Done with classes till January

Yup, Finished up finals last week and scored Very well on the NATEF tests for both engines and manual transmissions. 30 out of 40 on transmissions and 33 out of 40 on engines.
In Addition to that I Did some work for a guy on his toyota who was very very satisfied with how well it ran afterwards, At this rate I may be stuck here merely by reputation rather then detained by the fact I havent been sucessful in finding a mechanicing job as of yet. I could always go back to plumbing for my uncle, Doesnt make use of my degree of course but is a job I do fairly well.
But yes back to the mustang, I havent gotten the new set of pistons on the connecting rods, I havent even posted a photograph of on here. But it'll have to wait until I get there. I Just havent had the desire to get out of bed now that its starting to get cold outside. Those blankets sure do grab hard when is gets well into the 40's(thats just a guess of course but likely an accurate one). Stay tuned all, somthings gonna happens sometime, eventually.......

I dropped a piston....

And now its ruined(collasped the skirt 0.005), The unfortunate part is that they couldnt even Find one that was anywhere near the proper weight(736grams), The next question is what do I Do now?

Summit racing brand hyperteutectic pistons, 89.00 plus shipping and handling. It'll take all the money that I was planning on using to finsh my valve train but Is Critical to finishing my engine. The good news is If i want to lighten and balence my connecting rods I'll be able to do so since Im putting a fresh set of pistons on.

parts came today

keepers, springs, retainers, everything a good cam needs to perform. in addtion a timing set to tie the crank and cam together grand total 175 bucks of work-study money. only 425 left to earn and spend and 200 of it is sitting in my wallet waiting to be transfered onto the wired card and ordered with.



This Is the basic assembly you look at under the vlave covers, the only thing its missing is the valve itself and the cylider head(I'll show ya later after the long week-end)

I havent been slacking

I've just had a billion things to do and almost no time to do them in. between putting new valve seats in my clinder heads, port and bowl work, and anal retentative cleanlyness for all the parts. On top of that Having all the required lab and theory work for the class which entails several hundred hours of job sheets and Engine R/R in addition to the problems that your average Technician will face with ordering and aquiring parts, fitment of parts. I Am into the Next class with my own personal engine project, Which willbe finished as soon as I order in the last of the parts required(roughly $250 left to order). Then the slammin and jammin starts and stops and starts again with all the blue-printing phases nessscary to make the level of performance I'm looking for and the longevity of the engine demanded in this industry. Ok now that the long long introduction is over its time for the pictures, Hurray for pictures

This picture is of one of my cylinder heads waiting for me to finish the new valve seats(It take on average 3 turns of a 45 degree angle cutter). At this point I was just waiting for the valve springs keepers and retainers to arrive from summit racing(shipping out of navada)

The next photo is of the engine block after i pulled it out of the jet cleaner and dried it off. It wasnt too badly dirty, but ever bit of dort on the outside can an often will get into the inside and cause Havoc with both bearings and machined surfaces, If you block comes back from rebuilding still covered in dirt, dont expect much.

This picture is some of the port work that was done, I got a little grinder happy and dont have a before picture but believe me I took a ton of material out of the ports and upper intake

My pistons are waiting to get back in the bores and get some fire put to them, Speed thou art my mistress.

So last we wrote

I had a valve train problem, which the solution took some money. My first work study check will be sent out on the 25th and i have well over 20 hours at 6.55 in addition to a 20 dollur tip from doing a brake job for the welding instructors and 29 from scrap metal. hopfully it will be close to the 186.95 I need for the first installment of parts for my valve train.

If all goes well next weeks pay peroid I'll order my second order which will consist of roller rocker arms and mounting studs.(very nearly 200 on the second order as well)

After that ill Have an anally excessive number of assembly pictures and maybe some Videos Which will be embedded here for your veiwing pleasure. One that you will absolutly get is the start-up and break in of the engine, thats a given.

Valve float

Yes you read it right, Ive found more problems with some of my parts. the valve springs have a closing force which is less then the requirement for my cam shaft. 150lbs as opposed to 230lbs. This means the missing closing force has to find a place to be made up at, which in the form of valve float. valve float is the valves staying open too long at high RPM because the springs cant close the valves quick enough to ride over on the cam ramps hence the valves dont fully close. were it a stock cam i wouldnt have much problem with it as it would be low duration and realtivly low lift, but at .447 lift (we're talk tenths of an inch here not thousanths) we're watching our street machine chew up a lobe.
Good news, Ive potetnially got a Reputation + as ive Designed an engine for a Real life client of my instructor and hopfully he likes it(400 ft/lbs of torque at low RPM, he Better like it. stump pullers for the win)

so to keep you up on what's the sizzle

I qualified for work-study, I cant argue with 6.55 to do things that I would normally help folks out with anyways. I'm still waiting to see where I'm at with the stangs engine, so far everything looks peachy with it.
speaking of engines I Impressed my instructor with some fancy computer aided engine design, the down side is he had me running cams for most of the day. The only snag we ran into was the Factory manifolds on this 350(soon to be 383), the restriction they caused decreased the power output by well over 50 horsepower and put a small amount of unesscary curve in the torque band. were it my call i would ask the client(a client of the instructors from his business) if he wanted to add-on the additional parts(89.95 + shipping) its my firm belief that the customer will be far more satisfied with the final product.(you would be too when your car is putting down 400+ horsepower and a great deal more torque(its a truck actually))

the old red truck is beat to F!#@

we finished pulling and tearing down(yes it was tearing down as opposed to disassembling , ask me the difference sometime)my old mans engine, we got half a zippy bag full of piston peices a bent connecting rod and oil pump drive shaft, several spun bearings indicating improper clearence both oil clearence and side clearence. the good news you may ask, the ford motorsports cam we had in there suvived along with the lifters. over all an interesting project that really we shouldnt have had to do but ended up doing anyways.

A lesser know porject im working on....

We Pulled the engine out(for the third time.....) of my old mans red truck today and discovered more then the Intial problems(See site for pictures). the second bore on the right side appeared to be detenating (the fuel combusting before the piston reaches the peak of its travel and begins going down for the exhuast stroke, see Howstuffworks article on engines). The good news(assuming you noticed the problem on my old mans site) is the block is salvagable.

Fnished disecting the mustangs old engine..

and there is a 0.015 ridge on the center of the crankm the cam is pancaked, two main bearings and all the rod bearings are toast, some of the cam bearings are scuffed, the front cover is toast with a half an inch of metal missing from the fuel pump eccentric rubbing on it. the timing chain had so much play in it that it would have been impossiable to get an accurate engine timing...........the block looks ok but i wont know for sure until i hot tank and sonic check/magna flux it. luckily enough i came up with a partially built 289 and a gasket set.

On a lighter knote Vocation Rehab authorized the purchase of a set of micrometers and a good torque wrench in addition to any parts I require to finish the engine im working on, although i think they would throw a fit if i tried to convince them i needed a 331 stroker kit. mostly it will be belts, hoses and maybe (If they'll let me) the right springs for my cam.

so tomorrow schools back in which means

and its engine time, enough of the body work already lets build some muscle

Ok Back on point

The body was cleaning up nicely, a few minor dents the ding were quickly remedied. over all the body was about 50% stripped (the exterior mostly, and most of the major interior parts such as the seats and carpet). the rear window glass was also taken out the adhesive holding it in was sloppily applied and was holding the shoddy window tint in. I can't stand that amount of poor workmanship, especially on somthing as simple as rolling on window tint without leaving massive air bubbles and runs, but alas.

the fender came out great, i managed to get it almost perfect a little more filling and sanding and it should look wonderful

that last note on shoddy worksmanship.....I had to patch part of the Quarter panel where it was almost designed to rust out from the factory, ithout proper tools it can be a lesson in patience.
this one didnt turn out so well.

The local car show

Mine wasnt in it for obvious reasons, doesnt mean I houldnt share the majesty our little boon-dock town has to offer, some were a bit better then others

not dead but busy

more pictures to come, just been busy with fixin little problems around the ol casa

When it comes to the Body work aspect you need alot of specialty tools

from hammers and dollies all the way through english wheels and metal shrinkers

heres what I use, pictured here is my hammers, each has a flat face for general smoothing and a specialty face, which includes a pick, a cross peen and another one I cant remeber what its called. also here is a slide hammer(the blue thing on the back of the table) several different pulling rods, and on the bakc right a couple of bondo knives. None of these tools are top of the line and the average price is 30 bucks a set of tools (slide hammer,and hammers+dollies were 30 each the rest was between 10-15) and you can near fix any dent with fairly little effort. my advice to anyone who want to get into this as a hobby is to buy a car for maybe 400 bucks and just do by trial and error. would i recomend you go out and get a 69 cuda in mint condition and rip into it, NO, start with something like an 83ish truck that has been kicking around a farm for a few years collecting dents. In addition to doing, you gotta know the theory behind what your trying to do, so mehaps hit up the public library or perhaps head over to the parts store (haynes has a few body-working books) or the paint shop(my guy is a helluva good guy), perhaps even goto a local body shop and ask a few questions, maybe see if one of the guys would like to teach you a thing or three for a case of beer. You dont have to goto a professional college in order to get into this as a hobby.

So the dents came out one by one.

The quarter panel needed a few high spots bumped in and some additional sanding. but all in all the project was moving along

The Fenders were getting the final block down and a little more sandblasting to take car of the pitted rustspots on the lower sections. alll in all everything has gone smoothly

As the body panels came off

I began to see what needed attention and how much. 90% of the dents and dings were about the size of a quarter. the only severe one was on the drivers side quarter panel(no pre repair picture is availiable sorry). in addition to the major dent there was a fair sized rott hole near the wheel well. When the cash is available Ill replace at least part of the quarter panel . The fenders on the other hand were just mildly dinged and required a few taps with a hammer and a skim of body filler. In the included photo above you can see the small dents as white areas and the high spots as bare metal. the gray colored area in between is realativly even. the way you would go about hammering a dent such as those is by placing the dolley(a concaved or convexed peice of steel made to the shape of the body curve) on a low spot and hammering on a high spot. the dolley recoils and beats the low spot upward(from the back) and the hammer moves the high spot inward. rinse and repeat until they are as close as possiable, idealy 1/16th is the magic number when it comes to body filler, 1/8th will work but any thicker then that and you run into problems later on after you have painted. the ideal is to over fill the dent 1 inch past in ethier direction and cut the excess filler off with a body file or sanding block. usually you would cut in flat with 80 or 120 grit sand paper and apply a high build primer then re-sand with 320 grit paper.

ok so we were at the part where I had a busted ass car

So I had the body hauled a few blocks to my house to really get working on somthing I could fix without much trouble. It went from this------->

To this in a few hours. How did I do it, you may ask yourself. Well heres some of the tools of the trade that make any disassembly project fly faster then you would think possible

The basics of the basics make any project easy, a good set of wrenches, some screwdrivers, pliers, a few excessivly large hammers can help things along but the top of the hill is air tools.

This is the basic set you will ever need a couple of good 1/2 inch impacts, a good 3/8 butterfly impact and an air ratchet. Though not everybody has the lucery of a 80 gallon air compressor even a decent 20 gallon will run things for a little while.

Now that I kinda knew what i was looking at on the outside, it was time to take the moldy smelly interior out. the drivers side floor pan was almost completely clean just some minor rust around the seat bracket holes and the drain holes. the passenger side was in about the same condition there was slightly more rust which was taken car of using navel jelly (a jellied phopheric acid used to remove rust) all in all salvagable. the interior as stated had seen some water so it needed to be redone. thats all for right now, I can tell a few of you are starting to fall asleep at the keyboard

Its been a few days

I havent posted because I'm having network troubles with the laptop and all of my photos are on there. so if you here for the project, well hang in there, more to come

what postion is its conditon?

The engine in the mustang sat for a few hours until I began an autopsy on it. the valve covers had been taken off before I began to remove it. This is where I saw the first of a series of problems. the rocker arms had excessive play in them. this could have been from the lack of oil to the lifters or perhaps the press in rocker studs had begun to fail after 30 some odd years of use. ethier way there was a serious problem within the valve train. Upon noticing this I decided to break out the camera and see just how many rockers where on the verge of failing.

The entire passenger side was for the most part FUBAR, the drivers side was little better. After I got back on track, the engine and transmission came out in record time. though I doubt it will go in as easily as it came out. Shortly after this I removed the oil pan and found the bearing to be shot, two freeze plugs in the coolant passages had been popped. over all I'll be lucky to save the any part of the engine.

Hours after it arrived at my home, I began disassembling it to begin repairing the years of neglect that it had suffered. the panels were dented but they were very minor and a few minutes of hammering and some minor filling yeilded a very fine finshed product.

The first part to get any kind of attention was the hood. over several days i sandblasted rust pits, removed rust with phospheric acids and sanded the old paint away. in the end it finished with a very minor skim of body filler and a few coats of self etching primer. the hood scoop was another part that was missing, and probly had been for several years.

I had alot of work ahead of me,more then I honestly knew.

Though it was rough around the edges, It was for the most part all there. the only thing that was wrong with it on intial inspection was that one window was broken and alot of surface rust.

The engine was what sold me on wanting this car. the standard engine for all mustang II's was a 2.3L 4 cylinder engine. but this diamond in the rough had a 302CID V8 which put out 140 horsepower, under powered for its displacement. Though it would be a gas guzzler in the initial stages, I knew that with my skills and previous experiences in the art of fuel injection, I could tame the engine until the thorttle hits the floor then have balls out power. It was my luck to have the better part of an engine kit and even spare parts had I the need for them.

The next few weeks were spent adjusting tweaking and modifing any componet that would cause a not start condition, when the reality the engine was utterly Shagged from a poor rebuild. this Discovery wasnt made until it was pointed out to me by my instructor that the engine should have been cranking with a smooth rythm. All this time I had been excited to have my first pony car and imagining the tourque it would pound to the earth, that I had forgotten basic engine priciples, Air Fuel and spark. I knew i had spark and fuel, but the engine wasnt getting the fuel and air mixture because of zero oil pressure. every main and rod bearing was shaved into the copper. someone had put standard sized bearings onto a 10/10 crankshaft(0.010 undersized).

Within a few hours of discovering this the engine was wrestled out of its tight space and planted on an engine stand. From here the car too a six block trip by trailer to my house where the next phase of its ressurection would take place.

There was a mustang II cobra, destined for the circle track but saved from it fate

In a previous post I said I would start posting more pictures, well 56k internet speed beware.

My usual customer, when It came to stock car work, was a co-worker of my fathers. one day I had dragged a 780 Cubic foot a minute carberator home from college, we were cleaning out the junk shed out back of the college. That same day my father and his co-worker (as previously mentioned) needed to pick something up from my garage. I had that enormous holley perched atop my smaller too box, and when they walked in the salivation commenced. As it were he had a 454 big block chevy that he felt was under-fueled for his race car and that 780 would feed it all day long with no problems. but it would have completely flooded my small block ford 302. I was to prepare a car for him but I hadnt enough room at that moment, as the cobra was where my fathers POS truck was and his truck was in one of the garage bays. about that time I had found a smaller 600 Cfm carberator buried under serveral quadra-junks. now I had a bargaining chip, the 780 holley would be just the ticket to pay for my mustang. after I made my proposal I nearly had t o get a mop and bucket to clean up the drool. Not only was he rid of POS car,but he gained a carberator to fuel his engine.

I understand that not everyone likes reading

But so far I havent added any photos diplaying anything of done so far, the best i can do is put up a link to my you-tube page and you can watch my videos(well actually at the moment the singular video)

so here is my video

Now you Know where come from, you need to know where I'm at.

As I mentioned in the previous post, Im in the middle of price utah and currently attending the college of eastern utah(AKA CEU.) I am Very close to graduating from CEU and will be moving on from there to wyoming technical university (wyo-tech).
Here in price I occasionally operate a business(unoffically of coure) which prepares car bodies for stock car racing at our local track(desert thunder racway). this job at best pays for my share of car insurence and covers most of the shop supplies used.
My current project list is huge in compairison with my money making. I own 2 cars now, an 1988 taurus and a 1977 mustang II cobra. the taurus will be going to my younger sister when she gets her drivers licence and the cobra is dismantled in my side yard waiting for engine rebuild class at CEU and for the parts from my fathers 1980's ford f-250 to be finished. In The next post few posts I'll lay out what each vechicle needs to run and what extras I am going to be adding onto it. If you have any questions please leave me a Private message or a comment. If your interested in Funding projects, shoot me a private message. Id you just want to sit back and relax till the next post is made, subscibe to my blog and enjoy all that is me

And There was a garage full of Cars

The Obsession of my life from the moment I could see the world and understand, was cars. Intially I had little money, I was working at a chinese restruant making 6.50 an hour and coming home with less then 200 bucks a pay-day. this bought me my first car, a falling apart 1989 pontiac, which made me aware of another passion. not only did I enjoy the look of cars and the feel of driving them, but I liked to work on them. This lead to much "modifying" of the poor pontiac. the final results were lost on a move from where I had lived most of my life to an area farther north in order to goto the college of eastern utah.