Hey, I'm talking about my nasty ole spark plugs. I've never seen anything so bad. I replaced them with same plug - Autolite 45. My shop manual said to go by what is on the sticker... yeah right what sticker. I found results at .035 and .040 on the Internet and picked .040 cause bigger is better right?

Now, it does not cough an sputter as before but I think I might need to remove the heads to do a carbon clean up and change out the valve seals but that exploration often leads to finding more stuff to do.

The engine is a 429 transplanted by the PO from a late 60's T-Bird. It's got a rear sump pan and upgraded Duraspark II ignition but the motor mounts are really unbelievable. I think I'm going to get some new mounts from L&L and replace these. As I mentioned in another post, it also looks like the PO hacked up the harmonic balancer because there is nothing there to measure timing....

The engine will fire quickly when its warmed up and I have a very steady 17-18 in of vacuum at idle. It reads 20 in when cold. Plenty of oil pressure and no knocking or ticking. I'm still hoping the motor is good and just needs some TLC.

She smokes a bit when cold but not so much when warmed up.

Okay, now check out these babies.. anyone seen em this bad before? If I had a head gasket problem (with oil leak) I think I would see that only one one bank or maybe just one one or two cylinders and not all of em. The PO put on a new carb - some kind of Edelbrock 4 barrel so that could also need some tuning.


Passenger's side

Driver's side

 

Im surprised that engine was even running...those are pretty bad...heads need re-done for sure...if you take half of it apart may as well do the rest...Just my opinion

 

Autolite's aren't your fathers Oldsmobile (anymore), the 45's use to be stamped "Made In USA", now they are just blank, but the packaging reads "Made in China (or Mexico), sadness.

 

Don't get me started!

 

Looks like oil fouling probably valve seals or guides. one way to clean carbon out of the top end is to get the engine warmed up set the hi idle and DRIBBLE water into the carburator this turns to steam and cleans the carbon out remember DRIBBLE it in.Then with a good air compressor and you can do valve seals buy putting compressed air into the cylinder and using a screw type valve spring tool to do each cylinder. Many repair manuals go into more detail on this operation.

 

Or use Seafoam. pour it in the gas, the oil and let the vacuum line suck some through. It'll cough and hack, but it'll clean the engine.

*another thing I've done is use E85. Run your tank down to about empty, put a couple gallons of E85 in and run it down to about empty again. That stuff burns hot and makes engines look brand new.

 

Any reason to not keep running E85 if it's that good ?

 

they "say" e85 is not good for aluminum and not good to run in vehicles not made for it. I've had several vehicles that I ran E85 straight in, and never had any issues. Some adjustments had to be made due to the octane difference, but I loved how they ran with it. Your mileage suffers with it though because it burns hotter/quicker. If we had more than one station with it around here, I'd be running it more often, but that station is 20mins away. I've mixed half and half before and it did pretty well.