I finally got the motor all buttoned up this weekend. She runs!!!! Before I fired it up I had to finish all the wiring, fuel lines, and vacuum lines. I combined parts between the old distributor and the new one and I was able to get everything nice and tight, but I do not trust the Cardone Select distributor. It will do for now, but I plan on replacing it soon. Do NOT buy!
I got some VHT header paint and decided to paint my flowtechs a little better. I know it's probably pointless since it will most likely flake off in a year, but it made me feel better. I scratched the hell out of them getting them in the truck, which made painting them even more pointless.
The instructions sucked. They said to remove the starter for the passenger side headers, but that would have been pointless. The easiest thing was to un-bolt the motor mount and lift the engine about an inch. Drivers side went in fine with the clutch linkage out. One thing that really irritated me was the ARP header fasteners I bought. They were stainless steel and precision machined, but they were too short!!! I was only able to get one or two threads to catch, and these flowtechs have relatively thin flanges... I ended up having to use the fasteners supplied with the headers. So much for $35 ARPs....
I also dropped the fuel tank and drained all the stinky nasty gas out of it. While it was down I decided to undercoat it some more. The PO (My great uncle) had undercoated it years ago and the tank was in GREAT shape. Most of the undercoating was still on it, but I re-coated it anyway.
Before:
After:
After reinstalling the tank, I finally got to install my shiny new 1806 Edelbrock! Right out of the box this thing ran great with only minimal tuning. I was very impressed. Looks good too!
The finished product:
Video:
Still has open headers until I get it to the exhaust shop.
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One thing that has me stumped is my coil. It's and MSD Blaster 2F coil and I put an in line .8 ohm ballast resistor like they said to. I noticed that the coil will get Very warm and sometimes the whole truck will die and loose spark. I've also noticed that the wires behind my ignition key switch will get warm (not hot) I'm not sure if this is a problem or not. I have double, triple, and quadruple checked all my grounds, they all look fine. Anyone have any ideas? It normal for a hotter coil like my MSD to get very warm?