[DesertXL]

Great Work

Thank you Dominick 1, very kind.

Cheers

 

[DesertXL]

Oil Pan and Things....

Thought I'd share a little more progress.

Here's the factory oil pan, it's fine for a slow car, but a brisk acceleration and the oil pump risks sucking air as all the oil goes backwards and away from the pickup. So the plan is to increase the capacity of the pan and make a pocket of reserve oil for the pickup under a bit of power.

I also want to add a low oil sender and oil temperature sender in the pan. I will use these. I like the Ford low oil level sender as it's metal unlike the GM ones.

I've already removed the pitiful inner baffle.

I want to do something like I did here, just with a few minor changes. This is the LTD's 390 I did a while back. I took measurements off this one to mark up the other pan.

I am using 16 gauge steel to make the larger portion of the pan.

One side boxed in.

Making the drain plug ramp.

Continued in next post.

 

[DesertXL]

Oil Pan and Things.... Continued

Making the templates for the baffle.

Other side cut out.

Rest of the oil pan boxed and sealed.

This is how the baffle will look once it's welded in. But before that I want to check my welds for leaks.

I found this works really well for leak checking. It's viscosity is near water, doesn't oxidize steel and has green colourant that leaves a green stain around a leak.

Must be my lucky week, over 8 linear feet of weld and not one leak. I let it sit an hour.

I welded the baffle in and did one last leak check. I should buy a lotto ticket, still no leaks.

Continued in next post.

 

[DesertXL]

Oil Pan and Things.... Continued

Ready for paint. So my idea with this pan was to create a sealed pouch of oil around the pickup. All the similar pans without dedicated traps and special pickups had holes around the baffle. This baffled me (pun intended) because under a hard acceleration the oil wouldn't stay in the pouch and just drain back. So all the ones I looked at Summit didn't make much sense to me. Maybe I'm missing something. Dunno.

Getting painted.

Final product compared to an original FE pan for these low frill base FE's.

One last thorough cleaning and installed.

It's ready for installation. I was going to run this on a dedicated stand, then I thought, just put it in the chassis and run it there. Duh....

A new flexplate was purchased.

I compared it to an old FE 390 plate to make sure it was correct (neutral balanced and same number of teeth).

On the spacer plate the '66 plate (right black one) doesn't have the drill holes for the oil galleries around the cam plug. The other plate (upper left) is a '68 and does have them. So I laid the '68 plate over the '66 plate, transcribed the holes and drilled them. I had screw plugs installed in the '66 so they protrude and the plate needs to have clearance holes.

Engine in and the spacer and flexplate installed with Locktite and torqued to specs.

Continued in next post.

 

[DesertXL]

Oil Pan and Things.... Continued

Once the engine was in and the transmission attached I gutted an old points distributor, filled it with oil, attached a mechanical oil pressure gauge and spun up the oil pump with my cordless drill.

With the drill at about 100 RPM it read 70 PSI. So far so good.

I ran the pump and verified a nice trickle from each rocker tip and yes this made a mess.

I still have to set the electronic distributor.

I still have to R&R the starter and install this side header.

For now I added a cooler bypass line to run the transmission as it's full of fluid.

This side header is installed.

This is just one reason this set of FPA headers costs 1200. The clearance is phenomenal for how tight this is. It's like threading a needle. Add that to the fact the tubes are heavy gauge steel and so is the flange. These are quite heavy and worth every penny.

This is where I'm currently at on the starter. So far this one looks good, just needs to be cleaned, greased and detailed.

Getting close to starting it up.

More to come.

Cheers

 

[DesertXL]

First Start, Well Eventually.

This was frustrating and it shouldn't have been. First the starter was acting up and that was my fault for not filing the contacts on the bendix switch. I was so excited to see it run I gave the switch contacts a quick look and even though they looked OK, I should have filed them. My error.

So what the starter was doing was not throwing out the bendix and just spinning. There is a high current switch that effectively takes one field pole (the one that attracts the ferrous pivoting core into the starter field pole) and places it directly across the battery potential. Once the ferrous core is magnetically sucked in, withcidentally this forces the bendix out the switch is opened and returns that field pole back in series configuration with the armature and matching other field pole. If that switch doesn't make good contact there's not enough inrush current to push the bendix out and the starter will just spin. It would do this from time to time.

Can't win them all.

The starters commutator had some noticeable low spots that needed to be leveled.

A job for the lathe, file and 400 grit sandpaper.

leveled and dressed.

I didn't take any more pictures, but since I need to clean the starter contact I shall show that later.

Now this is where I had other problems. When I set the new distributor and temporarily connected the ignition system and used the timing light I set base timing to 10˚ BTC. There was an odd occasional double flash but the mark was stable for the short cranking time in setting the timing.

Well didn't matter if I sprayed gasoline or carb cleaner or starting fluid it just backfired violently through the throttle body. This drove me nuts for a bit, then I rechecked the timing and I noticed on extended cranking the mark would now jump around. Thinking it was a flaky module I switched it out. I was using a generic GM 4 pin HEI module. So I changed it for a brand new Wells one. Same thing.

With that I grabbed the Duraspark off the '66 LTD 390 as that system worked. Again same thing.

In a fit of pique I just took the distributor out of the '66 LTD 390 and that worked. I had a stable timing mark. So the brand new distributor I bought has a flaky pickup coil in it. Another crappy aftermarket part.

Now I do have a video of it running open headers, but I couldn't spray fuel fast enough out of the spray bottle to get the RPM's up. Plus I used an actual video camera and it ended up compressing the audio so open headers doesn't seem terribly loud, but it was.

With that I ended up putting the full exhaust back on and using carb spray and that worked well. Tis happy.

Here's the video of it running for a few seconds. I call it poor mans fuel injection.

http://galaxieworks.com/sites/forum_videos/1966 gal500 XL Full Exhaust.mp4

More to come.

Cheers

 

[Dominick 1]

What no oil leaks
Sounds good

 

[DesertXL]

What no oil leaks
Sounds good

Thank you Dominick 1, most kind indeed.

Cheers