Full Rebuild - Part 3 - Making progress

It was definitely time for a new timing chain. Here's the old one with quite a bit of slack, and the TDC marks don't quite line up.

The new one is nice and tight, and we got the TDC marks to line up exactly.

The harmonic balancer was starting to fall apart, so it was past time for this upgrade as well. It was a bit cheaper on RockAuto than we had seen elsewhere, so this was added to the list.

 We did a new oil pump while we were in there. The old one seemed fine, but it's hard to know what condition the internal parts and bearings are in.

Here's the gasket kit. There were a few items missing, and a few wrong items in here. It took a bit of doing, but we eventually got everything we needed.

 A bit overwhelming, we lost control of the garage at this point and took over both bays.

Funny thing, you need to take the bumper off to get the cam shaft out. That was unexpected on my part, but Connor somehow knew it was coming!

 We gave the engine a nice coat of epoxy high-temp black.

Valve guides are a royal pain in the rear. I banged around and hacked at a few things, and even broke one before I found a system that worked. We picked up a cheap $20 air hammer which really made things easier, but that was after we had already broken an insert and had to wait days for new ones to arrive.

 So the big trick here was to drill out a cheap socket, and slide it over a new valve insert and use this to drive out the old insert.

 Here are the crank bearings

This took a bit of searching, and doing it wrong, and destroying a bearing before we got good at it. One nice hack. Tie a knot in a piece of mason line, and put it in the oil channel of the crank shaft. Then spin the crank around to push the bearing out. We then reversed the process using a cotter pin to "push" the new bearing in most of the way.

Here we are with some major progress, Cylinders are honed, piston rings are replaced, pistons cleaned up, and everything in place.

 Lifters are the last piece before we get ready to put the head gasket back on, and mount the head.

Full Rebuild - Part 2 - Pistons Bearings, and Lifters

We kept at the tear down, needing to know things like the crank bearing sizes, and if we were going keep or replace the pistons.

Here are the hydraulic lifters, these contact the cam shaft and push the pushrods to open and close the valves. 

 We had at least 1 broken ring in cylinder 6, and possibly in cylinder 4. There was clear evidence in cylinder 6, since the piston walls were fouled a bit further down from the top than the others. 4 may have broken while removing it.

At this point we had all the required measurements, and were ready to order parts and begin the wait for boxes to arrive.

Full Rebuild - Part 1 Getting Started

So this has been "Rebuild66.blogspot.org" and all this time no actual rebuild? Well, to be fair we've done pieces of it getting the car on the road. All that is about to change.....

So, the progressive oil leak of the Mustang got to the point where there was a solid trail out of the garage one night in September. It was time to do another set of gaskets, and a rear main seal, and while we were at it, we ended up doing a full rebuild of the engine.

Shopping RockAuto, we quickly found a whole list of supplies that were needed, and that crank bearings, and headgaskets (ours was seeping out the sides a little) valve seals and a whole list of stuff would get us all the parts needed to get started.

The main problem was we needed to do the tear down, before we could order the parts because we did not know exactly what was in the engine.

 Here we are with the head off.

 And here's one of the critical pieces of information. Our cylinders are overbored at 0.040. Very Nice!

 Purchased a set of calipers, cheap. Now I use them for everything. It's one of those tools you can live without until you have a set. Then you need them for everything.

 Getting dimensions of the valves

Hey Stinky!

So getting to the bottom of why it smells of exhaust in the car most of the time, we figured out that the exhaust manifold gasket was completely shot. This and the exhaust pipe was also in bad shape. We replaced these two, and took the opportunity to paint the exhaust manifold.

Keeping the rusty bolts in order so they go back in right. We put a good coat of Anti-seize on them so we don't have issues next time the manifold needs to come out.

The Accelerator return spring attaches to the exhaust doughnut flange. It's was time for a replacement, this one rusted through as we were taking it off. Replaced with a nice shiny stainless steel replica that should last forever.

Here you can see the leakage, exhaust gasses, and is that oil?

Nice results with high temp paint.

High Energy Ignition Upgrage

The HEI Ignition system is not a traditional Ford ignition system, but there are good drop in replacements for the standard Ford distributor that make this an easy upgrade for the Mustang. If you believe all the claims, it's a hotter spark, longer dwell and simpler design. Initially we had gone with the original distributor, a Pertronix ignition module, and a Pertronix Ignition coil. After the issues we had with the ignition while doing the T5, we did a bit of research and found that it would not be much more expensive to replace the whole distributor, electronic ignition, and coil with an HEI. This would also correct the strange issue we were having with cracked distributor buttons. We are on our 4th button in the 3 or so years the car has been running, and there are not that many miles on it in that time.

The Pertronix Module

Old Ignition Coil (that went bad)

The old distributor, wires, and ignition coil

Adjustment of the Pertronix

Replacing the vacuum advance

So this fall when it got cold, we had a number of issues. We ended up adjusting the distance of the Pertronix module, changing the vacuum advance, and a few other debugging steps. Looking back on this, I think part of our problem was that the ignition coil was starting to fail.

Here is the new HEI replacement that includes the distributor, the ignition control module, and the coil.

HEI Distributor with Vacuum Advance

While upgrading the transmission we found that we were getting voltage sag at the ignition coil, which is a common issue, and easily remedied with an ignition relay. These are common since probably the 1970's but this car did not have as part of the original design. This was already on the to-do list, so we went ahead and added that to get things running again.

The new kit included new wires, and recommended a spark gap of 0.045 to 0.050" which is larger than the standard gap so we decided it was a good excuse to do the plugs too. 

Before pulling the old distributor, with the spark plugs off, we turned the engine to the TDC mark on the crankshaft pulley. We know from our previous experiments, that the TDC mark is for cylinder 6 and NOT cylinder 1. With this in mind, we started with wire 6, and went around the firing order listed on the engine 1-5-3-6-2-4. So we wired 6-2-4-1-5-3 starting with the wire where the distributor button was pointing at, and going clockwise around the distributor.

Fired right up! A quick twist, and then we readjusted the wires for the new TDC position we needed. Second start was nice and smooth. We also now see the timing gun fire on every pass. Previously it was skipping a strobe once in a while, and looking back that's probably a misfire, or a cylinder that would diesel and run rough.