1962 Ford Falcon Project: Take your economy car and your suitcase, take your psycho little dogs

A friend posted this today and tagged me. If you've ever had a project car or even worked on a car, you understand. I mean at what point can I be done with this? And then move directly on to the next one...

TWO YEARS OF THIS!

In reality, things have been moving along pretty well. Some days you spend the whole day working and at the end you feel like you spent the day arranging a barrel of M&Ms into alphabetical order, but lately it's felt more like arranging the magnetic words on your friend's fridge into dirty sentences which you then giggle about. The other day while building battery cables for the starter I realized that they would pass through the same approximate area as the downpipe. That was all the reason I needed to build a downpipe. Who doesn't like building downpipes? Nobody, probably.

Clearing the firewall took the tightest radius mandrel bend I could find

And another bend

Sorta done

Installed

The Ford 2300 (AKA Lima, AKA 2.3, AKA Pinto motor, AKA SVO motor) is generally a tough as nails engine but it has an Achilles heel. The distributor and oil pump are driven off a timing belt driven auxiliary shaft. The gears on the distributor (or dummy shaft in my case since I'm converting to a distributorless system) and aux shaft will wear thin and fail on occasion. Usually it happens when someone swaps a distributor or aux shaft but does not do both as a matched set. I once found myself coasting to the shoulder of the freeway with a dead motor thinking "I'll bet the aux shaft just stripped out..." Imagine my triumphant feeling of vindication a few minutes later when I confirmed my suspicions, and was still on the side of the freeway with a dead vehicle! Because I'm hoping to have a reliable car I can drive every day on Los Angeles ~~gauntlets~~ freeways as well occasional road trips, I thought it wise to replace the stock pieces with heavy duty parts from Esslinger Racing.

Removing stock gear from dummy drive shaft which drives the
oil pump in the distributorless 2300

Pressing on Esslinger's bronze gear

The esslinger kit also requires that you drill the shaft out for a 3/16 roll pin,
as the stock pin fails on occasion

Left: Esslinger billet aux shaft
Right: Gear installed on dummy drive

Aux shaft hole. the gasket needed to be replaced, unfortunately this required that I buy an entire timing cover set. If I had one request of Esslinger, it would be that they include this gasket in the kit.

All sealed up!

Dummy drive installed in distributor hole.

Every good gearhead knows that no engine build is a real engine build without a hot cam. Only accountants and kids who eat their own boogers run stock cams! Since I am neither, I haven't run a stock cam in this engine since sometime around the beginning of 2005. I do have a dirty secret and that is that my cam is just a re-ground stock cam. What does that mean? Some internet dude explained so:

Thanks, internet dude! Regrinding a cam is a cheap way to get a bit more valve lift and airflow, but It has it's limits. And those limits are pretty low. You can pick up a few horsepower with this Delta Cams regrind, but a completely new cam offers a lot more.

A few years back a guy named Bo entered the Ford 2300 world and a lot of guys were seeing pretty good gains over the Ford Motorsport cams. Things at Bo's company, Bo-port went south about two years ago when he disappeared with a whole lot of money that had been paid up front for porting services and products. People tend to not like that, and surprisingly when Bo resurfaced neither of his kneecaps were broken. Word spreads pretty quick about things like that in niche markets in the internet age. He's promised to make good on all his previous customers, but it remains to be seen if that will actually happen. And once again, I'm off on a tangent. What I meant to say is that I picked up a slightly used Bo-port stage 1.5 cam a year ago and I'm finally getting around to installing it.

Even after removing the radiator, the cam hit the core support on the way out

Easiest solution? Unbolt motor mounts and jack it up. At this point the cam slid right out.

Boport Stage 1.5 cam

Since I had already installed a new aux shaft and cam shaft, I thought this would be an ideal time to install an adjustable cam gear which would allow me to degree my cam as well fine tune my powerband characteristics down the road. And just for good measure, I took the opportunity to replace the timing belt and tensioner.

Fidanza adjustable cam gear

Turbos don't live long without oil, and engines don't last long if the oil sent to the turbo doesn't make it back into the oil pan, and in the spirit of not destroying my engine or turbo, I decided to make oil feed and drain lines for the turbo. I sacrificed yet another bit of my bank account to the hungry gods at Summit Racing and ordered a few more Fragola 8000 series push lock hoses and fittings, and crossed my fingers hoping I wouldn't have to build yet another set of tools. I caught a break this time, and the -4 and -10 hoses did not require any custom tools to assemble.