Three Hundred Sixty-Six Days

First things first, Grace is back! There is a lot of tuning to be done, but as you can see she fired right up on the first try.

 

 

 After completing the wiring harness there were a lot of small odds and ends to complete. I guess I had never re-installed the starter after fitting the engine, so I was pretty surprised when I went to put it in and there was no way it would fit. The starter had three mounting tabs, but only two are used in this application and the extra tab was interfering with the headers. So off it came.

After I cut the tab off, it became very clear that it was not the only part of the starter that interfered with the headers. Since these headers are for a 94-95 mustang, I looked it up and sure enough, it was a different starter design. My old starter was for a Ranger, as well as Fox body Mustang. I got on amazon and found a deeply discounted open box starter, and placed the order.

Now that the starter was in place, I could make cables for the starter. Thankfully had enough cable and lugs leftover from previous projects that I could get right to it. Out came the hydraulic lug crimper and before long I had fully complete and fully sealed starter and alternator charging cables.

Spark plug wires were another custom part I had to make. I had in my head that I needed vintage-look braided spark plug wires. They can be kind of hard to cone by, and eventually I found a company that made just what I needed at a much better price than any competitors. They made a small error on my order, but I called them up the next day and they fixed it right away. I highly recommend The Brillman Company if you are looking for vintage style wiring or spark plug wires.

The kit I ordered needed some modification because my application is a little bit odd, but were used to that sort of thing by now. It just took an hour of cutting, crimping, and wrestling plug boots into place with the help of some dielectric grease.

The last of my items to build was a throttle cable and bracket. I've found that bike brake and shifter cables work well as throttle cables and are cheap, so I don't even bother looking at the Summit or Jegs site when building one. The bracket was fairly simple, just a piece of drilled rod and angle iron welded together.

Before I started her up, there were a few other small things to do, like fuel drain, radiator install,  oil and coolant fill. Those all went pretty quickly and happily, startup was pretty easy. It felt really good to get the engine going on the first try.

However, over the past week since the first start I've become aware of a few issues. First was a minor issue, the valve covers were leaking. The valve covers and the gaskets were just not playing nice together. After getting the engine up to operating temperature, I noticed that the paint had burned off the headers (this was expected) on all but 2 of the cylinders (this was not expected).

Cylinders #2 and #8 still had bright shiny paint, which meant that they never got hot. It might seem strange that 2 cylinders would have this problem, until you realize that cylinders #2 and #8 are paired together in the ignition system. My ECU can have up to 6 ignition outputs, which isnt enough to have one output per cylinder, so I paired cylinders that were opposite in the firing order. A setup like this is called waste spark because the spark plug fires on the compression stroke and exhaust stroke.The exhaust spark is "wasted". The only drawback is that it may limit your RPM (I think this won't allow me to run faster than 10,000 rpm or so) and the coils fire twice as often, so the coil and plug life could theoretically be reduced.

Anyway, once I figured out that the problem was related to this spark output, I took a look at the ECU. I quickly realized that while I was soldering on the ECU board, I had forgotten to build a transistor circuit to trigger these coils. I got the soldering iron out, along with the resistors and transistors I keep on hand for occasions like this. Everybody does, right? Unfortunately, a now-functional coil trigger circuit was not the cure for all my problems. Apparently my goof with the transistor circuit fried my coils. I am able to trigger other coils with this spark output, but coils #2 and #8 are unresponsive. I've got some Amazon cheapo coils on the way and we'll go from there when they arrive.

I have one factoid to share before I hit the "publish" button. Grace was without a running engine for 366 days this time. It was one year and one day from the time I pulled the ailing 4-banger to the time I started the V8. And even on just six cylinders, the V8 is far smoother than the four cylinder ever was. I'm feeling ok about this swap so far.