the oil pump driveshaft with the end of the distributor. Since my distributor wasn't oriented correctly when I removed it I needed to rotate it clockwise 20-30 degrees so the hex end of the shaft was never going to been lined up. If that wasn't bad enough, the bottom of the shaft is attached to the oil pump, but the top end is free to wobble around side to side. When I looked down the hole for the distributor the driveshaft was always leaning to one side.

An easy trick to getting things to line up is to drop the distributor in place until it hits the top of the driveshaft and then turn the crankshaft, which rotates the distributor, until the shaft lines up and the distributor drops down. Tried that. Didn't work. I rotated the engine a full 360 while pushing down on the distributor and it still wouldn't drop into position. And now my rotor was a full 180 out of whack. I didn't want to continue rotating back to TDC just yet because I wanted to static time the engine later on.

So on to trick #2. I removed the distributor (remembering to keep it 180 degrees from normal) and used a small socket on a long extension to reach down the distributor hole and rotated the driveshaft in small increments until things eventually lined up. And I didn't drop the socket inside the engine.

With the distributor in place I needed to static time the engine. The vacuum advance was now pointing at the radiator like it should, instead of the driver's headlight. First, I rotate the crankshaft another 360 to bring cylinder #1 back to TDC. But I stopped with the balancer pointer at 9 degrees before TDC. Then I rotated the distributor until the points opened (that's when the coil would fire). With my multimeter checking continuity across the points this was fairly easy to do. But I noticed something peculiar that should have raised a red flag. Normally my meter will read "1" for an open circuit and "0" when you touch the terminals together. When I checked the points, however, the meter still read "0.4" when the points were closed. I was still able to static time the distributor but I failed to see any problem with the points. Apparently, when I had checked to gap on the points with my oily feeler gauge I contaminated the contacts.

So of course, when I tried to fire the engine, no go. I suspected the ignition right off so I checked for a spark. I pulled the coil wire from the distributor and placed the end near a ground and cranked the starter. No spark. Now I'm suspecting the MSD box. Maybe I fried something, maybe a fuse blew, maybe a wire came loose... I wasted several hours tracing wires, checking voltages, and still couldn't find a problem. I looked up how to test the MSD. Simple. Disconnect the only lead running to the distributor and touch it to ground. Spark! So the MSD is working but the spark isn't getting through the distributor. It finally dawned on me that the points were probably the culprit so I went online to see if the local Autozone had a replacement in stock. They did, although when I picked them up the counter guy thought they were for a tractor.

With the new points installed the engine fired right up--but it still wouldn't idle below 1100 rpm. I'm pretty certain I did a decent job of sealing the intake manifold so it's time to move on to the carb.

Clutch Play

I'm still waiting for my intake manifold gaskets--taking a little longer to arrive due to hurricane Matthew. Looking on my todo list I decided to finish up the clutch and brake pedals.

For the brake pedal I installed a new brake switch (the old one had a loose terminal) along with new bushings for the master cylinder pushrod. It was a real bear getting the retaining pin in place--definitely a lot easier working under the dash without the pedals and steering column in the way. After plugging in the new switch I spent some time organizing the wires that were hanging down under the dash. As much as I hated to, I even remounted the stock 5-circuit fuse block. Someday...

On the clutch pedal side I installed new bushings on the clutch rod and attached it to the clutch pedal. The z-bar had about 1/2" of side-play so I moved the end mounting bracket over, reducing the play to 1/8". Then came the hard part. When the headers were installed they interfered with the end of the clutch fork so someone hacked an inch off the end of the fork to provide clearance. The downside is that was where the spring for the equalizer rod attached. Without that spring the clutch fork can ride against the throw-out bearing, and even worse, the equalizer rod can fall out leaving the car undrivable. I attempted to drill a new hole for the spring, but the clutch fork is pretty beefy and there isn't much room to get a drill in the right place. The way the fork is stamped you can just hook the spring over the edge but I was afraid that it would slide off the end. So I whipped out my Dremel and ground a notch on the backside of the fork so the spring would have someplace to seat and wouldn't shift around. It's always under tension so I'm pretty certain it can't fall off. The spring seemed a little short to reach the z-bar and I felt like I was over-stretching it so I added in a stainless S-hook I had laying around. I also had to cut a slit for the end of the spring in the rubber boot covering the fork. The full-length fork would have extended through a slit in the end of the boot.

There's just under 1/4" clearance between the spring and the header so we'll see how it goes. If it rubs I'll have to grind another notch in the fork closer to the transmission. Before I put the spring on I adjusted the equalizer rod to have about 1/8" of play which gave me 7/8" play at the pedal. Cool.

I Thought Brake Fluid Was Clear

While I'm waiting for my intake manifold gaskets to arrive I decided to take a look inside the brake master cylinder. When I was driving it home on day one I could tell the brakes needed some work. The power boost was nonexistent and the pedal felt like I was trying to crush a brick. I can see that the master cylinder and booster are new, as well as all the brake lines. There are new disc brakes on all 4 corners, of what origin is yet to be determined.

Now I know the booster won't work with the 6" of vacuum that I currently have but that fix is on the way. And I've eliminated the brake pedal binding caused by the worn support bracket. So the only thing left to do is flush the brake lines and bleed the brakes. Although the brake components are "new" they were probably installed between 6 and 9 years ago. Since that time the car has been driven less than 1500 miles.

Yuck! This is pretty nasty stuff. I hooked up my little vacuum pump and siphoned out as much as I could.

The bottom of the reservoirs looked even worse. I was worried that all the brown stuff was corrosion but it came out pretty clean.

Time to go buy some Dot 3 brake fluid and flush out the lines. Stay tuned...

It's Alive!

It's been almost a month since the engine has run when I drove the car home. During that time I replaced the push rod guide plates which necessitated adjustment of the rocker arms. When the pulled the spark plugs I found one the terminals to be severely corroded. So I installed new wires and plugs gapped to .035" (the old plugs were all at .045"). While I had the plugs out I was able to crank the engine over freely so I adjusted the floats on the Holley carb as best I could. I also set the idle mixture screws at 1 1/2 turns out.

The engine started right up after just a few cranks but wouldn't idle at all. I had to crank the idle stop screw to raise the rpms up to about 1200 or else it would stall. I unplugged the vacuum advance and checked the timing. The balancer is only marked up to 12 deg before TDC but the timing light showed much higher than that, I'm guessing 20. So I backed the timing down to 12 and adjusted the idle mixture. The engine ran best with both screws out a total of 2 1/2 turns and I was able to lower the idle down to 900, but the idle was still very rough.

I hooked up a vacuum gauge under the carb and discovered the engine was only pulling 6 inches at idle. Very poor. That explains why it won't idle smoothly. I'm not sure what to do at this point. I'm pretty sure there's a vacuum leak somewhere. Hopefully it's under the carb and not the intake manifold. And I'm still not confident the carb is performing correctly. With the low vacuum I'm not getting enough airflow for the carb to meter the fuel properly.

UPDATE:

I decided to checked the intake manifold bolts and boy was I surprised. They weren't loose exactly but they weren't torqued any measurable amount. So I torqued them down in stages to 20 ft/lbs. With my fingers crossed I started her up. The idle did seem a little better but I still only measured 6" of vacuum. I was more than a little disappointed since I thought I had fixed the leak. Now I'm pretty certain the manifold must have been leaking before I tightened the bolts, and I'm guessing it must still be leaking. I've ordered new intake gaskets so stay tuned.

Instrument Cluster

I had removed the instrument cluster a while back to make it easier to access things under the dash. I learned my lesson with the turn signal switch so I made sure to diagram all the wires.

It looks to be 12 wires that need to be disconnected before the cluster can come out. I really wish there was a single connector, or maybe even two. Maybe a future project...

Here's the back of the cluster in case you were curious.

And here's the cluster back where it belongs. All the gauges are AutoMeter behind the stock bezel. The gauges sit in a plastic gauge pod that's made for just this purpose. Unfortunately the speedo sits a little too high and is not adjustable. A lot of the online reviews of these pods state the same problem. Oh well.

Let There Be Light

On my one and only day driving my car I discovered several issues with the turn signals. First, the stalk was very loose even though it was tightened all the way. There was too much free play and the detents were weak making it hard to tell if it was centered, left, or right. The second issue made this worse -- the left and right indicators on the instrument panel didn't work. And lastly, turning the steering wheel made loud clicking noises that didn't sound good. I almost forgot, the horn didn't work either.

Here's the old switch with the wheel removed. It turns out the nasty noises were coming from the horn contact plate. You can see the yellow wire is covered with copper filings.

Here's a closeup off the plate. You can see the inner contact ring is worn through while the outer contact was actually hitting the solder joint. Unfortunately you can't buy just this plate so I had to buy a whole new wheel mounting kit.

This is what I found when I crawled under the dash to disconnect the turn signal switch from the harness. Whoever installed the previous switch didn't bother to reuse the other half of the connector and just pushed the wires in. More than one wire fell right out. This is probably why the dash indicators weren't working. Luckily I was able to find the correct matching connector online.

Here's the new switch in place. I know, looks like the old switch.

Before I took the old switch out I found a wiring diagram online that showed how to wire the two harness connectors, a 6-pin and a 2-pin. Like an idiot I didn't bother matching the old wires to the diagram. To make matters worse, when the new switch arrived it had different colored wires than the old one. I figured I could just compare the two switches and be able map the new wire colors, but when I went back to the diagram, half off the wires on the old switch didn't match. Let the fun begin.

So, I then spent several hours trying to connect the new switch. Some of the wires are hot all the time so I had to be careful not to fry something. Thus, every time I tested the connections I had to disconnect the battery, crawl under the dash to move the wires around, reconnect the battery, climb back in the car to turn the ignition on and flip the turn signal, check the front signals and then the brake lights to see my if I had it right.

I probably had the wiring correct after just a few tries. But no matter what I tried I couldn't get the rear lights to work. So I kept moving the connections around. After a while I got frustrated and decided to take a different approach.

First thing was to look at the wiring diagrams. Right off I noticed that the one of the wires from the switch went to the turn signal flasher and in turn to a terminal on the back of the ignition switch. Then it hit me -- I remembered finding a loose wire on the back of said switch. I didn't tighten it at the time because it's very inaccessible and I was busy with something else at the time. This sounded promising. So I climbed back under the dash and tightened up the connection.

But when I tried the turn signals again, everything worked except the rear lights. So I used a multimeter to check the voltage coming off the switch for the two wires that I thought were for the rear lights. While the turn signal was activated I could see the voltage cycle on and off. Bam. So at least I had the wiring right. Then I went back in the trunk and checked the connection back there. Again, I could see the voltage cycling on and off. I turned on the parking lights and the license plate light, which shares the same wire as the tail lights, came on. However, the tail lights were still dark.

So why don't the lights come on? The tail lights are totally custom and are sealed to the body. I know, who does that? I have power going to the lights but no light. The housings are plastic so maybe the ground is bad. But the only way to see what's going on inside the lights is to cut them off. It's strange that the tail lights stopped working after I took the turn signal switch apart. I don't see how I could have fried something by hooking up the wrong wire. 12 volts is still 12 volts. I'll have to investigate the grounding for the lights, hopefully without removing them.

Anyway, since the switch appears to be working correctly I buttoned things up a bit. Here's the wheel all cleaned up and back where it belongs.

Third try's a charm. As I said before, the tail lights are solidly sealed to the body. The only wires going into the housings are two sheathed wires.

The white wire (connected to black from the harness) is also tied into the license plate light, which works, so I know that wire is good. The black/red is for the backup lights. One of the sheathed wires carries three conductors. White is for the parking lights and the red and black are for the left and right signals. All three of these test good. The other sheathed wire runs along the left side of the trunk towards the front. I removed the door sill plate to see if it ran through there.

As you can see only two conductors were in this sheath. The black wire is grounded to the sill--so much for that bad ground idea. But what about that red wire? Then it hit me. It must be +12v power. I couldn't figure out how the rear lights could sequence when the turn signal wire was only sending a momentary signal. There must be some kind of "brain" in the rear lights that requires constant power. So I checked the voltage at this splice and got zero volts. That's good. The lights weren't working because they weren't getting power, not because I fried something.

This is where the red wire goes, wedged right into the fuse box. Nice. I had seen this wire before but I assumed it went to the radio or something. It's not even protected by the fuse as it's on the hot side.

Here's the back where you can see the always hot black/yellow feed come in. Not wanting to zap myself, I disconnected the battery so I could check the continuity in the red wire. That's when this happened.

The red wire fell right out of the connector. Bingo! Turned out to be a very simple fix. Just to be safe I wedged the terminal on the other end of the fuse so it would be protected. If you're gonna hack something, at least do it right. I'll look at upgrading this fuse box to something more modern in the future.

And here's the final result result of several wasted hours, all because of a loose terminal. You can see how dim they are, even on an overcast day.