Well Long story short I am helping a good friend out with redoing his 62 or 63 Ford Unibody F100. I am building a 390 for Him. I have Built many engines, Most of which have been forced induction crap for mine or other drag cars or drag boats. but it has been at least 10 years since I have built a 390. I forgot how much fun you can have building them.

We are starting with the Core from a running 1964 Mercury Montclair (Damn thing is a land Yacht and barely fit in the shop). It is a 2V motor, but Will end up running a single 4Bbl. I started Tearing it down last night and have never seen so much sludge build up! Already found that #8 exhaust Valve is burnt and #7 was on its way out too.

I still have to pull the other head off just taking my time as the truck wont need the motor till the spring But I want to get the heads and block to the machine shop ASAP cause he has quite the wait time.


I will post specifics on the motor as I decided which route to take on it First I need to see what all is good and go from there. The truck will be a daily Driver and will pull a Drag boat to the lake once in a while.

Pics to come very soon

Oh a quick Question what the heck is up with the head gaskets on this thing they expose part of the deck of the block to the combustion chamber?? They are oblong shaped?

 

I now have both heads off the engine and the pan pulled, Everything has a aluminum sheen to it. Looks alot like when I have burnt up a piston.

But I had forgotten my balancer puller at the shop so I didnt proceed to get the crank out of the block.

So the Heads casting numbers are C4AE, and I still am wondering about the head gaskets?? Why would they be shaped like that??

It has been all too long since I have built a FE So I will be asking quite a few questions about the final combo once I tally Wherte I stand with good useable parts

 

Without seeing a pic..I can only assume that what your looking at with part of the deck exposed is where on the FE's the intake would be covering that part of the deck..un-like any other motor..the intakes on FE's come down onto the deck of these blocks instead of the head covering the whole deck I.E. every other motor does..

Are you saying the fire ring around the cylinders on the head gasket are egg shaped ? Huh ?

 

Yea the sealing fire ring around the cylinder are egg shape, and that is how they were new, it was just odd

 

Ford designed the gaskets to fit several engine sizes in the FE family, some will have even more deck exposed as they might be for the 427s that had the block chamfered to clear the valves of the MR and HR engines.

 

"If" you havent trashe canned those head gaskets yet ? I sure would like to see the oval shape on the fire ring...Didnt that motor have the stock shim type gasket in it ? or had the motor been into before and someone used a compression type crush gasket ?

 

I will take a pic of the gaskets they are sitting on my workbench at home, My wife wont let me take the camera out to the shop right now, something about wanting the camera at the hospital with her for when our new little one arrives sometime tonight or tomorrow. so it will be a few days for pics.

From What I can tell is this is a 100% untouched motor. every thing to me screams that it has not been apart. All I have left is to pull the cam and then the block is going to the machine shop!!! Can't wait to start ordering parts!

 

ANother possible reason for this could be th try and compensate for the squish and dimension change caused by torquing down the heads.


THis picture shows the pressure placed on the head gasket from clamping. The areas in red are higher levels of pressure while the darker blue the less pressure. I will see what other information I can find on this for you.

Ok so what I have found (if I understand what you are talking about and didn't mix things up in my noggin) is the low pressure are see above pictures when under a detonation or other horrible engine atrosity the high pressure areas are able to stay clamped down and won't shift but over time and long periods of abuse the low pressure areas can start to bend outward untl the point whre the finally reach a catostrophic failure i.e. blown headgasket. But like I said maybe my noodle got kaboodled and I missed something in your posts.

 

That is a very interesting pic but what engine is it from? Not an FE and what is the media for that pic?

 

I have a picture of the one I just pulled out of a virgin 360, but can't figure out how to attach the file? If someone can give me a hand on how to do this I will post it. Thanks.

 

It was from a big block chevy article on hot honing the torque plate for a better wall surface that just dingle ball honing. The picture is from popular hotrodding I remembered the article and thought to look into this picture and possible causes for the oval shape fire ring. The article didn't give any information I just used the picture to represent what I found.

As for posting a photo get yourself a photobucket or other file sharing website account upload your picture to the site and use the img tagged hyper link in a post it will look like so

 

Here is the one I found in the doner for my 410 build.

 

Hmm are the bulges on the top by the valves or are they on the bottom. Up by the valves I could see that maybe it was done as a precautionary measure to make sure the valves didn't come in contact with anything during travel. But thats just a guess and cool and blows my last theory our of the water.

 

Thats what mine looked like but wont look like that when it goes back together, Well the new baby arrived just fine and we are settling back into the swing of things.

First time I checked craigslist since being back at work I found an edelbrock streetmaster intake for the old FE for 75 bones we now have a intake!!!