With the Sanderson headers you are not supposed to use a gasket - just some RTV. This is one of my reasons for waiting for the replacements. With a little luck they will be at the door today.

 

They arrived today. Much happier with the condition inside the tubes, still a bit of clean up required but much less cast off than the first set, and the main thing is all the bolts clear the holes!

They included a tube of Pemtex black RTV this time. Nice touch. I'll have new collectors made on Tuesday and can then start messing with the carb.

 

i have many questions, if your willing, 1 why no edelbrock stuff? 2 where did you get the t&d rockers? 3 what brand is that ole street master intake i want one but haven't looked anywhere yet?. 4 you may have posted it on here and i missed it but did you go with a roller cam?

 

I feel Edelbrock is more into exploiting us than building good products. They did breath some life into the FE with a set of aftermarket heads many years ago, but today almost every alternative for heads are better than Edelbrock.

I bought the heads, rotating assembly, cam, lifters, and rocker assembly from Barry Rabotinik at Survival Motorsports. Yes I went with a hydraulic roller cam.

The intake is an older Holley Street Dominator I got from a buddy and did some grinding to open the plenum and port match to the heads. According to Jay Brown's excellent "The Great FE Intake Comparo", the Holley Street Dominator and Edelbrock Street Master both made surprisingly good power - comparable to the best dual plane intakes. I strongly recommend the book to anyone thinking of doing a build.

Barry is very helpful, has built a LOT of FEs, only sells FEs and parts for them, and his prices are very fair, but he was slow to deliver on many of the parts and because of problems with his manufacturer he was never able to provide the FElony heads I wanted (his brand) and in the end offered me a choice of Edelbrock (no thank you) or BBM. I went with the BBMs.

 

For what it is worth got the Sanderson headers installed and new collectors. The exhaust guy put gaskets on because he felt that the RTV that Sanderson shipped wasn't high enough temperature, and with a new engine break in he didn't want to run the risk of cooking it.

The fit nicely and are well sealed up.

Having said that since I got it back from the shop the engine now runs WAY worse, and I noticed that the timing was suddenly up at 28 degrees of advance, so before I can put any time on the engine I have to go pull the dizzy and go through it again.

 

Did they mess with your idle and happen to open the throttle plates enough to cause the "timed" vacuum port to start flowing vacuum?

 

I've known him a long time and I'd have happily paid him to look at it, but he said he hadn't touched the engine and I have no reason to doubt him.

I have doubted myself because it seemed to me that every time I checked the timing had moved, so time to dig into the dizzy and see what is up.

 

yeah, I know you know your stuff, just that it just seems there's been a rash of people with their throttle plates too far open -

 

Like many of us I know some of my stuff. It is the other stuff we keep stepping on. I did have the front too wide to start and when I closed it and opened the secondary I had a really annoying whistle.

I think I'm good there for the moment, it was running very strong from idle up. It is now running badly from idle to WOT.

 

I had an old dizzy with a pertronix which worked well for awhile, then I started to have timing issues. The timing would jump around and it ran poorly. I bought a reman dizzy and reinstalled the pertronix, set the initial at 12 degrees with a total of 38 degrees. I also opened up the spark plug gap. The timing is now rock steady with good power and no pinging.

 

Well, got the new Sanderson headers on and it was suddenly running like crap. Turns out it was a bad coil. New coil and it ran strong but started to tick. Did a pre-load adjustment on the lifters and today, nice sunny day and probably the last nice day of the year, and it is ripping the tires loose at 20 mph. Very happy, but time to put it away for the winter.

Picture was taken Friday, a warning of what is to come:

 

I was just asked for an update on another thread, and here it is.

Pulled it out of storage about two weeks ago. I had a new MSD "Ready to Run" distributor, 6AL box and a new set of wires all ready to go. Had to pull some new wire since the old ignition wire was cracking and breaking down. Since the oil pressure and coolant temperature sender wires were in the same bundle I pulled new ones for all three and bypassed the resistor wire in the ignition.

On testing it presented a lovely strong spark from the coil wire onto the intake. Plugged it in and it started pretty quickly, got the timing close and let it warm up. It was idling a little low but not enough to concern me, and I adjusted the timing to about 14 degrees initial, 34 degrees total and took it for a little test drive.

Very little test drive, it got about 50 yards before it died. Clearly the fuel pump had stopped (Holley blue, so easy to hear). Walked home and picked up a flashlight and a pair of pliers, I had fuses in the glove box). The fuse that blew was NOT in line to the pump, but the old style fuse under the dash providing power to the fuel pump relay via an oil pressure cut-off switch mounted to the oil filter adapter.

It took 3 more fuses to get the truck around the block and back to the house. A little work the next day revealed that the bypass switch that let me run the pump without oil pressure had two bare spade connectors and one of them had a scorch mark where it had touched something and shorted out. Easily fixed with a little electrical tape.

With that sorted out I started it again and warmed it up planning another short test drive before beginning to play with the timing and the carb to dial in the idle transition to driving behaviour.

I got twice as far as I did on the first test drive before it quit again. This time no spark when the lead from the coil was lying on the intake, and some neighbours helped me turn it around and drag it home (about 200 yards).

Did some diagnostics and the 6AL box and coil are working fine, but there is no signal coming from the magnetic pickup in the somewhat ironically named "Ready to Run" distributor.

Called MSD the next day and the tech support guy asked me a couple of questions and put me over to the warranty guy. So, my new $480 MSD distributor worked for about 12 minutes, and they confirmed that it had a bad pickup. I get to pay to ship it back to them to fix. That is how you stand behind your products. I can only surmise that so many of their products are returned for repair that the cost of paying to have them returned would ruin the company.

Put the old Ford distributor with the Petronix back in and will start it as soon as I can get a second pair of hands to assist.

 

Well that blows about the distributor...
MSD has used both ford and gm pickups in their distributors. Do you know which one you had?
I'm surprised they made you pay shipping. How long ago did you buy, it that died?

 

And never EVER pull the + side coil wire going to the MSD thinking you can then just crank the engine over for some other reason like finding the timing marks.

I blew the very same MSD 6AL model doing that. Not sure if they ever fixed that little issue, but without the coil there to absorb the energy, it blew itself up

 

Bought the distributor in January. Rather surprised at the "you pay to ship us our mistake" idea.

I also noticed, once I'd pulled it out, that it squeaked when I turned the shaft - sounded a little like the squeak you hear when cleaning glass.

I read that more than a few people keep a spare pick up in their glove box.