We hope you had a good Easter and for us here in the UK the second short week as a result. We have been busy in the yard over the break by moving cars around. This was prompted by some customers asking to get their stored cars out ready for the summer season. Our workshops had a bit of trouble shooting to do for a customer’s Ford, but it wasn’t a Mustang.

Customer Cars

The ’69 460ci has the next part of the EFI being installed. The control modules and the wiring needed to be kept neat and tidy like the rest of the car.

Most of it will be hidden except for a couple of under the hood addons. In fact there is only four wires to connect with this configuration.

With the throttle body being electronically controlled it needs to understand what is going on input and output. So an O₂ sensor is fitted to the exhaust for the clever box of tricks to understand burnt fuel mixture at any given moment anything from idle to full throttle or anything in between.

To make sure the car can cope with the demand from the new electronics an upgraded one hundred amp one-wire alternator from Powermaster was installed.

The plug leads fitted back onto the distributor and things start to come together again looking like an engine.

Just in case anybody misses it – there are a couple of little stickers to state what is going on under the hood.

F100 Truck

This customer’s pre ’70’s F100 truck had its 302 engine rebuilt and was OK only for a very short while, then it just didn’t run at all. The truck was taken to our workshop where Yogi got to work trying to understand what had happened. His gut reaction was to take the valve covers off based on the description of the problem.

The problem was immediately evident:

The wrong rockers were fitted and slipped of the top of the valve stems. The correct rockers for these engines should have a lip down each side in order to stop that happening. These are clearly visible on the larger picture on the left below (top).

Once the correct rockers were fitted and adjusted, the engine started and fired OK. There was some minor timing and carb set up adjustments needed as well. BUT, what worries us in these scenarios is the fact that something so obvious was wrong and not corrected. That leads to the follow up question; what else is wrong? Without another potentially costly full engine strip down, we don’t know. We have listened to the engine and diagnostics so far so good. But engine problems can happen next time it starts up. we guess time will tell.

Yet again Mustang Maniac comes to the rescue to help out, in this case working on an engine we know very well. We may have fixed one or two in our time.

Stay Safe & Take Care!