can anyone help me try to hook up only the the vacume line needed on a 351w running no (cats) this vacume line stuff has left me really confused, chilton book does not go into detail enough, i only want whats has to be there on the engine for good performance, right now i have a mess of vacume lines that need to be sorted out and put into there right places or removed, thanks for any help you can provide.
the strawboss, william h davis
p.s.that 351w came out of a 79 t-bird.

 

If the engine is all original and has all of the emissions gear intact then you pretty much have to hook everything up to make it run right. All of the emissions and timing systems are sort of interelated. If the emissions equipment is taken off you could probably get away with just hooking up the spark advance lines. On my 400 the distributor advance vacuum line was plugged straight into one of the carb vacuum lines. It ran OK but not as well as it did when everything was hooked up correctly. The only reliable place I found vacuum diagrams was in the repair manuals published by Mitchells. I found these at my local library and was able to make a copy and route all of my vacuum lines. I don't have it perfectly tuned but it starts and runs much better.