Im in the process of buying a 1968 f100 short bed that had a 351w, now it has no motor or tranny, what is the best year in the 302/351w to start of from and build a mild engine?, im sure if its a fuel injected motor it can be converted to carburator right? Thanks guys.

 

Any of the following: 96-2001 Explorer/Mountaineer 5.0, 89-93 T-Bird/Cougar 5.0, 94-97 pickup or van 5.0 or 5.8 and the 5.0's from the 87-95 Mustangs. The Explorer/Mountaineer motors have GT40 or GT40P heads, the rest all have E7TE heads, all have roller cams of four different specs.

 

Sure can just strip off all the EFI stuff and mount a carb intake, Duraspark distributor, and mechanical or electric fuel pump. But then.. an EFI 5.0 or 5.8 would look pretty trick under the hood of that '68 and with the right donor vehicle you would have all the bits necessary for the install.

 

Not just appearance, but also the EFI provides so much better dirvability and efficiency than a carburetor.

My 69 Mach I has a 302 with Edelbrock intake and a Holley 600 cfm 4 bbl carb. Its automatic choke, never quite worked right, so I swapped in a manual choke so i can control it better. But I have to keep messing with it as engine warmed up, or it just won't run well. I'm tempted to put the auto choke back in and try to adjust it better. But every time I started up 87 GT, it idles smoothly, drives off nicely, gets great gas mileage and provides lots of power. I've often considered scrounging up some EFI parts to install onto the 69 engine.

 

The trick to "EFI like" performance with a carb is simply to use the EFI cam, combined with a hot electronic ignition, a dual plane intake, topped with a smallish sized carb. I've run this setup on an Explorer 5.0, topped with a Ford A321 intake and a Holley 570 Street Avenger, cold starts with no choke, no "pump shot" from the gas pedal at temps down to 25*F. You could crank it a few seconds and the engine would fire up and idle without touching the gas pedal. For those who would say the carb was too rich, I will simply say that it was dead on perfect as to the mixture, you could pull the plugs after a year's time and they still looked like they just came out of the box.

 

X2 on all this plus he'll need a steel geared distributor to match the roller cam.

 

So what would be the best setup EFI motor, maybe a late 80's Mustang 5.0, or an early F150 5.8?

 

I like the later truck 5.8's best. 1994 and up had roller cams. Vans too.
Going with a bit earlier one will get you a non-roller cam engine. Which has it's good points too. You can swap to your choice of aftermarket cam quite a bit less expensively and you can use a regular old Duraspark distributor without worrying about having to fit a steel drive gear to it.

 

Roller cam swaps are no more expensive than flat tappet cams in a roller block.. Actually a bit cheaper if you happen to wipe a cam lobe or two with a new flat tappet cam. Any 5.0 cam will fit a roller 5.8. The steel cam gear is no big deal either I've done two gear changes with simple hand tools and a dial caliper.

 

My favorite year of the 302 is the one i have in my 1993 Cobra and my favorite years of the 351w are the 94-96 roller blocks

 

All of the efi work well but if I was doing a swap, I'd go with a mass air flow system and not the earlier speed density. On trucks I think it was just the last 2-3 years, not sure on other models.