Over the weekend, drove my truck, "Joe" 70 miles south for a Country Music Jam. He never gave me a lick of trouble.
But he never does. Just a good ride.

 

 

Sure.

The way I figure it, your biggest issues are gonna be electrical.

 

After purchase. Mud trap backside


Blood, sweat and beers


Starting to take some shape.

 

Well lately I've been noticing it's been hard to restart hot sometimes, the starter keeps getting drug down like overly advanced timing. Took the distributor cap off today and noticed that the pickup sensor and wheel were touching. Where the pickup rotates on the collar/shaft it had be come worn. I haven't greased it in a few years and it all eventually melted out. I see they both have been rubbing for a while, and if the pickup and wheel lined up and stuck together magnetically when shut off it would hold the mechanical advance in an advanced position. Explains my troubles. I cleaned and greased everything and the grease in there took up the slop and I have a gap again. Gas mileage has also been around 9-9.5 instead of the usual 10.7 or so, wonder if that's why... The distributor was a reman the PO put in it shortly before I bought it. Guess it's got about 14,000 miles on it and already halfway junk. Are there any better built aftermarket distributors that can be used with the Duraspark II setup? I don't want to buy a crappy reman like I have already.

 

I swapped out my truck's original carb for a remanufactured unit. I wish I had done this a long time ago. I've had an off-idle bog that I never could get rid of. It's like night and day with this reman.

The plan is to send out the original carb to a specialist for a full rebuild. A coworker recommended him. He fully rebuilds each carb one at a time, not on an assembly line like most places. I've "rebuilt" it twice myself, but that's really just a good cleaning and new gaskets.

I lucked out and found this reman sold by AutoZone on eBay. It was considerably cheaper than in the store. Best of all, no core charge! I plan to hang on to the original, so no core charge is a HUGE plus.

Details of a little trick i learned here, for better access to the idle mixture screws:

https://www.ford-trucks.com/forums/1...re-screws.html

 

 

Very thoughtful of you not to point out the missed areas. He will do better as he grows. The making of great memories!

 

still buying parts and doing research. Nearly there to having a new powerplant under the hood of my truck. Next step after that is to find out how much Xtreme will charge to do some body work and paint. They did a customers truck for like $8,500 which included replacing front doors, fenders, hood, welding in new whole floor pan, cutting out whole bed floor and welding in new bed floor.

All I need is passenger side cab corner welded in, a hole in the windshield pillar by the driver door weather striping welded in and pull the back sliding window out to replace the weather striping. Figure $2,500 should be a fair price for that kind of work with a two tone paint on a short bed flare side truck.

 

Does that $8,500 include paint or primer?

 

Yep the $8,500 included primer and paint on his truck. Plus his is a long wheel base work truck where as mine is a short wheelbase flareside. That's why I am figuring for the little metal work mine needs it should be more for just the paint which should be around $3,000 or less. But I do want them to do the two tone and if they cant get the oem pinstriping then I will pay them to mask and paint the pinstriping on like oem.

 

Not too bad... either way body and paint is always gonna be a big chunk of change.

 

Yep. Ive done the hood and cowl twice already and its bad again. First time I used a enamel paint the Tasco paint shop down here sold me worked great. 3 months after the paint started to dull and split down to the primer and curl up. They don't know what happened but sold me two stage clear coat I did that worked great. But 2 years later the clear dulled and a year later peeled off the hood. The cowl is peeling down to bare metal but the metal is not rusting. I know I blasted the hood and cowl with black diamond sand but I wiped everything down with laquer thinner before hand to clean everything up in prep for primer and paint.

Im done trying and I am wanting to pay a place to put an OEM quality paint job on that will wear off not peel or chip off. I feel the paint on the truck from factory is still on there its wearing off not chipping or flaking off. Paint should be better now and more durable than that.

 

Finally found a NOS OEM Motorcraft 7 volt electric choke thermostat that wasn't $40+, took the manual choke stuff off and put that on today and so far it works much better than the 12 volt setup the carburetor came with. Didn't heat up and take the choke off immediately and it seems to keep the choke open for quite a while, which the original thermostat would cool off way too fast. Gonna give the high idle and tension an adjustment in the morning if it needs it. Found that thing for $9 shipped to my door! I was surprised how much the Motorcraft thermostat weighed compared to the Holley thermostat!

 

Interesting. I got the summit 4V carb and was thinking about maybe swapping it out for something else. Thing is the 2150 choke I have from my 2150 carb is with hot air assist. But I figure running the 12V choke that came with the summit carb off the stator on the alternator shouldn't get it to open up too quick. Will have to try and see. Lots of locals been telling me even if you run a 12V choke to take and pump only 6-7 volts to it for ideal operation.