Date: Tue, 02 Jan 1996 23:44:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: RE: Show of hands...
To: gnttype@buick.monsanto.com

-> Hey, it's 11:30 and I haven't had my pills yet.... what am I doing
-> here?  Huh?  I'm melting, I'm melting................

"One pill makes you larger
one pill makes you small
and the ones the Mother gives you
don't do anything at all.
Go ask Alice
when she's ten feet tall..."

Jeez, I have this urge to blow the dust off the turntable and spin one
of those old Jefferson Airplane albums...  Uh, oh, no gnlist relevance.
Uh, can I come up with some link between Buick-powered ground systems
carts and the Airplane?  No?  Run away, run away...

====dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us========================DoD#978=======
can you help me...help me get out of this place?...slow sedation...
ain't my style, ain't my pace...giving me a number...NINE, SEVEN, EIGHT
==5.0 RX7 -> Tyrannosaurus RX! == SAE '82 == Denizens of Doom M/C '92==



Date: Mon, 11 Mar 1996 19:14:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: carbon fiber exhaust
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

-> I used to work with some composite materials engineers, and we
-> occasionally had trouble with exotic resins going exothermic.  The
-> heat from the reaction becomes adequate to drive the reaction, and
-> things burn up in a hurry.  No fire, but *lots* of smoke, stink and
-> ruined materials.

I used to work at a company that made steel doors and frames.  We had
been stuffing insulated doors with glass wool and changed over to
Styrofoam cores glued to the steel panels.  Had a hell of a time finding
adhesives that didn't attack the foam, take too long to set up, or
whatever.

After playing with coffee-table sized scraps for a while we thought we
had it, so we made a run of ten doors late in the afternoon.  The next
morning we came in and found the fire alarms wailing and the shop filled
with smoke.  The pallet of doors was spread all over the floor, as the
doors had swelled into giant steel dumplings and fallen over.  Smoke was
jetting out of hinge and lockset holes, the paint had burned off, and it
was a general mess.

Turned out the glue was exothermic as it cured, and though Styrofoam is
"self-extinguishing", there was no place for the heat to go in the
middle of a stack of foam and steel laminates, so they burned.  We're
not talking about a whole lot of glue here, either.

I see lots of one-off and prototype cars built by gluing slabs of foam
together.  I've always wondered why none of them have ever run into the
same trouble.



Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 21:54:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Behemoth and other news
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

The guy with the 460 finally came through.  He delivered it last month,
with a 1972 Lincoln Continental wrapped around it.  We pushed it into
the back yard with his pickup.  I didn't want grass in that spot anyway.
The hood refused to close all the way after I got it up.  After a couple
of days three of the tires went flat.  Fortunately the neighbors are too
busy shooting at each other to complain to the city.

The weather was nice this weekend, so I yanked the engine out of AB's
Capri and started loading the hull full of Capri parts.  When we were at
Kenney's to pick up the crank for the stroker 302 she gave the car to
one of Kenney's buddies, the one with the 525 inch 460 I mentioned last
year.  Jimmy is getting out of tractor pulls and into drag racing, and
will be running the Capri with the 525.  This let me get one car out
of the yard, and 75% of the shed was full of Capri parts.  Now the parts
are (still neatly boxed and labeled) in the car, with more boxes of
parts wrapped in plastic and sitting behind it, waiting for Jimmy to
bring the trailer.  It's almost like getting a new shed; I can put some
of *my* stuff in there now, besides the compressor and the lawn mower.
Compulsive parts-collecting isn't entirely the province of MG and VW
owners, you know.

The Capri had had a 283 Chevy, a Saginaw 4 speed with 3.50 first gear,
and a 2.56 axle.  Since I didn't want the engine just lying around, it
needed to go to the shed.  Easier if I take it apart, not to mention
after ten years of sitting it had stuck solid.  I built that 283 when I
was in high school, back in 1978.  Jeez.  Other than perhaps excessive
use of silicone sealer I found nothing to be ashamed of.  On the other
hand, it never leaked oil, either.  I loaded the parts in my little
Radio Flyer wagon and hauled them to the shed and put them in a rack.

The Capri had been a trouper for several years, before being totalled
by a Toyota.  We had bought another with a straight body, and I was
halfway through moving all the stuff over when AB and I had our first
and most major marital dispute.  It was to the effect I wasn't going to
do all the work on it myself while she sat home and watched TV.  She
had taken the old one to car shows and wanted the new one finished out
to the same standards.  After carefully evaluating her priorities, she
decided the TV was more important.  That was in 1984.  It has taken this
long for her to realize I was serious.

AB was kind enough to buy me a new 9-volt battery for my postal scale,
so I whipped up a fixture to weigh each end of a connecting rod
independently, then weighed and marked all the rods for the long-rod
302.  Then I picked through dozens of rod caps, weighed them, graded
them by weight, and began matching them to rods.  I only had to grind a
couple balance pads.  The rods are now all within 2 grams on the big
ends.  Close enough; taking them the rest of the way is part of the
balance guy's job.  They go off to get the big ends resized now, and
then I'll machine the sides down a bit to fit the Ford journals.  Since
the piston domes are all fitted the long-rod's next stop should be the
balance shop.

The original plan was to haul the innards to Chrome-A-Shaft in Memphis,
where I usually take my stuff.  However, the last time I had one
balanced there the guy who did the work seemed pretty confused.  The new
improved plan is to have Jimmy, the guy AB just gave the Capri hull to,
do it.  (this is not the Capri I may be running at the BMWCCA event next
month; we have no shortage of Capris).  Jimmy works at a large volume
rebuilder in Little Rock, and he's the main balance guy.  Not only will
they let me back in the shop to watch, they'll also let me take photos.
Jimmy has also done several big block strokers, so if the long rod parts
come out okay I'll probably have him do the stroker 302.

Anyway, that took care of Saturday.  I guess I overdid it a bit
considering I didn't even get back to work until Wednesday; I was pretty
crapped out today.  I didn't particularly care to work on any of the
fifty dozen projects I had started, so I took advantage of a splendid
day to tinker with the Behemoth.

The guy had claimed the engine "ran good", but I largely discounted it.
Not that I cared; I wanted the thing as a core to build a stroker.  What
the hell, let's see if I can get it to run.  It had oil, and antifreeze,
and all the belts were on; no signs of catastrophic oil leakage, the
trunk and back floorboards were reassuringly free of empty oil and
Stop-Nok cans.

The first item was the distributor.  Someone had taken the points out
and left it open.  This would have been no major deal, except evidently
the car had been left with the hood up so the weather could get in.  I
hosed the innards with TV tuner cleaner, scrounged some points, then had
to scrounge through my parts boxes to find a couple of 6-32 screws to
hold the points.  The coil had vanished, I hooked up the extra from the
RX.  Something had found the plug wires appetizing, so four of them had
to be replaced from my junk plug wire box.

I had to pull the Shop-Vac out to vacuum the acorn hulls from the
distributor and the top of the carb.  Fortunately the choke plate had
remained closed, but the intake manifold is still an inch deep in acorn
hulls.  It must have been Squirrel City under there.  Also knocked off
about ten pounds of mud dauber nests.

Fat sparks when I drop the RX' battery in and hook it up.  Wipers come
on, and the motors on the passenger side of the split bench are
evidently shorted, causing it to do a weird six-way power adjust all by
itself, over and over, like some exotic sex device.  This car has
serious electrical problems.  Also promising, engine-wise.

The engine turned over.  Cool.  Shoot some gas from the squirt bottle,
give it a snort of ether, and it fired up, idled raggedly for a second
or two, and quit.  Hot damn.  No telling what's in the tank, but it
smells *bad*.  I crawled underneath, cut the fuel line, and ran a hose
over to the lawnmower gas can.  Used the squirt bottle to fill the float

<<<>>>

down the venturis, and hit it.  Voom!  It idled nicely.  I crawled under
the dash and performed a fuse-ectomy on everything but main power.  Ran
the air hose over from my convenient *outside* air chuck (ahem!),
pumped up the tires, and moved it into a different spot, kill some
different grass for a while.  Then let it run until it emptied the gas
can.

No noises, smoke, or untoward behavior.  It might be a decent engine.
Transmission was very slow to engage.  Could be sick, but C6 parts are
cheap.  At least I can get the thing in the shop under its own power.

Hmm... it would be a little tight around the steering box and left
exhaust manifold, but wouldn't a 460 look good in an RX7?



Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 17:35:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Fords HIPO History
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

-> You really have to know what you are doing to get into the nines.
-> Just slapping a 460 into a Mustang ain't gonna do it, IMHO. You need
-> to know your suspension and engine building / tuning techniques (or
-> have someone do it for you).

I sorta liked the idea of the world's most badass winch, driven by a
truck transfer case off the back of the transmission.  Lay down 1320
feet of 5/16" steel cable and spike it on the other side of the lights,
with one of the aircraft-type flipoff hooks.

Traction?  Who needs traction?  And think of the money you'd save on
slicks, ujoints, and axles...



Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 21:34:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: coolant filter and stuff (long)
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

I finally got one of the coolant filters I posted about a few weeks
ago.  None of the auto parts stores would order a Fram part for me; they
claimed the master warehouse in Little Rock didn't carry Fram, and they
wouldn't order from anywhere else.    There's one warehouse that
supplies all the auto parts places in Central Arkansas.  Back in the old
days Johnny at Jacksonville Auto Parts would have had anything I wanted
in from Memphis the next day, with my choice of a dozen brands.  Alas,
Johnny sold out to a major chain and retired at 38.  The chain, of
course, went bankrupt within six months.  If you needed a left hand
water pump for a '37 Ford, or a set of points for a '48 Allis-Chalmers,
or a distributor cap for a new Lamborghini, Johnny could get it.  Alas,
the chain only wanted to sell Class A items and rebuffed the somewhat
strange people who had made up the store's primary clientele.  And back
in the back, he had had his little machine shop, where he ran his Class
II gun business on the side, cranking out full-auto conversions,
sawed-off shotguns, silencers, and whatnot.  We used to test-fire the
machine guns in the storeroom, blazing away at Khomeini posters on the
far wall. You'd pull a box of 7/63 pilfer grommets off the shelf, and
it'd be half full of spent brass...

  Ah, anyway, one of the stores managed to
cross the filter itself to a Wix (24070, if anyone cares) but refused to
even try to get the adapter block.  The local Western Auto tire store,
which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite places, told me if the part
number was still good they would have one for me Wednesday.  "Order
two," I said, after finding out they were only $13 each.  They were
there this morning.  Hot dog.  And they're cast aluminum, not zinc like
the usual generic oil filter adapters.  These are just like remote
filter adapters, except they have an 11/16 filter nipple instead of the
usual 3/4".  There are 3/4" coolant filters listed, but they all have
built-in additive packages, which I preferred to avoid.

Looks like I'll mount the coolant filter on the firewall over the
heater tubes.  I have a hose that jogs from the water crossover at the
back of the manifold to the heater inlet.  After reading the horror
stories of Mustang owners blowing up heater cores because they didn't
know there was a restrictor in the heater hose when the replaced it, I
have a restrictor in that line.  The filter itself ought to make a dandy
restrictor.  Also, this is a full-flow line, regardless of thermostat
position, so the filter will get a good shot at the muck in the cooling
system.

A couple of people have opined I might be overdoing the filter thing.
After all, there's the remote engine oil filter block with two 1-quart
filters, the 1-quart filter in the transmission cooler line, now the
1-quart filter in the cooling system.  I guess nobody would care I found
some neat spin-on fuel filters, too, cataloged expressly for the type of
two-stage fuel system skod has been talking about.  They have a high
volume, low pressure filter for recirculating low pressure fuel lines,
like back from the tank up to the fuel surge tank in the engine
compartment, and then a high pressure, low volume filter for from the
surge tank to the injectors.  I now have some nice aluminum tubing to
make a surge tank from, too.

On the other hand, maybe it *is* a little peculiar...

It has been too cold to do much to trace the Capri's electrical
troubles, much less crawl underneath to do serious track prep.  I am
giving serious thought to doing a quickie alignment on TRX, borrowing
Ron's trailer, and running it at the PCA event next month.  The Porsche
people would probably turn mauve when it pulled up for tech - from the
windshield forward there's the hood, two wheels covered by the little
plastic inner fender liners, and... nothing.  The radiator and all the
unmentionables are flying in the wind.  Power to weight ratio, yeah.
Of course, both fenders, the bumper, header and splash panels probably
don't weigh much over 50 pounds.

Despite TRX' delicate condition, work on the new motors continues.
Hopefully this weekend I can try some of my new tooling out, boring the
pin ends of some junk rods.

Somehow I have wound up with two licensed, insured, running, but
undriveable automobiles, two complete, assembled, running engines in the
shop, one complete engine lacking only assembly, and two engines 90%
complete (only rod resizing and balancing needed).  Oh, and the 351X,
which is still in the living room, which AB is using as a laundry rack.
And what's really weird is, for all this engine stuff, I've never been
able to successfully repair one of those thrice-damned Tecumseh
lawnmower engines...



Date: Thu, 28 Mar 1996 19:59:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: FW: Ford Parts 38 give me Willies!
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

-> k. lust for the willies porter

...and if you were an Eric Frank Russell fan, you'd *have* to name the
car "Eustace Phenakertiban", just for the sheer hell of it.


-> won't have a prayer against the fourteens those awsome EFI 4.6
-> powered things run. *gack* *cough*. (Can one of my fellow pushrod
-> buddies check to see if I failed to alienate anyone with that
-> statement? I'd hate to discriminate.)

BZZZT!  Sorry, only a C-.  You plumb forgot to alienate the four
cylinder nerd motors, the six cylinder nerd motors, either one with
unnatural aspiration, the "fatheads", and the giggle-gas crowd.  Give it
up, Porter.  You're a has-been, flamewise...     There's also this
little item of your involvement in a bit of miscegenation, something
about a Cleveland in a Ch*vy...

Just bundle up all your Ford parts and mail them to me:

Dave Williams
third house trailer on the right
first dirt road after the end of Jeeter Street
Toad Suck, Arkansas 72212

====dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us========================DoD#978=======
My baby's dead... got hit by a train... *big* old train...  Eeeew!
                                         - George Carlin, AM/FM
==My race car runs like a Deere== CYA '82 == Rednecks of Ruin M/C '92==



Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 18:03:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: MM&FF magazine reply...
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com

-> But Its a problem for me when they try to mix it with a nudy
-> magazine.

I dunno, anyone remember Auto Buff?

It's a marketing truism that anything with nekkid wimmen in it draws
attention, and attention is what marketing wants.  Now take a look at
the way MM&FF is slanted - their target reader appears to be 20 to 25
years old, single, male, and has a disgustingly high VISA card limit.
So that's what they write to.  Unfortunately, even their target readers
have probably figured out they can get more nekkid wimmen from Hustler
or www.playboy.com than in a car magazine, so they're probably not that
interested in women who are technically dressed.

Then again, I'm old enough to find a photo of a curvaceous 18 year old
in a skimpy bikini and a pair of clodhopper chukka boots with the laces
untied hysterically funny.  Hey, baby, dig them shooooooozzzzz.......

If you don't have the tech, don't have the cars, and even the
editorials stink, I guess it's time to call up Dial-A-Bimbo for some
models.  



Date: Sat, 20 Apr 1996 21:55:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: electric cooling fan
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com

-> I'd hang the relay right by your starter solenoid, and just grab the
-> battery hot for the load side with a biggie ring terminal on the

In the ten years since I put the Capri together I've learned a lot
about reliability.  Much of it came from talking too much to
anal-retentive types like Scott Griffith and Brian Kelley.  The coil
positive wire on the Capri is wrapped around the post on the coil and
held down with a nut.  It has worked fine for ten years.  The coil wire
on Tyrannosaurus RX is soldered and covered with heat-shrink tubing;
some of the other wires are crimped into dielectric gel filled
connectors, crimped, and shrinked.  (is that even a word?)  The Capri
has ten feet of thumb-sized battery cable tied haphazardly under the
car; I have no idea why the car never burned to the ground, as the cable
goes through drilled holes with no bushings.  I fixed that recently.
The RX, on the other hand, runs the battery cables inside, in channels
carved into the sound-deadening mats, with metal or plastic guards
anywhere it looked like anything might touch, and held in place with
more rubber-lined Adel clamps than are perhaps strictly necessary.

It's strange how it creeps up on you.  First you have a piece of old
speaker wire for throttle linkage, then you have stainless steel Heim
joints and bellcranks...



Date: Wed, 22 May 1996 07:58:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Finding icing for my cake
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com

-> and Fuel systems. I believe that the combo I have is reasonably
-> balanced; but, needs adjustment to work to it's potential. This
-> adjustment is the focus of my question.

BINGO!

You have reached one of the major points of engine-building
Enlightenment, that is, just bolting parts together ain't gonna do
diddly unless you can tune the resulting assemblage. (or fangleage)

Unfortunately, performance tuning is one of those iterative, involved,
tedious, no-glory hassles most people don't want to take on, so they
whip out the Mastercard and keep trying for magic by accident.

I'm sorry I don't have any useful tips for your setup, but you're
heading in the right direction.  Now you know why there are all those
high-dollar cars at the track going so slowly...



Date: Mon, 17 Jun 1996 07:49:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: another "drag" trip
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com

-> good so far.Next spring "project tow vehicle," my 86 conversion van
-> will be ready.My blown LX 5.0 is a blast and is an ongoing project

After getting my '68 F100 tow vehicle home, I suddenly realized I now
have *two* vehicles to prep before going to the track...  I'm not sure
if I've made a net gain or not.



Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 21:15:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: RE: Capri swap Q's
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com

-> Dave, you still da man but I have to disagree with you on the
-> strength of that 4-speed.  I've broken two of them.  Most recently
-> sheared all

I guess the Capri Transmission Gods have smiled on me.  The only time I
had a problem was in, mmm, summer of '86, AB and I were heading to
Memphis and the transmission seized solid at well over the speed limit.
AB brought it to a halt on the shoulder with both rear wheels flat
spotted and big handfuls of opposite lock.  I looked underneath and
there was smoke coming off the transmission; we had acquired the car
just a few weeks before and I'd not yet checked the trans and rear end
fluid levels.  It was stone dry, of course, and when it seized it also
destroyed the clutch disc.  It was a long, long walk along I-40 that
night to find a place with a telephone.  Really, it's not like AB is
cursed or anything; we get places fast because speed limits mean little
to her, and I get to keep my driver's license.

Capri driveshaft-to-diff bolts are 16mm, a true bastard size.  Nothing
else will quite fit.  They're also torqued to about 10,000 ft-lbs and
Loctited.  They're a real thrill in the dark, alongside a busy
interstate...

For those of you chuckling about my getting my just deserts for not
checking the fluid levels, I'll have you know I paid for my sins many
times over that night.  Jay came out of Memphis with his van and about
three feet of chain, and we towed the Capri on in to Memphis.  In the
dark.  On three feet of chain.  At 40 miles over the speed limit or
better, all the way.  Behind a van with no windows.  With no vacuum
assist on the brakes - and Capris came with standard power brakes for a
damned good reason.  I don't think my heart rate ever dropped below 175
for the whole ride and I was sweated to the seat within minutes.  By the
time we got to Jay's I was as limp as one of those people who jump off
tall buildings and miss the net.  I vowed to kill Jay in various
horrible ways, but it took ten minutes just to get enough strength to
open the door.  There have been several times over the intervening years
I've told Jay, "I'm going to kill you, you sorry bastard."  Jay would
ask why, and I'd have to say (having usually stored the memory of that
trip safely away with the monsters on under my bed when I was a small
child, and the time I jumped a dirt bike over a new whoopdie right into
a tree, six feet up...) "I don't remember, but I'm sure it was a good
reason."

This particular trip, anyway, was what prompted the transmission
conversion.  I found a Pinto flywheel, bellhousing, transmission,
shifter, and starter, had a four cylinder Fox driveshaft cut to length,
made an adapter for the driveshaft to diff flange, and tossed out the
weirdball non-serviceable two piece Capri driveshaft, weirdo Bosch
starter, funky pot metal floor shifter, etc.  I still have that car - AB
drives it to work every day.  That transmission swap wound up bouncing
me from C/Street Prepared to Modified at SCCA autocrosses, which annoyed
me mightily at the time.


-> I've heard similar things, although I've never done this swap.  I
-> would put in some stronger springs though.

Any Capri can use stiffer springs.  All US market Capris, from the 1970
1600cc to the much, much heavier 1974 2.8 with AC and auto, came with
the same front springs, which were around 100 lb/in.  The rear springs
are all the same too.  That's why every year Capri sat a little lower
than the one before.  I'd already gone the route with radical lowering
with a previous Capri in my search for the ultimate handling, and found
out the lowering really didn't help anything.  In fact, the reduced
ground clearance and suspension travel made it a real pain in the ass.
I put a set of Traction Master 150# springs in front and added two extra
leaves to the back on the next car, which made it sit up maybe a full
inch higher than stock.  I had originally planned to lower it back down
to stock height, but then I found the extra height didn't seem to hurt
anything.  With those springs, the humongous TMC swaybars, and the KYB
Gas-A-Justs it did just fine.  At the time I was taking engineering
courses at UALR in Little Rock.  The route to school included a stretch
on Roosevelt Road.  Imagine the hilly section of San Francisco, except
with massive road construction and patches.  It was a truly nasty piece
of road, with wierd not-quite-pothole gullies on one side or the other
that gave fits to most cars, and motocross-style whoop-de-dos with big
scars at the crests from unfortunate transmissions and crossmembers.
The Capri was absolutely unfazed, and I found out I could get a rythym
going and leap from crest to crest without bottoming the suspension.
It was a lot of fun.  A fellow student was behind me one day, and said I
had air under all four tires more often than not.  I told him it gave a
smoother ride that way...



Date: Sat, 29 Jun 1996 20:16:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: GLobal west uppers for '67 mustang
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> > Probably because they had no idea where the new roll center was.

> im gonna assume that youre not just kidding.  i kinda thought of
> that, but the guy i talked to seemed intelligent (i think he was the

I wasn't kidding, but I wasn't really slamming GW either.  Finding the
roll center of an SLA front end is not a trivial process.  That's the
reason I get a charge out of people who think a $59 software package is
going to do their front end geometry for them...

Simply getting the X-Y measurements of the A-arms is a big job.  You
can't just measure from the suspension pivots to the ground; stuff is in
the way.  Some of those pivots are eccentrics, so the real pivot is not
the center of the bolt.  Then you have to figure where the pivot point
of the ball joint is - and it's not the middle, by the way.  Then you
measure the A-arm inclination and skew, get the spindle inclination and
offset, and you can make a good start, except for steering...  it took
me several attempts to map the geometry for my early Capri, and it was
just struts.


It's entirely possible GW used whatever parts they selected to move the
roll center as far as it would go; if that's all they could get, why
go through the hassle of measuring it?  They're in business to make
money, and the time to make those measurements isn't free.  It's
entirely possible you were the first person ever to ask them about the
roll center.

If it makes you feel any better, MidAmerica Corvette and Doug Rippie
sell roll center relocation brackets for the rear of the Corvette, and
neither one of them has any idea where they move the roll center either.
Pretty much par for the course, like people who sell sway bars and
don't know the bar rate, or people who sell cylinder heads and don't
know how much they flow...



Date: Sun, 07 Jul 1996 20:12:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: yes, there is a skod
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

Scott Griffith and I have known each other for several years over the
net and telephone, but had never actually met.  Last week skod and his
charming wife Cindy were here in Arkansas to visit his parents for a
few days and we arranged to get together for a while Saturday afternoon.

The trip up to Fayetteville is 3.5 hours, and I regret to say I
chickened out at the last minute and didn't take TRX.  That driveline
vibration is still there, and rural Arkansas on a holiday weekend is not
the kind of place you want to break down.  The B2000 can also make the
trip (7 hours plus 1/2 hour in town, ~450 miles) with just under a
quarter tank left.  TRX turns 4500 RPM keeping up with traffic, and gets
just over 100 miles per tank.  Oh well.

Made it up there, found the correct place, and waited...  and waited...
if I got tired of doodling I had a couple of paperbacks in the truck.
Be prepared.  Actually they were only a few minutes late, since I'd
left plenty of time to find the place.

We had a fine time, talking mostly about (what else) cars, and skod
introduced Cindy to a traditional Southern beverage known as a mint
julep.  It's true, after a couple of juleps you don't really give a damn
about mosquitoes large enough to have FAA tail numbers or weather that
can turn a brass doorknob mushy.

Skod in person is very laid back, and became even more laid back as
mint julep intake continued.  It was an enjoyable evening and hopefully
we can get together again next time he's in the area.  And eventually
I'll meet the wookie, who can tell me all his skod stories...



Date: Thu, 11 Jul 1996 22:18:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Modular V-10
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> _comparable_ Mopar V10 to the Ford V10 is the truck engine - let's
-> compare apples to apples here. The Mopar truck engine produces a

Now look at modification:  The Ford V10 is a derivative of the 4.6, and
is thus a long stroke, small bore motor, seriously undervalved, and
overly complex.  The Mopar V10 is short stroke, big bore, bigger valves,
simple.  Not to mention the extra displacement to start with - and
there's plenty of room to take it out at least another liter.  The Ford
is already up against the wall.  Get into any serious performance
modification, and the Mopar is so far ahead it's not even funny.

Ford's V10 is a dead end.  It's just a checklist item, another
Ford-apes-Mopar wierdity.  Mopar styles their trucks like something
barfed on the CAD station.  Ford must clone it.  Mopar makes a V10.
Ford must have a V10.  If Mopar put six foot tailfins on their trucks
next week, Ford would have them by '98.

I like Fords, but I'm not blind.  There is no intelligent life in
Dearborn, and apparently hasn't been for some time.



Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 07:56:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: young Frankenstein...
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

Yesterday I worked on adding new wiring to my workshop.  For some
braindead reason (I think I had originally intended the entire wall to
be shelving) I had not put any outlets or air chucks in one wall.  That
wall, of course, is now where the tire machines, welder, and various
other pieces of equipment are.  So off comes the sheetrock, out comes
the insulation, and I'm stringing 110, 220, and 3 phase 220 wiring, plus
air lines.  By noon it was pushing 100F so I knocked off, went inside,
and enjoyed the air conditioning while watching my remote thermometer
creep up to 105.  The hygrometer read 92.  Ah, yes, the joys of living
in the South...

By 5 PM "20% chance of showers" had turned into a thunderstorm.  By 7pm
I was wondering if I had enough lumber to build an ark.  By 9 I was
asleep... got up about 3:30 and went back out to the shop.  Temperature
was down to 71.  Looked like as good a time as any to finally get back
to work on the stroker motor.  I set the mill back up for boring,
adjusted the boring head, and set to work on opening up the pin ends of
the rods.

3:45 AM, leaning over the milling machine... radio is trying to play
"House of the Rising Sun" through the interference of the lightning,
which strobes outside the big doors, which are open in the rain...
all I need is an assistant named Igor.

The rods are all bored now; next step is to hone the pin ends to size.
heh, heh, heh...  Sixto and Frank better get in gear, I'm on a roll now!



Date: Sun, 04 Aug 1996 17:42:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: serious carb/idle help needed
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> I don't know how far along in microprocessor technology they were
-> back in 1966, but it seems that my car has a built in happy meter

Uh oh, you set the wayback machine...

The development of the integrated circuit, which is the building block
of microprocessors-as-we-know-them, was sponsored by the US Air Force
Strategic Air Command.  Solder joints on the printed circuits and
connections internal to the components themselves have a statistically
significant chance of failure.  Given the complexity and harsh
environment of the missile guidance systems they were used in, a
still-classified percentage of our ICBM arsenal was incapable of guided
flight on any particular day.  The only solace was the surety the
Soviets had even worse problems.

The Pentagon put up a hefty cash prize for anyone who could solve what
had become known as "the connection problem."  Finally two virtually
identical applications landed in the Patent Office simultaneously - one
filed by an engineer at Texas Instruments named Carroll Killebrew, the
other by an inventor named Bob Noyce.  The military grabbed the new
technology and farmed it out to defense contractors while the Patent
Office commenced some slimy maneuvers that made The Pentagon Papers and
Watergate look minor.  It took so long for the Patent Office to award
the patent that the first Altairs were shipping before they decided to
award it jointly to both.  By then, it hardly mattered - Killebrew still
had his job at TI, Noyce had found some vulture capitalists and started
a company called Intel, which he ran until he died a few years back.
Both TI and Intel had been making chips for many years before the patent
wrangle was settled; so had half the world.  The patent was basically
worthless when it was finally issued.  To the best of my knowledge
neither was able to collect any royalties.

The patent in question concerned a process of fabricating both the
components and their wiring on a single piece of material - basically,
what we now call a "chip," variants of which are found in ECUs, traffic
lights, radar guns, personal computers, pacemakers...  the world would
be a much different place without the integrated circuit.



Date: Wed, 07 Aug 1996 08:43:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: FW: 390 Performance
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> The true value of that truck will be in the joy it will bring you
-> when you jump in and fire it up or see it waiting in the lot when you
-> get off work.

That's the true value of any vehicle, and what makes car geeks
different from those who view automobiles as transportation appliances.


-> k. Ask me to hear my die grinder imitation porter

I do an excellent VW Beetle imitation:

Beetle at idle:  putt, putt, putt...
Beetle on road:  putt, putt, putt...
Beetle at red line:  putt, putt, putt...

Heck, we could go on tour!


- Dave (former Beetle owner) Williams



Date: Sat, 10 Aug 1996 11:07:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: oh, so this is why I hate mechanics.......
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> and get some plug wires, and a distributor rotor.  I guess that I'll
-> find the problem eventually by simply narrowing it down with stuff I

What exactly was the car doing, or not doing?  I don't remember the
first message on this.


-> my heart-felt sympathies go out to the guys with EFI and all the
-> electronics , who can't help but go to these guys.

Oh, for the Mustangers it's no big deal - by the time the Mustang got
EFI it was fourth generation stuff.  They'll to their best to *tell* you
what's wrong.  The really fun stuff was the second and third gen ECUs,
which had no data out, no built-in diagnostics, hell, not even a way to
tell if the ECU had gone bad.  You disconnected and checked each sensor
individually, and then you went through mountains of flow charts which
were (usually) wrong in important places.  And if you ever *did* manage
to isolate what was bad, that part had been discontinued anyway.

Guys who never worked on the older stuff have no clue as to what a pain
in the ass it was.  Everything was a frigging secret, only the dealers
had even the barest information or test equipment, that is, if the
dealer *bought* the stuff - Ford didn't give it away for free.  Pfaugh.



Date: Thu, 15 Aug 1996 19:01:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: ...
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> I would LOVE to learn to build racing engines.
->
-> I am not completely and totally clueless when it comes to cars, but I
-> would be starting from almost ground zero.  How do I get started in
-> something like this?

Plenty of reference materials, a hefty dose of cynicism, willingness to
break lots of parts, and lots of expensive tools you may not even know
exist yet.

Quite a few successful builders farm out their machine work; no
problem, but you have to have to tools to check what has been done.
Bore guage, dial calipers, 0-4 mike set, 24" machinist's straightedge,
12" feeler stock .001-.010 in .001 steps, a degree wheel, and a cheap
dial guage and universal stand would be a good start.

Next you'll need to have the "in" at a machine shop, where you can walk
in back and talk to the guys who run the equipment, look over their
shoulders while they work, and possibly run some of the equipment
yourself.  Some shops run on commission; I was able to get a tremendous
amount of experience by offering to trade my labor for getting some
parts done.  Of course, you have to have to time to trade, otherwise
beer helps.  A small neighborhood shop is more likely to be flexible;
big production rebuilders don't like to handle anything unusual.

Learn how to do it stock before you worry too much about doing your own
thing.  I've had a couple of "better ideas" bite me in the ass.  It
happens; but you don't need a "learning experience" on one of your first
motors.  Go by the book until you know what you're doing.

Once you get this far, then you need to have an idea what you're going
to do.  The simplest and most common procedure is to copy what other
people are doing, or say they're doing.  The next step up is to learn
all you can about what's going on in there, and why.  This is where most
builders give up.  It's a task you can't finish, and the learning curve
is steep.  There are a few standard references, but they're just the
starting point.  Most of the stuff is aimed at the small block Chevy,
but parts is parts.

You will need to get these from your friendly bookstore:

"The Chevrolet Racing Engine"  by Grumpy Jenkins
"Smokey's Track Tech"  by Smokey Yunick
"Power Secrets" by Smokey Yunick
"Performance with Economy" by David Vizard
"Mustang Performance Handbook" by Bill Mathis
"How to Build and Modify Small Block Chevy..." by David Vizard (three
volumes, some overlapping, buy them all)
"Engine Blueprinting" by Rick Voegelin
"Peterson's Complete Guide to Cams, Valves, and Exhaust Systems" by
Peterson Publications - this one has been out of print for 25 years,
but you might find a copy on inter-library loan
"Some Unusual Engines" by LJK Setright - inter-library loan
"Advanced Engine Technology" by Heisler
"The Internal Combustion Engine in Theory and Practice" by CF Taylor,
Parts I and II
"Chevy Power Guide" by Chevrolet - there are several editions of this
book, you need them all, as there are major differences between them
"Dyke's Automotive Encyclopedia" - last edition was around WWII; another
inter-library loan item, or antique book store

Those will give you a fair ratio of theory and practice, and then you
can really start building a library... and don't forget the trade
journals, like Precision Machine Shop or Engine Rebuilder.

Once you get all that, the rest should come naturally...  but if you're
a tool junkie you might be in trouble.  Chez Williams has, among other
things, a chassis dyno, a flow bench, complete Sioux valve grinding
setup, Kwik-Way boring bar, porting tools, Atlas 10x36 engine lathe, a
vertical mill, a horizontal mill, various welders, Coats tire mounting
and balancing machines, a honing tank and Sunnen honing rig, Magnaflux
rig, etc. etc. etc.  Much of this stuff was purchased when I planned to
go into business doing racing engines, but various "job" things
interfered with getting Maximum Overdrive off the ground.  I used to
think I was a bit strange, but I know of others with even more stuff and
I do, one of whom has a couple of tons of crank grinding equipment...



Date: Tue, 20 Aug 1996 09:00:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re[2]: Some questions
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> Dave's Second Law:  Power is cheap, reliability is expensive.

> Think about it, would you rather be really fast and break all the
> time, or would you be a little slower and still be able to drive home
> at the end of the day?

Someone once said (long before Dave's Law, and certainly before Dave
himself) "You can't win if you can't finish."  Murphy's Law applies as
well.  And I still believe there are supernatural creatures who come out
at night to feed on hoses and wires...

Carroll Smith's '"..." To Win' series of books is a monument to
controlled paranoia.  Yes, it sucks to spend three days prepping a car
for an event.  Yes, the lower control arm bolts have made it for the
last 90,000 miles.  Yet I will check them anyway, because the five
failure modes of a track car are:

mode 1:  wrenching at the track
mode 2:  lose a session
mode 3:  sit out the event
mode 4:  break/bend car, mobile
mode 5:  break/bend car, trailer

The first mode costs you some time.  The others cost you increasing
amounts of money.  If you're running for points or money the penalties
grow more severe.


-> "But the idea is to go FAST!"  Nope!  The idea is to have FUN, and
-> blowing your motor because you scrimped on it, is No Fun.

A reliable car will let you go fast longer...



Date: Tue, 03 Sep 1996 19:47:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Iron Man
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

Since the weather has cooled off a bit I've been able to do some
work on various cranks and heads I've had laying around.  I had several
stroker cranks that needed to be lightened and profiled and a stack of
heads to be pocket ported.  So here I am in the early morning, decked
out in apron, long-billed cap, full face visor, gun muffs, a big fan
behind me on high to help blow the chips away from my face (that's hell
in winter time...) and the latest stroker crank chocked up on the
welding table, my trusty Black & Decker 4" angle grinder, and a stack of
26-grit wheels.  We're talking serious noise here so I have to work with
the shop doors closed.  I'm singing along with the stereo.  Nothing like
some Black Sabbath for this sort of stuff.

"No more war pigs have the powerrrr...."

"HEEERROOWWWWWWWW...."
<26-grit disc bites into expensive stroker crank>

"Hand of God has struck the hourrr...."

"HWARAWRRRRR...."



A few hours of this sort of stuff and my arms are numb all the way
past the elbows; haven't felt like this since I made a 19-hour nonstop
road trip to Colorado on the Yamaha.  The grinder vibrates a bit.  By
now I'm blowing black snot; finely ground cast iron is some nasty
stuff.  After a while you can even feel it gritting around your teeth.
The Black & Decker gets too hot to hold after half an hour or so, so
I alternate between it and the air grinder.  This is a fine way to get
simultaneous heat blisters and frostbite.  You don't want to get
carried away because this sort of stuff seriously confuses the people
in the emergency room.

I'm gonna *have* to get one of those cleanroom bunny suits and one
of those fireman-type helmets with outside air.  AB get all warped when
I leave rusty deposits in the sink and the bathtub, and my blue jeans
(and a white shirt) are now reddish-brown since they went through the
washer...  I don't usually put in marathon grinding sessions like this.

This type of stuff, BTW, is why the 347 strokers are much more common
than the 355s.  A 347 offset grinds the Cleveland crank back to 3.4",
then pops in a set of $600 5.4" rods.  With the slightly shorter
stroke and longer rod you don't have to profile the counterweights to
clear the pistons at BDC.  Most places aren't willing to put in the time
to profile the crank, so they stick in the expensive parts and pass it
on to the customer.


"You're coming home / there's blood on the walls
When Charlie and the Family make house calls..."


- Dave "Ozzy is my god" Williams



From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: quality time
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 23:05:00 +0000
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

My buddy Jay came over from Memphis on Saturday.  He was driving his
wife's Mitsubishi Galant VR-4 with the interior and trunk liner gutted
out, stuffed with four 275/40-17 Hoosiers to be mounted, four 275-40 R1s
on rims, and four new Pirelli P Zero 205/50-15s for the Galant, which
had air showing thru in spots.  His wife was not pleased to find the
passenger seat, back seat, and trunk parts in the living room...  Jay
has a van, but it's terminally ill and some of the parts for the new
motor are now 15 months on back order.  "Peeved" no longer describes our
attitude toward a $1k order with Iskenderian; Jay is talking about
taking a jumpseat flight out to LA and kicking some butt.

Anyway, he rolled in with the Galant and went to work on the spin
balancer.  Last year I picked up a Coats four-jaw overarm tire machine
and a spin balancer, $1200 for both.  The balancer took three phase
power, which I only accomplished recently.  Actually, I finally found a
permanent place for the equipment a few weeks ago.  Tire machinery takes
up a huge amount of floor space, and the plastic swimming pool on a
hinge on the spin balancer was ridiculous - some sort of stone guard,
except not all models even bothered.  Coats made it impossible to
remove, so we simply fired up the cutoff tool and the angle grinder.

"Jay, you should've used the ear muffs."

"What?"

"YOU SHOULD HAVE USED THE EAR MUFFS!"

"Earwigs?  Where earwigs?"

The only problem with the spin balancer was the little probe that
measures the wheel diameter and offset.  It's spring loaded, and if you
let it snap back into place it'll eventually destroy the little
potentiometer rig it uses to measure distance.  We have now sampled
eight spin balancers in two states; seven of them had broken probes.
You can enter the diameter and offset manually, but Jay replaced the pot
and recalibrated it while I was rebuilding the three-jaw chuck on the
lathe.

We have learned many ways to screw up a tire balancing job.  Not
entering the proper wheel offset is one; not spinning the tire back up
after hammering on weights is another.  Using the wrong centering cone
will do it, and using the cones on wheels that aren't intended to be
hub-centric is another.  Jay's Corvette wheels pilot on the center hole;
the center hole on my truck wheels is just punched out and isn't even
approximately centered.  You have to use a spider to hold the wheel - a
spider is a plate with a sun gear and assorted attachments and studs
that holds a wheel by the lug holes to center it for balancing.  The
stock wheels on early Capris are lug-centric, for example.  When we
got the spin balancer Jay sort of swiped the spider from under a bench;
it was the only one in a busy tire dealership with six other machines,
and nobody there even knew what it was.  The big aluminum wing nut that
holds the tire on had been broken some time in the past; it's cast
aluminum.  Someone had applied huge gobs of weld to it.  Being the kind
of turd-polishing people we are, we shimmed the nut this way and that to
check the balance of the nut.  It was half an ounce out.  We used
the angle grinder to balance it.  For however many years, every tire
that machine had balanced was off by half an ounce.

The more I learn about apparently simple stuff like this, the more
paranoid I get.  No wonder I've had tires that never seemed to get
balanced right...

Oh, and I bet you thought tire weights were tire weights, didn't you?
Oh, no.  There are at least two different kinds of weights for steel
wheels, and about four for aluminum wheels, the differences being in the
thickness of rim they're intended to grab, and the contour of the inner
rim.  I actually have a little plastic tool that's supposed to tell you
what weight you need, except it doesn't cross to anything I can find.
Then there are the tape on weights - regular, and "thin" type.  Sheez.
We haven't figured out the trick for removing tape-on weights yet.  Jay
has been using a hammer and chisel and just ignoring the gummy mess;
brake dust covers it soon anyway.  Still, it's uncouth.

We finished up in time for dinner, scarfing enormous quantities of
pourables and pizza while sitting and leaning on the stacks of tires in
my back yard.  275-series Hoosiers make fine lawn chairs.

Jay also brought an application for the next PCA event, Friday the 18th
of next month.  The Czech is in the mail - Tyrannosaurus RX is entered,
and I'll probably travel in style with the F100 and trailer.  After its
Close Encounter of the Camaro Kind, poor TRX is more than a little
battered.  People will probably think I'm hauling it to the dump...  The
wheezy old 302 will have to make it through another event; between this
"job" thing and other people's motors I don't have time to finish its
new motor.  

====dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us========================DoD#978=======
can you help me...help me get out of this place?...slow sedation...
ain't my style, ain't my pace...giving me a number...NINE, SEVEN, EIGHT
==5.0 RX7 -> Tyrannosaurus RX! == SAE '82 == Denizens of Doom M/C '92==



Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 17:27:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Z28 vs Mustang GT (long)
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> Ford is too busy putting 200 HP in a damn Windstar, or a Taurus, or
-> someother car, but all the while neglecting the Mustang.
->
-> I give up.  Ford seems to have also.

I find it hard to get worked up about it, as I have about as much
intention of buying a new car as setting myself aflame.  Even the
cheapest thing on the lot far exceeds what I'm willing to expend of
monthly payments, insurance vigorish, taxes, and so forth.

Ford has managed to flood the market with cheap, easily modified
rolling stock.  The papers and used car lots are full of Mustangs.
For the price of a Ford Aspire I could put together a ride that was bad
to the bone, and I wouldn't have to tithe the taxman and the DMV near as
much, either.

Of course, some people have this "new car" thing.  I've seen it happen
to most of my friends.  It's an evil thing.  They get restless and
irritable, their nostrils flare, their eyes roll, and suddenly
something breaks, and a few hours later they're driving off the lot
with a by-damn NEW car.  The adrenaline rush carries them for about a
day, and then you'll find them sitting somewhere alone, head in hands,
muttering "dear God, what have I done?" as they contemplate their
payments for the next five years...



Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 19:15:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Chevy Infiltraters (wanna be fordnatics!)
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> >in chevy headquarters.  Maybe I'm confused,, what is a Fordnatic??
-> There sure >are alot of guys in here talking up there chevys!!!
-> Makes you kinda wonder..

It's called "know thy enemy."  Many marque lists are full of jerkwads
who make ridiculous brags about how fast their cars are and spend the
rest of the time thinking up puns and putdowns about anything else on
the road.  The talon list has always had a problem with that, the a
recent influx of newbies to the gn list has caused a severe loss of
signal to noise for similar reasons.

Though it may have a Ford oval on it, parts is parts.  It's common
enough for people on fordnatics to discuss the technology used on other
brands.  Much of it can be applied to Fords as well.

As for the other brands... it sort of helps to know what the other guy
is driving.  Most drag racers are smart enough to know what a Buick
Grand National is, and how cheaply they can be made to run hard.  But
did you know the exact same powertrain came in the T-Type, and there are
lots of them running in the 11s and lower, virtually stock, bench seat,
vinyl top, column shift, and all?  Or that that zit-faced punk with the
Talon or Eclipse might really be in the 12s?  99% of them are hot air,
but a few really *can* walk the walk.  Or the Mopar contingent, some of
whom are seriously bad fast despite the babbling and occasional spasms.

And finally, when you get right down to it, if it wasn't for the Camaro
there probably wouldn't *be* a Mustang nowadays.  Sure, Ford came out
with a ponycar first - that's why they're called ponycars - but 1973 was
the end.  Chevy proved it could make money selling ponycars, so Ford
botched together the Pinto-thing, and later the Fox, to jump into the
market it had abandoned.  In a Zen sort of way, the Mustang and Camaro
define each other.  No, we're not going to embrace them on the list and
treat them like long-lost friends, but it sort of helps to know the new
Camaros are several notches higher in the food chain than the new
Mustangs, at least if you're planning on bringing a 2-valve GT up
against an LT1.

Non-Ford discussions on this list usually have at least some relevance
to the charter, though a few of us might stretch it a bit.  But we have
entire newsgroups available for brand bashing, and we don't need to see
any more of it here.



Date: Wed, 09 Oct 1996 10:27:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Even more BS about ABS?
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> IMO anybody who judges a sport by virtue of how "archaic" the
-> sporting equipment is suspect.  Hey man, whatever floats your boat.

They seem to market the hell out of the Olympics with throwing,
lifting, or just plain old running and jumping.  Can't get much more
no-fangle than that.

Now, if you wanted to see some sport, make no-wing sprint cars an
Olympic event...



Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 20:03:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Adjustable exhaust noise/restriction.
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> quiet the neighborhood was. Unmuffled expansion chambers at
-> resonance, have a great sound! I tried the washer thing in my

When I was in high school I had a '74 Kawasaki Mach III 500.  Ported
barrels, milled heads, Denco expansion chambers.  Painted it Do-Glo
Lime.  Hey, it was the '70s.  It looked damned near glowed in the dark -
some people said it looked like radioactive vomit, but they were
probably just jealous.

  Of all the vehicles I've owned since, the only one that even
comes close is my turbocharged XJ, and it's still not in the same class.
Piped and ported, the powerband on the 'saki was more akin to being
rear-ended by a pickup truck than anything else.  One of my favorite
things was to find a nice stretch of road, drop down to about 35mph in
top gear, and whack the throttle open.  Not much would happen other than
intake drone, and the needles would sloooooowwwwwllllyyyy creep up -
we're talking tens of seconds here - until around 5000 RPM, when it
would sort of cough and the front wheel would lift four feet into the
air.  Yep, we're on the powerband now.  Used to run gold-palladium
electrode spark plugs that cost $9 each in 1977.  It had to have them to
fire through the Castrol two stroke oil; it really liked Yamalube R
better, but the Castrol smelled like... Castrol.  Cagers would gag and
roll their windows up at stoplights.

The CDI finally died on it, and being color blind, electrical stuff is
not my forte.  I sold it to a friend's younger brother for $400.  He
paid me in cash.  Quarters.  I blew $125 of them on an engineless but
otherwise okay '72 Capri, $75 for a junkyard 302, and the rest on
connecting the two together.  My first engine swap.  The Capri *looked*
stock on the outside, and when I picked up a girl for a date her
parents wouldn't make the sign of the cross and throw the deadbolts
like they did with the bike.

The Capri was reasonably satisfactory for a testosterone-crazed
teenager.  I found it could do nearly infinite burnouts.  After a few
minutes of that, a steel belted radial would start to come apart, with
bits of broken steel wire sticking out through the tread like coarse
fur.

One of the more interesting times with the Capri was The Night of the
Lepus.  My buddy Ron and I were flying down a back road one night when
we ran over a couple of rabbits.  Stuff happens; usually it's the
opossums that bite the dust.  We're back in town later going through the
drive through at McDonalds and we smell something bad.  You sort of
expect that at McDonalds, so other than a few comments we thought
nothing of it.  Throughout the evening we cruised all the local
spots, frequently attracting some attention.  No big deal, we're used to
it, but finally we notice people making gagging effects instead of
showing awe at our street racing prowess.  I pulled over, got out, and
was immediately enveloped in that smell...  all down both sides of the
car were streaks of blood and unmentionables.  Bits of rabbit fur were
wedged into my new Thrush Outsider sidepipes, interspersed with
thoroughly cooked meat.  Underneath the car, bits of entrails had caught
on the parking brake lines and were dragging on the ground.  Yes, it was
thoroughly gross.  It took several trips to the high pressure car wash
to remove the gore...

Well, at least I cleaned it.  A few weeks later Ron nailed a bat with
his Pinto.  About two inches off dead center of the grille.  He drove
around with it until it started to decompose.  It was quite an
attention-getter at the gathering places, particularly when the odor let
people know it was a real bat, not a rubber one...  Then Ron upgraded to
a '70 Torino with the 351CJ-4V, and I upgraded the Capri and started
working on my '68 Mustang with the 351C swap.  Foreigner had the lyrics
to it all:

"Running all night
on Lake Avenue
it's a piece of cake
if you know what to do
you got to lose a few
'til the stakes get high
when the odds are right
you just blow by..."



Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 09:31:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Re[2]: Valve Toss
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> they've already got room temperature superconductors.  the problem is
-> current density.  the superconducting effect breaks down rapidly

(#*@.  I'm behind the technology curve again.  Damned inconsiderate of
Asimov to up and die like that.


-> us.  we were required to get security clearances, and a week later,
-> this big box comes in.  it's full of... bricks.

Be glad you weren't there a few years earlier, during the last round of
Flying Saucer Cattle Mutilation Frenzy.  You'd probably have been faced
with pallets full of oozing cow patties...


Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 07:50:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: RE: prolong additive.../Smokey Yunick
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> that Smoky Yunick was in their booth (signing autographs0. >THAT<
-> really makes you wonder about its 'snake oil' status...

Smokey has endorsed several dubious products in his long career.  Money
talks; endorsements usually carry cash up front plus a percentage, which
is why you see everything from Bill Cosby endorsing Fords to Famous
NASCAR Driving Stars endorsing motor oils and laundry detergents.

I also notice that for all his fame, Yunick essentially got out of the
racing engine business around 1968; at least I haven't seen a single
mention of anyone except Smokey running a Yunick motor after that.
Prior to that he had contracts with various OEMs to do oddball R&D.  As
far as I know he never *was* in the racing engine business, other than
his own racing, which wasn't notably successful.  I can count the big
Smokey Yunick wins on no hands.

He's never shown any reluctance to take credit for other people's ideas
or work, either.  To hear him tell it, he invented variable ratio power
steering, the replaceable paper element air filter, torque plates, and a
host of items in common use long before he "invented" them.  And then
there's his miracle negative-entropy engine he tried to sell.  Since all
its operational details were Top Secret nobody was interested in a pig
in a poke.

Yunick is knowledgeable, inventive, and entertaining, but far from the
Engine God many make him out to be.  The real Engine Gods are at Shaver
and Hennessy and Yates, cranking out racing engines, not prose and
endorsements.  Or raving about pelicans and green cards and wanting
your tax dollars to support NASCAR, like he used to do in Circle Quack.


Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 08:57:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Motor Oil
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> (Note that I have nothing against AMSOil, and indeed reckon it's
-> probably a fine product.  They sure have some annoying independent
-> representatives, though.)

It's a perfectly adequate product, and for a long time they were the
only ones with readily available synthetic greases and hypoid oils as
well.  We used to run AmsOil synthetic in Monzilla and various bikes and
were completely happy with it.  It was also only $6.50 a quart back
then, cheaper than Mobil 1.  This was, ahem, when premium dino oils were
under fifty cents.

We used to buy it at my favorite auto parts store, where the owner, who
had a distributorship, kept it on the shelf.  No need to risk infection
by the company's marketing schemes.  After the store sold out the new
owners got rid of everything except generic Class A and B high sales
items.  Jay tracked down another AmsOil dealer next time a change came
due in Monzilla, but the encounter was difficult enough to send him back
to dino oils.

Ah, Jacksonville Auto Parts, I sorely miss it.  Johnny was running the
country's third-largest machine gun store out of the back room, with
silencers as a sideline.  Johnny's sales technique would put the most
rabid AmsOil dealer to shame.  After snagging a potential customer's
attention, it was time for the "hold the warm puppy" routine.  He'd walk
the mark over to the edge of the counter where you could see down the
path between the shelves to the back wall of the storeroom, where he had
a stack of custom-printed targets with Ayatollah Khomeini on them.  He'd
hell "FIRE IN THE HOLE!" to warn anyone in the back room, hand the
startled mark a full-auto, silenced Uzi, and point them in the
appropriate direction.  Anyone standing at the counter got showered with
hot brass.  It was a great sales technique.  Hell, it worked on *me*...

I missed out on the time he got hold of a crate of surplus LAW rockets
though.  The BATF wanted an accounting of them once when inspecting the
inventory.  LAWs are/were Class II Destructive Devices and individually
accountable.  The BATF didn't quite understand that once you fired an
antitank weapon it was *gone*.  Played hob with the paperwork.  The
photographs, however, were glorious.  Johnny liked to plink at junk
cars.  When the rocket hit a Pinto, there simply wasn't a whole lot
left...

Now we have an Auto Zone staffed with Radio Shack sales rejects. 



Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 05:03:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: old fangleage
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

Back long ago Petersen Publications was heavily into tech instead of
pictures, or their current NASCAR/swimsuit issues.  I found a 5x8"
paperback called "Hot Rod Engines 1968" many years ago, stuffed with
engine building stuff from Shelby American, Keith Black, and others.
A couple of years ago I found an 8.5x11 hardback called "Complete Book
of Engines #3", again stuffed with much esoteric info.  These two books
have been quite useful over the years.

One day while looking through another 25-year-old book I found a
bibliography of sources for one of the articles.  It listed a bunch of
books, some of which I'd heard of, some not.  It struck me someone,
somewhere, might have a copy of one or two, so I asked here on
Fordnatics.  Fordnatic Frank Parker offered up an entire collection via
email, a deal was struck, and it was Christmas in November.  Thanks
Frank!

Most of what I got are Petersen's "Complete Book of Engines" ranging
from the early 1960s to the early 1970s.  They're all in paperback,
instead of the hardback I had at first.  A librarian friend says the
paperbacks are normal, the hardback would have been a library edition,
back in the days when libraries didn't shelve paperbacks.  Same goodies
either way.

Copyright on the books is "the editors".  Whoever did the originals
must've used some clout.  There are PR and engineering drawings,
buildups by famous hot rodders, occasional magazine tests, loads of tech
data - the particular alloys used in each engine's piston rings,
connecting rod lengths, bearing widths, engine weights (though not often
external dimensions), rod and piston weights, and other trivia you
simply don't see very often.  As is the nature of things, each issue
rehashes much of the one before - things didn't change that often, after
all - but it was interesting to see how much of the early tech data was
dropped in later years.  The hardcore tech articles became watered down,
"Bob's shop is doing this".  Still, this stack of books from Frank
probably has more good stuff than any whole shelf in my little library.


It's obvious that the original author(s) departed after the third or
fourth annual, and whoever took over the series was a cretin.  Not only
did the tech become watered down in the later ones, they sort of missed
the 351 Cleveland and BOSS 302.  Though they're mentioned in a few
builder articles, the Clevelands didn't get their own space in the
engines section, nor were they covered in the Windsor section.  There is
extensive BOSS 429 coverage.  Their coverage of the Street Hemi was
lukewarm compared to the (of course) extensive 396/427 Chevy stuff.
There's a photo in one issue of an SBF with a set of Gurney heads, but
no mention in text anywhere; they completely missed the Gurney heads,
the Weslake heads for the Ford and Chevy, and the Moser/Crane DOHC SBC
heads, and Chrysler's Indy V8 efforts, among other items.  They did
cover the Capri/Pinto 1600 and 2000, but missed the V6 entirely.

Thanks to Frank I now have a source for hundreds of hours of nitpicking
amusement and trivia...  even though forged and billet rods were common
even in 1963, boxed stock rods were mentioned right up into the
Seventies.  Grooving the mains on the cranks was also still popular.
Chroming the crank appeared to go out of fashion by the late Sixties,
though.  "Fascinating," as Spock would say.  "Why 'dey do 'dat?" they'd
say locally...


Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 17:04:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: addendum to Charlie's message
To: bkelley@ford.com

-> August National story to the Ford 9" discussion.  Recall, big malay
-> after the keyhole, first lap of the race.  Clarence Morse and a T1

Well, if they don't watch the flags, the spear might get their
attention...

"HEY YOU!"  \STAB/

Sorry Pam, it was too funny to pass up...  



Date: Wed, 13 Nov 1996 06:32:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Introduction
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> > Any comments on the new F-150's?
->
-> Yeah, they're butt-ugly.

GM:  "Lord Vader, your car is ready."

Ford:  "Senor Dali, your truck is ready."



Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 12:58:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: 53 Ford
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> Heck, I remember starting my flatty up with only one cylinder head on
-> it. Even at an idle, it looked liked those pistons would fly right
-> out of the block! man, they moved fast.

  I'd love to have seen that!

I've run Ford two barrels without the top of the carburetor screwed on,
and even driven them a bit.  Don't want to slosh all the gas out in the
turns, you know...

Back in high school I rebuilt a '61 Corvair.  I must've run it for an
hour one night.  Had the carbs off, waiting for kits to come in.  Had my
brother start it, and I dribbled gas into the open holes in the cylinder
heads with a pair of Coke bottles.

A buddy of mine beat that, though.  He'd bought a junker '59 Rambler to
strip for parts for his good Rambler.  The junker had no battery, no
carburetor, and was solidly locked up from sitting 15 years or so in a
field.  While towing it home with a chain he put it in gear and worked
the clutch (which wasn't stuck, miraculously) to see if he could break
it loose.  It finally did, and a few seconds later went "VOOM!" and ran
into the back of the truck.  This caused great amounts of consternation
until we figured out the thing was pumping ancient fuel out of the
tank, some of which was going into the open intake manifold.  The
generator didn't need no steenkeeng battery, so when enough gas made it
in, the thing fired up.



Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 21:27:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: re: 4WD Mustangs
Sender: fordnatics-errors@lists.best.com
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> "We're mechanics.  We'll *make* it fit!"

Die grinder - milling machine - gas welder - arc welder - lathe - BFH.

Much of the front crossmember on TRX was once part of a Nippon Electric
Co. relay rack...



Date: Thu, 19 Dec 1996 19:06:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re[2]: 4WD Mustangs
Sender: fordnatics-errors@lists.best.com
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> Much of the front crossmember on TRX was once part of a Nippon
-> Electric Co. relay rack...

> You realise you've voided the warrenty on the rack, right? :-)

Yes, but it's *much* faster now...



Date: Fri, 05 Jan 1996 19:03:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Taurus digest
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net


-> Hey , what is this , the Taurus digest?

Fords is Fords, even if they look like giant suppositories.


Date: Thu, 18 Jan 1996 20:58:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: airbag lawsuit against Ford
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

-> What, should I sue Ford cause my '62 Ranchero had no seat belts in
-> it?

Well, you should at least be able to claim pain and suffering.
With a really good lawyer you should be able to get a yacht, or
perhaps an estate in Montana.


-> If I am stupid enough to drive it around in todays traffic without
-> belts, I deserve whatever consequences I encounter, since I have a
-> brain that functions reasonably well, and I can decide myself whether
-> to put in the belts or not, and use them.

Have you been having these feelings long?  ("Nurse!  Get the Prozac,
and tell the lobotomy crew we have another incoming...")

Remember, this is Amerika.  There is no responsibility, only fault.


Date: Sun, 21 Jan 1996 00:50:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: V8 Ranger ?
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net


-> That truck could trump GM's Sonoma GT, offering people who want a V8
-> in a small truck an alternative to the midsize Dodge Dakota V8.  More
-> than 20 percent of Dakotas sold carry V8 engines.

Lawdie lawdie, Fode done brung de naff to de gunfah't agin.

That poor old 210hp turkey ain't got a chance against the 318, much
less the 360.  Ford's a day late and a dollar short, as usual.  Dodge
wasn't asleep when they built the Dakota, and it'll take more than some
leftover 5.0s to catch it.

  It must feel so *good* when Ford's marketing people stop
slamming their heads against the wall.  "But really, nobody wants that
'horsepower' stuff when they can get purple and ultraviolet Da-Glo
splash graphics!"  Unfortunately, they seem to be right...



Date: Tue, 27 Feb 1996 09:11:07 -0600
From: Cliff Koch 
Subject: Re: fathead owners vs. everyone else
To: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)

On Feb 25,  8:27pm, Dave Williams wrote:
> Subject: Re: fathead owners vs. everyone else
>
> -> Sorry for being so testy but Dave Williams put me in a bad mood and
> -> it was like the first message I got!!
>
>  Well, like I tell myself in the morning, "Any time I can put whatisname
> in a bad mood is a day well spent."
>
>-- End of excerpt from Dave Williams

He's probably off sulking somewhere.  His rants got annoying enough I told
him to shut up, as I'm sure several others did.  I didn't get a response
back...



Date: Fri, 22 Mar 1996 21:20:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: cranks
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

-> And, the crank comparisons do look *very* rosy. Ford did a
-> world-class peice of engineering here on the mod motors. There have
-> been numerous articles on these many people can say they've bothered
-> to read any of them? They're worth looking There have also been
-> articles in engineering journals, industry journals, even

I get Ward's Auto Report, Automotive Industries, and a couple of
other industry mags.  I get Automotive Engineering from the SAE.  I
take most of the hot rod magazines, and even Super Ford.  I haven't
seen any 4.6 crankshaft articles in there.

Same material, less overlap, smaller journals = weaker crank.  All
the standard engineering references will back that up.  Sorry.

As they say up north in Missouri, "Show me."  Otherwise, as Arnold
Schwarzenegger says, "Boulsheit."

I can hardly wait for the next cobra46 revelation...




Date: Thu, 16 May 1996 07:39:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: another "BAH" from Kelley
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com


Too bad you don't seem to have the concept of "line length."  Of
course, given the informational content of your messages, it's not a
major issue.


-> Sorry to interupt,  I was just quoting Ford's own claims on the
-> flow.....

Are these your usual secret unnameable Ford sources?  Your cousin Ed?
The Rosicrucians?


-> can go back to your beloved chevies and their 40-year old engines...
-> or grindin babbitt bearings in your 70 year old engine, or just
-> whatever it is that you do

What Brian and I do is build motors.  I seriously doubt, given your
obvious incomprehension of what goes on inside an internal combustion
engine, that you've ever even seen the inside of a motor, except at the
magazine stand, or possibly when the space aliens bring your your latest
batch of Secret Knowledge.


-> something to read all about these new-fangled MODERN Fords. Or, are
-> you saving immigrate to California with the rest of the Joads?

Joads?  What's that, the latest Beavis and Butthead word?


Now go away, or I will taunt you a second time.




Date: Tue, 21 May 1996 17:48:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Emissions Comparison Survey Request
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com


-> Check your prices some time - the vaunted siSSy costs as much as the
-> Cobra, to dime. And, try finding an siSSy, much less one that isn't
-> loaded up with t-tops

There are half a dozen Impala SSs in my area.  I have yet to see a
Fox Cobra anywhere.  Not even at a dealer.


-> That's only because GM can't afford a line of all-new engines now, so
-> their cor marketing plays on high-tech fears. Customers are being
-> denied technology becau they're being led by the marketeers to
-> believe it has no value.

"Denied technology?"  Is the Trilateral Commission behind this?
Or maybe GM's engineers are good enough to keep the old small block
wheezing along despite CAFE and IM240 and the rest?


-> Just like it doesn't for the Mustang. Remember, and Ford has said
-> this repeated interviews, the only reason the HO 5.0 existed at all
-> is because Lincoln footed development bill to keep the engine going.
-> That explains why the Mustang has go it's highest-tech and most
-> exotic engine ever.

Let's see, the 5.0 HO was, what, 1982?  Holley four barrel and dual
exhausts?  That's not high tech or exotic to me.



Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 10:40:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: 
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com


-> From: "East, Kevin" 
-> To: fordnatics@lists.best.com
->
-> --Boundary (ID NOxP1ugl5IxPYyqIgotWyQ)
-> Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
-> Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit
->
-> Set fordnatics ack
->
-> --Boundary (ID NOxP1ugl5IxPYyqIgotWyQ)
-> Content-type: application/ms-tnef
-> Content-transfer-encoding: base64
->
->
eJ8+IjwMAQaQCAAEAAAAAAABAAEAAQeQBgAIAAAA5AQAAAAAAADoAAEIgAcAGAAAAElQTS
->  5NaWNy

[many lines of similarly obscure stuff deleted]

AABBAAAAPGM9VVMlYT1fJXA9amVyJWw9SkVST0JFUlQvTEFTQ09MSU5BUy8wMDAwMDVDMU
->  BqZXJs Y3BkYy5qZXIuY29tPgAAAADygg==


You want fries with that?


Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 12:15:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Rental Agreement - blank agreement to rent.txt (1/1)
To: wheeltowheel@abingdon.Eng.Sun.COM


-> begin 644 blank agreement to rent.txt
-> M04=2145-14Y4(%1/(%)%3E0@#0I4:&ES(&%G M(&]F('1H M1F5R;F%N9&@36%L9&]N861O("AO=VYE `
-> end

Klaatu barada nicto...




Date: Wed, 30 Oct 1996 09:24:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: unsuscribe
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> although i like Fords, this generic ford channel is way too much
-> about models I have no desire to know about. How do I unsuscribe from
-> this channel?

Uh, with the TV remote, same way you got here, right?

Generic Ford channel?  This is *supposed* to be the "1968-1971 Cortina
four-door with fuzzy dice" mailing list.



Date: Sat, 02 Nov 1996 05:43:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Mustang fever
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com


Y'know, someone once said a person was defined as much by his enemies
as by his friends.  Looking at the truly pathetic hate mail I get, it
makes me wonder exactly which of my attributes are being defined...

Nonetheless, it's interesting to notice how much bandwidth on some
other mailing lists - talon, gn, and mopar for example - is devoted to
ragging on "Rustangs", "5.Slows", and the like.  If they put all that
effort into their cars they'd be better off.

Gee, I remember laughing hysterically at the "new" Fox Mustang with
the pathetic 255 V8 that made less power than the four cylinder I was
driving at the time.

The shoebox Mustangs have arrived!




Date: Fri, 06 Dec 1996 08:07:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: New Buick General Manager
To: gnttype@

-> "General MotorsCorp. Promoted two longtime managers Wednesday to head
-> Cadillac and Buick, venerable marques that GM is trying to make more
-> appealing to younger car buyers."  

Silly now that the baby boomers are firmly over the hill themselves.
And the kiddies have mostly been firmly indoctrinated in the glories of
public transport and that personal automobiles are evil, so they
retaliate by buying Grand Cherokees, minivans, and SAABs.

Buick's traditional target market is poised for explosive growth as the
boomers reach their peak in purchasing power, while Buick fritters off
at trying to sell to people who'd rather eat worms than buy a Buick.

Glad to see it's business as usual at GM...




Date: Tue, 03 Sep 1996 19:47:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Iron Man
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

Since the weather has cooled off a bit I've been able to do some
work on various cranks and heads I've had laying around.  I had several
stroker cranks that needed to be lightened and profiled and a stack of
heads to be pocket ported.  So here I am in the early morning, decked
out in apron, long-billed cap, full face visor, gun muffs, a big fan
behind me on high to help blow the chips away from my face (that's hell
in winter time...) and the latest stroker crank chocked up on the
welding table, my trusty Black & Decker 4" angle grinder, and a stack of
26-grit wheels.  We're talking serious noise here so I have to work with
the shop doors closed.  I'm singing along with the stereo.  Nothing like
some Black Sabbath for this sort of stuff.

"No more war pigs have the powerrrr...."

"HEEERROOWWWWWWWW...."
<26-grit disc bites into expensive stroker crank>

"Hand of God has struck the hourrr...."

"HWARAWRRRRR...."


A few hours of this sort of stuff and my arms are numb all the way
past the elbows; haven't felt like this since I made a 19-hour nonstop
road trip to Colorado on the Yamaha.  The grinder vibrates a bit.  By
now I'm blowing black snot; finely ground cast iron is some nasty
stuff.  After a while you can even feel it gritting around your teeth.
The Black & Decker gets too hot to hold after half an hour or so, so
I alternate between it and the air grinder.  This is a fine way to get
simultaneous heat blisters and frostbite.  You don't want to get
carried away because this sort of stuff seriously confuses the people
in the emergency room.

I'm gonna *have* to get one of those cleanroom bunny suits and one
of those fireman-type helmets with outside air.  AB get all warped when
I leave rusty deposits in the sink and the bathtub, and my blue jeans
(and a white shirt) are now reddish-brown since they went through the
washer...  I don't usually put in marathon grinding sessions like this.

This type of stuff, BTW, is why the 347 strokers are much more common
than the 355s.  A 347 offset grinds the Cleveland crank back to 3.4",
then pops in a set of $600 5.4" rods.  With the slightly shorter
stroke and longer rod you don't have to profile the counterweights to
clear the pistons at BDC.  Most places aren't willing to put in the time
to profile the crank, so they stick in the expensive parts and pass it
on to the customer.

"You're coming home / there's blood on the walls
When Charlie and the Family make house calls..."

- Dave "Ozzy is my god" Williams



Date: Sun, 08 Dec 1996 07:41:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: NASCAR
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> GM will finally get their new heads. I don't get it. NASCAR finally
-> acheived "parity" last season, by changing the rules after Chevy won

The logical thing would be to just have a NASCAR "Spec racer", all of
them built by one shop and sealed like the old IROC or SCCA Spec Racer
classes.  This would give equality of equipment.  Then they could drop
the "sedan" bodies and go to minivans, which would give much more room
for sponsor advertising, which is the primary purpose of a NASCAR
vehicle anyway.

Hey, maybe we could have a "spec driver" too.

I would never have believed it could happen, but NASCAR has finally
surpassed the silliness of Formula 1.  The megabuck ultra-specialized
equipment and venue have so little to do with automobiles that I could
care less what they do.  And now, with the media promotion of "driving
stars", I guess it won't be long before we see Dale Earnhardt comic
books and Rusty Wallace after shave.  Oh, boy.  Snzzzzz....


From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: quality time
Date: Sun, 15 Sep 1996 23:05:00 +0000
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

My buddy Jay came over from Memphis on Saturday.  He was driving his
wife's Mitsubishi Galant VR-4 with the interior and trunk liner gutted
out, stuffed with four 275/40-17 Hoosiers to be mounted, four 275-40 R1s
on rims, and four new Pirelli P Zero 205/50-15s for the Galant, which
had air showing thru in spots.  His wife was not pleased to find the
passenger seat, back seat, and trunk parts in the living room...  Jay
has a van, but it's terminally ill and some of the parts for the new
motor are now 15 months on back order.  "Peeved" no longer describes our
attitude toward a $1k order with Iskenderian; Jay is talking about
taking a jumpseat flight out to LA and kicking some butt.

Anyway, he rolled in with the Galant and went to work on the spin
balancer.  Last year I picked up a Coats four-jaw overarm tire machine
and a spin balancer, $1200 for both.  The balancer took three phase
power, which I only accomplished recently.  Actually, I finally found a
permanent place for the equipment a few weeks ago.  Tire machinery takes
up a huge amount of floor space, and the plastic swimming pool on a
hinge on the spin balancer was ridiculous - some sort of stone guard,
except not all models even bothered.  Coats made it impossible to
remove, so we simply fired up the cutoff tool and the angle grinder.

"Jay, you should've used the ear muffs."

"What?"

"YOU SHOULD HAVE USED THE EAR MUFFS!"

"Earwigs?  Where earwigs?"

The only problem with the spin balancer was the little probe that
measures the wheel diameter and offset.  It's spring loaded, and if you
let it snap back into place it'll eventually destroy the little
potentiometer rig it uses to measure distance.  We have now sampled
eight spin balancers in two states; seven of them had broken probes.
You can enter the diameter and offset manually, but Jay replaced the pot
and recalibrated it while I was rebuilding the three-jaw chuck on the
lathe.

We have learned many ways to screw up a tire balancing job.  Not
entering the proper wheel offset is one; not spinning the tire back up
after hammering on weights is another.  Using the wrong centering cone
will do it, and using the cones on wheels that aren't intended to be
hub-centric is another.  Jay's Corvette wheels pilot on the center hole;
the center hole on my truck wheels is just punched out and isn't even
approximately centered.  You have to use a spider to hold the wheel - a
spider is a plate with a sun gear and assorted attachments and studs
that holds a wheel by the lug holes to center it for balancing.  The
stock wheels on early Capris are lug-centric, for example.  When we
got the spin balancer Jay sort of swiped the spider from under a bench;
it was the only one in a busy tire dealership with six other machines,
and nobody there even knew what it was.  The big aluminum wing nut that
holds the tire on had been broken some time in the past; it's cast
aluminum.  Someone had applied huge gobs of weld to it.  Being the kind
of turd-polishing people we are, we shimmed the nut this way and that to
check the balance of the nut.  It was half an ounce out.  We used
the angle grinder to balance it.  For however many years, every tire
that machine had balanced was off by half an ounce.

The more I learn about apparently simple stuff like this, the more
paranoid I get.  No wonder I've had tires that never seemed to get
balanced right...

Oh, and I bet you thought tire weights were tire weights, didn't you?
Oh, no.  There are at least two different kinds of weights for steel
wheels, and about four for aluminum wheels, the differences being in the
thickness of rim they're intended to grab, and the contour of the inner
rim.  I actually have a little plastic tool that's supposed to tell you
what weight you need, except it doesn't cross to anything I can find.
Then there are the tape on weights - regular, and "thin" type.  Sheez.
We haven't figured out the trick for removing tape-on weights yet.  Jay
has been using a hammer and chisel and just ignoring the gummy mess;
brake dust covers it soon anyway.  Still, it's uncouth.

We finished up in time for dinner, scarfing enormous quantities of
pourables and pizza while sitting and leaning on the stacks of tires in
my back yard.  275-series Hoosiers make fine lawn chairs.

Jay also brought an application for the next PCA event, Friday the 18th
of next month.  The Czech is in the mail - Tyrannosaurus RX is entered,
and I'll probably travel in style with the F100 and trailer.  After its
Close Encounter of the Camaro Kind, poor TRX is more than a little
battered.  People will probably think I'm hauling it to the dump...  The
wheezy old 302 will have to make it through another event; between this
"job" thing and other people's motors I don't have time to finish its
new motor.  

====dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us========================DoD#978=======
can you help me...help me get out of this place?...slow sedation...
ain't my style, ain't my pace...giving me a number...NINE, SEVEN, EIGHT
==5.0 RX7 -> Tyrannosaurus RX! == SAE '82 == Denizens of Doom M/C '92==



Date: Fri, 27 Sep 1996 17:27:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Z28 vs Mustang GT (long)
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> Ford is too busy putting 200 HP in a damn Windstar, or a Taurus, or
-> someother car, but all the while neglecting the Mustang.
->
-> I give up.  Ford seems to have also.

I find it hard to get worked up about it, as I have about as much
intention of buying a new car as setting myself aflame.  Even the
cheapest thing on the lot far exceeds what I'm willing to expend of
monthly payments, insurance vigorish, taxes, and so forth.

Ford has managed to flood the market with cheap, easily modified
rolling stock.  The papers and used car lots are full of Mustangs.
For the price of a Ford Aspire I could put together a ride that was bad
to the bone, and I wouldn't have to tithe the taxman and the DMV near as
much, either.

Of course, some people have this "new car" thing.  I've seen it happen
to most of my friends.  It's an evil thing.  They get restless and
irritable, their nostrils flare, their eyes roll, and suddenly
something breaks, and a few hours later they're driving off the lot
with a by-damn NEW car.  The adrenaline rush carries them for about a
day, and then you'll find them sitting somewhere alone, head in hands,
muttering "dear God, what have I done?" as they contemplate their
payments for the next five years...


Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 18:03:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: MM&FF magazine reply...
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com

-> But Its a problem for me when they try to mix it with a nudy
-> magazine.

I dunno, anyone remember Auto Buff?

It's a marketing truism that anything with nekkid wimmen in it draws
attention, and attention is what marketing wants.  Now take a look at
the way MM&FF is slanted - their target reader appears to be 20 to 25
years old, single, male, and has a disgustingly high VISA card limit.
So that's what they write to.  Unfortunately, even their target readers
have probably figured out they can get more nekkid wimmen from Hustler
or www.playboy.com than in a car magazine, so they're probably not that
interested in women who are technically dressed.

Then again, I'm old enough to find a photo of a curvaceous 18 year old
in a skimpy bikini and a pair of clodhopper chukka boots with the laces
untied hysterically funny.  Hey, baby, dig them shooooooozzzzz.......

If you don't have the tech, don't have the cars, and even the
editorials stink, I guess it's time to call up Dial-A-Bimbo for some
models.  

Date: Tue, 23 Jul 1996 07:56:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: young Frankenstein...
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

Yesterday I worked on adding new wiring to my workshop.  For some
braindead reason (I think I had originally intended the entire wall to
be shelving) I had not put any outlets or air chucks in one wall.  That
wall, of course, is now where the tire machines, welder, and various
other pieces of equipment are.  So off comes the sheetrock, out comes
the insulation, and I'm stringing 110, 220, and 3 phase 220 wiring, plus
air lines.  By noon it was pushing 100F so I knocked off, went inside,
and enjoyed the air conditioning while watching my remote thermometer
creep up to 105.  The hygrometer read 92.  Ah, yes, the joys of living
in the South...

By 5 PM "20% chance of showers" had turned into a thunderstorm.  By 7pm
I was wondering if I had enough lumber to build an ark.  By 9 I was
asleep... got up about 3:30 and went back out to the shop.  Temperature
was down to 71.  Looked like as good a time as any to finally get back
to work on the stroker motor.  I set the mill back up for boring,
adjusted the boring head, and set to work on opening up the pin ends of
the rods.

3:45 AM, leaning over the milling machine... radio is trying to play
"House of the Rising Sun" through the interference of the lightning,
which strobes outside the big doors, which are open in the rain...
all I need is an assistant named Igor.

The rods are all bored now; next step is to hone the pin ends to size.
heh, heh, heh...  Sixto and Frank better get in gear, I'm on a roll now!

Date: Sun, 17 Mar 1996 21:54:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Behemoth and other news
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

The guy with the 460 finally came through.  He delivered it last month,
with a 1972 Lincoln Continental wrapped around it.  We pushed it into
the back yard with his pickup.  I didn't want grass in that spot anyway.
The hood refused to close all the way after I got it up.  After a couple
of days three of the tires went flat.  Fortunately the neighbors are too
busy shooting at each other to complain to the city.

The weather was nice this weekend, so I yanked the engine out of AB's
Capri and started loading the hull full of Capri parts.  When we were at
Kenney's to pick up the crank for the stroker 302 she gave the car to
one of Kenney's buddies, the one with the 525 inch 460 I mentioned last
year.  Jimmy is getting out of tractor pulls and into drag racing, and
will be running the Capri with the 525.  This let me get one car out
of the yard, and 75% of the shed was full of Capri parts.  Now the parts
are (still neatly boxed and labeled) in the car, with more boxes of
parts wrapped in plastic and sitting behind it, waiting for Jimmy to
bring the trailer.  It's almost like getting a new shed; I can put some
of *my* stuff in there now, besides the compressor and the lawn mower.
Compulsive parts-collecting isn't entirely the province of MG and VW
owners, you know.

The Capri had had a 283 Chevy, a Saginaw 4 speed with 3.50 first gear,
and a 2.56 axle.  Since I didn't want the engine just lying around, it
needed to go to the shed.  Easier if I take it apart, not to mention
after ten years of sitting it had stuck solid.  I built that 283 when I
was in high school, back in 1978.  Jeez.  Other than perhaps excessive
use of silicone sealer I found nothing to be ashamed of.  On the other
hand, it never leaked oil, either.  I loaded the parts in my little
Radio Flyer wagon and hauled them to the shed and put them in a rack.

The Capri had been a trouper for several years, before being totalled
by a Toyota.  We had bought another with a straight body, and I was
halfway through moving all the stuff over when AB and I had our first
and most major marital dispute.  It was to the effect I wasn't going to
do all the work on it myself while she sat home and watched TV.  She
had taken the old one to car shows and wanted the new one finished out
to the same standards.  After carefully evaluating her priorities, she
decided the TV was more important.  That was in 1984.  It has taken this
long for her to realize I was serious.

AB was kind enough to buy me a new 9-volt battery for my postal scale,
so I whipped up a fixture to weigh each end of a connecting rod
independently, then weighed and marked all the rods for the long-rod
302.  Then I picked through dozens of rod caps, weighed them, graded
them by weight, and began matching them to rods.  I only had to grind a
couple balance pads.  The rods are now all within 2 grams on the big
ends.  Close enough; taking them the rest of the way is part of the
balance guy's job.  They go off to get the big ends resized now, and
then I'll machine the sides down a bit to fit the Ford journals.  Since
the piston domes are all fitted the long-rod's next stop should be the
balance shop.

The original plan was to haul the innards to Chrome-A-Shaft in Memphis,
where I usually take my stuff.  However, the last time I had one
balanced there the guy who did the work seemed pretty confused.  The new
improved plan is to have Jimmy, the guy AB just gave the Capri hull to,
do it.  (this is not the Capri I may be running at the BMWCCA event next
month; we have no shortage of Capris).  Jimmy works at a large volume
rebuilder in Little Rock, and he's the main balance guy.  Not only will
they let me back in the shop to watch, they'll also let me take photos.
Jimmy has also done several big block strokers, so if the long rod parts
come out okay I'll probably have him do the stroker 302.

Anyway, that took care of Saturday.  I guess I overdid it a bit
considering I didn't even get back to work until Wednesday; I was pretty
crapped out today.  I didn't particularly care to work on any of the
fifty dozen projects I had started, so I took advantage of a splendid
day to tinker with the Behemoth.

The guy had claimed the engine "ran good", but I largely discounted it.
Not that I cared; I wanted the thing as a core to build a stroker.  What
the hell, let's see if I can get it to run.  It had oil, and antifreeze,
and all the belts were on; no signs of catastrophic oil leakage, the
trunk and back floorboards were reassuringly free of empty oil and
Stop-Nok cans.

The first item was the distributor.  Someone had taken the points out
and left it open.  This would have been no major deal, except evidently
the car had been left with the hood up so the weather could get in.  I
hosed the innards with TV tuner cleaner, scrounged some points, then had
to scrounge through my parts boxes to find a couple of 6-32 screws to
hold the points.  The coil had vanished, I hooked up the extra from the
RX.  Something had found the plug wires appetizing, so four of them had
to be replaced from my junk plug wire box.

I had to pull the Shop-Vac out to vacuum the acorn hulls from the
distributor and the top of the carb.  Fortunately the choke plate had
remained closed, but the intake manifold is still an inch deep in acorn
hulls.  It must have been Squirrel City under there.  Also knocked off
about ten pounds of mud dauber nests.

Fat sparks when I drop the RX' battery in and hook it up.  Wipers come
on, and the motors on the passenger side of the split bench are
evidently shorted, causing it to do a weird six-way power adjust all by
itself, over and over, like some exotic sex device.  This car has
serious electrical problems.  Also promising, engine-wise.

The engine turned over.  Cool.  Shoot some gas from the squirt bottle,
give it a snort of ether, and it fired up, idled raggedly for a second
or two, and quit.  Hot damn.  No telling what's in the tank, but it
smells *bad*.  I crawled underneath, cut the fuel line, and ran a hose
over to the lawnmower gas can.  Used the squirt bottle to fill the float
bowls up through the vent tubes and squirt some gas
down the venturis, and hit it.  Voom!  It idled nicely.  I crawled under
the dash and performed a fuse-ectomy on everything but main power.  Ran
the air hose over from my convenient *outside* air chuck (ahem!),
pumped up the tires, and moved it into a different spot, kill some
different grass for a while.  Then let it run until it emptied the gas
can.

No noises, smoke, or untoward behavior.  It might be a decent engine.
Transmission was very slow to engage.  Could be sick, but C6 parts are
cheap.  At least I can get the thing in the shop under its own power.

Hmm... it would be a little tight around the steering box and left
exhaust manifold, but wouldn't a 460 look good in an RX7?


Date: Mon, 18 Mar 1996 17:35:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Fords HIPO History
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

-> You really have to know what you are doing to get into the nines.
-> Just slapping a 460 into a Mustang ain't gonna do it, IMHO. You need
-> to know your suspension and engine building / tuning techniques (or
-> have someone do it for you).

I sorta liked the idea of the world's most badass winch, driven by a
truck transfer case off the back of the transmission.  Lay down 1320
feet of 5/16" steel cable and spike it on the other side of the lights,


Date: Thu, 28 Nov 1996 12:58:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: 53 Ford
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> Heck, I remember starting my flatty up with only one cylinder head on
-> it. Even at an idle, it looked liked those pistons would fly right
-> out of the block! man, they moved fast.

  I'd love to have seen that!

I've run Ford two barrels without the top of the carburetor screwed on,
and even driven them a bit.  Don't want to slosh all the gas out in the
turns, you know...

Back in high school I rebuilt a '61 Corvair.  I must've run it for an
hour one night.  Had the carbs off, waiting for kits to come in.  Had my
brother start it, and I dribbled gas into the open holes in the cylinder
heads with a pair of Coke bottles.

A buddy of mine beat that, though.  He'd bought a junker '59 Rambler to
strip for parts for his good Rambler.  The junker had no battery, no
carburetor, and was solidly locked up from sitting 15 years or so in a
field.  While towing it home with a chain he put it in gear and worked
the clutch (which wasn't stuck, miraculously) to see if he could break
it loose.  It finally did, and a few seconds later went "VOOM!" and ran
into the back of the truck.  This caused great amounts of consternation
until we figured out the thing was pumping ancient fuel out of the
tank, some of which was going into the open intake manifold.  The
generator didn't need no steenkeeng battery, so when enough gas made it
in, the thing fired up.


Date: Wed, 18 Dec 1996 21:27:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: re: 4WD Mustangs
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> "We're mechanics.  We'll *make* it fit!"

Die grinder - milling machine - gas welder - arc welder - lathe - BFH.


Date: Fri, 25 Oct 1996 20:03:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Adjustable exhaust noise/restriction.
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> quiet the neighborhood was. Unmuffled expansion chambers at
-> resonance, have a great sound! I tried the washer thing in my

When I was in high school I had a '74 Kawasaki Mach III 500.  Ported
barrels, milled heads, Denco expansion chambers.  Painted it Do-Glo
Lime.  Hey, it was the '70s.  It looked damned near glowed in the dark -
some people said it looked like radioactive vomit, but they were
probably just jealous.

  Of all the vehicles I've owned since, the only one that even
comes close is my turbocharged XJ, and it's still not in the same class.
Piped and ported, the powerband on the 'saki was more akin to being
rear-ended by a pickup truck than anything else.  One of my favorite
things was to find a nice stretch of road, drop down to about 35mph in
top gear, and whack the throttle open.  Not much would happen other than
intake drone, and the needles would sloooooowwwwwllllyyyy creep up -
we're talking tens of seconds here - until around 5000 RPM, when it
would sort of cough and the front wheel would lift four feet into the
air.  Yep, we're on the powerband now.  Used to run gold-palladium
electrode spark plugs that cost $9 each in 1977.  It had to have them to
fire through the Castrol two stroke oil; it really liked Yamalube R
better, but the Castrol smelled like... Castrol.  Cagers would gag and
roll their windows up at stoplights.

The CDI finally died on it, and being color blind, electrical stuff is
not my forte.  I sold it to a friend's younger brother for $400.  He
paid me in cash.  Quarters.  I blew $125 of them on an engineless but
otherwise okay '72 Capri, $75 for a junkyard 302, and the rest on
connecting the two together.  My first engine swap.  The Capri *looked*
stock on the outside, and when I picked up a girl for a date her
parents wouldn't make the sign of the cross and throw the deadbolts
like they did with the bike.

The Capri was reasonably satisfactory for a testosterone-crazed
teenager.  I found it could do nearly infinite burnouts.  After a few
minutes of that, a steel belted radial would start to come apart, with
bits of broken steel wire sticking out through the tread like coarse
fur.

One of the more interesting times with the Capri was The Night of the
Lepus.  My buddy Ron and I were flying down a back road one night when
we ran over a couple of rabbits.  Stuff happens; usually it's the
opossums that bite the dust.  We're back in town later going through the
drive through at McDonalds and we smell something bad.  You sort of
expect that at McDonalds, so other than a few comments we thought
nothing of it.  Throughout the evening we cruised all the local
spots, frequently attracting some attention.  No big deal, we're used to
it, but finally we notice people making gagging effects instead of
showing awe at our street racing prowess.  I pulled over, got out, and
was immediately enveloped in that smell...  all down both sides of the
car were streaks of blood and unmentionables.  Bits of rabbit fur were
wedged into my new Thrush Outsider sidepipes, interspersed with
thoroughly cooked meat.  Underneath the car, bits of entrails had caught
on the parking brake lines and were dragging on the ground.  Yes, it was
thoroughly gross.  It took several trips to the high pressure car wash
to remove the gore...

Well, at least I cleaned it.  A few weeks later Ron nailed a bat with
his Pinto.  About two inches off dead center of the grille.  He drove
around with it until it started to decompose.  It was quite an
attention-getter at the gathering places, particularly when the odor let
people know it was a real bat, not a rubber one...  Then Ron upgraded to
a '70 Torino with the 351CJ-4V, and I upgraded the Capri and started
working on my '68 Mustang with the 351C swap.  Foreigner had the lyrics
to it all:

"Running all night
on Lake Avenue
it's a piece of cake
if you know what to do
you got to lose a few
'til the stakes get high
when the odds are right
you just blow by..."



Date: Sun, 04 Aug 1996 17:42:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: serious carb/idle help needed
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> I don't know how far along in microprocessor technology they were
-> back in 1966, but it seems that my car has a built in happy meter

Uh oh, you set the wayback machine...

The development of the integrated circuit, which is the building block
of microprocessors-as-we-know-them, was sponsored by the US Air Force
Strategic Air Command.  Solder joints on the printed circuits and
connections internal to the components themselves have a statistically
significant chance of failure.  Given the complexity and harsh
environment of the missile guidance systems they were used in, a
still-classified percentage of our ICBM arsenal was incapable of guided
flight on any particular day.  The only solace was the surety the
Soviets had even worse problems.

The Pentagon put up a hefty cash prize for anyone who could solve what
had become known as "the connection problem."  Finally two virtually
identical applications landed in the Patent Office simultaneously - one
filed by an engineer at Texas Instruments named Carroll Killebrew, the
other by an inventor named Bob Noyce.  The military grabbed the new
technology and farmed it out to defense contractors while the Patent
Office commenced some slimy maneuvers that made The Pentagon Papers and
Watergate look minor.  It took so long for the Patent Office to award
the patent that the first Altairs were shipping before they decided to
award it jointly to both.  By then, it hardly mattered - Killebrew still
had his job at TI, Noyce had found some vulture capitalists and started
a company called Intel, which he ran until he died a few years back.
Both TI and Intel had been making chips for many years before the patent
wrangle was settled; so had half the world.  The patent was basically
worthless when it was finally issued.  To the best of my knowledge
neither was able to collect any royalties.

The patent in question concerned a process of fabricating both the
components and their wiring on a single piece of material - basically,
what we now call a "chip," variants of which are found in ECUs, traffic
lights, radar guns, personal computers, pacemakers...  the world would
be a much different place without the integrated circuit.


Date: Fri, 08 Nov 1996 08:57:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Motor Oil
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> (Note that I have nothing against AMSOil, and indeed reckon it's
-> probably a fine product.  They sure have some annoying independent
-> representatives, though.)

It's a perfectly adequate product, and for a long time they were the
only ones with readily available synthetic greases and hypoid oils as
well.  We used to run AmsOil synthetic in Monzilla and various bikes and
were completely happy with it.  It was also only $6.50 a quart back
then, cheaper than Mobil 1.  This was, ahem, when premium dino oils were
under fifty cents.

We used to buy it at my favorite auto parts store, where the owner, who
had a distributorship, kept it on the shelf.  No need to risk infection
by the company's marketing schemes.  After the store sold out the new
owners got rid of everything except generic Class A and B high sales
items.  Jay tracked down another AmsOil dealer next time a change came
due in Monzilla, but the encounter was difficult enough to send him back
to dino oils.

Ah, Jacksonville Auto Parts, I sorely miss it.  Johnny was running the
country's third-largest machine gun store out of the back room, with
silencers as a sideline.  Johnny's sales technique would put the most
rabid AmsOil dealer to shame.  After snagging a potential customer's
attention, it was time for the "hold the warm puppy" routine.  He'd walk
the mark over to the edge of the counter where you could see down the
path between the shelves to the back wall of the storeroom, where he had
a stack of custom-printed targets with Ayatollah Khomeini on them.  He'd
hell "FIRE IN THE HOLE!" to warn anyone in the back room, hand the
startled mark a full-auto, silenced Uzi, and point them in the
appropriate direction.  Anyone standing at the counter got showered with
hot brass.  It was a great sales technique.  Hell, it worked on *me*...

I missed out on the time he got hold of a crate of surplus LAW rockets
though.  The BATF wanted an accounting of them once when inspecting the
inventory.  LAWs are/were Class II Destructive Devices and individually
accountable.  The BATF didn't quite understand that once you fired an
antitank weapon it was *gone*.  Played hob with the paperwork.  The
photographs, however, were glorious.  Johnny liked to plink at junk
cars.  When the rocket hit a Pinto, there simply wasn't a whole lot
left...

Now we have an Auto Zone staffed with Radio Shack sales rejects. 


Date: Thu, 20 Jun 1996 21:15:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: RE: Capri swap Q's
To: fordnatics@lists1.best.com

-> Dave, you still da man but I have to disagree with you on the
-> strength of that 4-speed.  I've broken two of them.  Most recently
-> sheared all

I guess the Capri Transmission Gods have smiled on me.  The only time I
had a problem was in, mmm, summer of '86, AB and I were heading to
Memphis and the transmission seized solid at well over the speed limit.
AB brought it to a halt on the shoulder with both rear wheels flat
spotted and big handfuls of opposite lock.  I looked underneath and
there was smoke coming off the transmission; we had acquired the car
just a few weeks before and I'd not yet checked the trans and rear end
fluid levels.  It was stone dry, of course, and when it seized it also
destroyed the clutch disc.  It was a long, long walk along I-40 that
night to find a place with a telephone.  Really, it's not like AB is
cursed or anything; we get places fast because speed limits mean little
to her, and I get to keep my driver's license.

Capri driveshaft-to-diff bolts are 16mm, a true bastard size.  Nothing
else will quite fit.  They're also torqued to about 10,000 ft-lbs and
Loctited.  They're a real thrill in the dark, alongside a busy
interstate...

For those of you chuckling about my getting my just deserts for not
checking the fluid levels, I'll have you know I paid for my sins many
times over that night.  Jay came out of Memphis with his van and about
three feet of chain, and we towed the Capri on in to Memphis.  In the
dark.  On three feet of chain.  At 40 miles over the speed limit or
better, all the way.  Behind a van with no windows.  With no vacuum
assist on the brakes - and Capris came with standard power brakes for a
damned good reason.  I don't think my heart rate ever dropped below 175
for the whole ride and I was sweated to the seat within minutes.  By the
time we got to Jay's I was as limp as one of those people who jump off
tall buildings and miss the net.  I vowed to kill Jay in various
horrible ways, but it took ten minutes just to get enough strength to
open the door.  There have been several times over the intervening years
I've told Jay, "I'm going to kill you, you sorry bastard."  Jay would
ask why, and I'd have to say (having usually stored the memory of that
trip safely away with the monsters on under my bed when I was a small
child, and the time I jumped a dirt bike over a new whoopdie right into
a tree, six feet up...) "I don't remember, but I'm sure it was a good
reason."

This particular trip, anyway, was what prompted the transmission
conversion.  I found a Pinto flywheel, bellhousing, transmission,
shifter, and starter, had a four cylinder Fox driveshaft cut to length,
made an adapter for the driveshaft to diff flange, and tossed out the
weirdball non-serviceable two piece Capri driveshaft, weirdo Bosch
starter, funky pot metal floor shifter, etc.  I still have that car - AB
drives it to work every day.  That transmission swap wound up bouncing
me from C/Street Prepared to Modified at SCCA autocrosses, which annoyed
me mightily at the time.

-> I've heard similar things, although I've never done this swap.  I
-> would put in some stronger springs though.

Any Capri can use stiffer springs.  All US market Capris, from the 1970
1600cc to the much, much heavier 1974 2.8 with AC and auto, came with
the same front springs, which were around 100 lb/in.  The rear springs
are all the same too.  That's why every year Capri sat a little lower
than the one before.  I'd already gone the route with radical lowering
with a previous Capri in my search for the ultimate handling, and found
out the lowering really didn't help anything.  In fact, the reduced
ground clearance and suspension travel made it a real pain in the ass.
I put a set of Traction Master 150# springs in front and added two extra
leaves to the back on the next car, which made it sit up maybe a full
inch higher than stock.  I had originally planned to lower it back down
to stock height, but then I found the extra height didn't seem to hurt
anything.  With those springs, the humongous TMC swaybars, and the KYB
Gas-A-Justs it did just fine.  At the time I was taking engineering
courses at UALR in Little Rock.  The route to school included a stretch
on Roosevelt Road.  Imagine the hilly section of San Francisco, except
with massive road construction and patches.  It was a truly nasty piece
of road, with wierd not-quite-pothole gullies on one side or the other
that gave fits to most cars, and motocross-style whoop-de-dos with big
scars at the crests from unfortunate transmissions and crossmembers.
The Capri was absolutely unfazed, and I found out I could get a rythym
going and leap from crest to crest without bottoming the suspension.
It was a lot of fun.  A fellow student was behind me one day, and said I
had air under all four tires more often than not.  I told him it gave a
smoother ride that way...


Date: Wed, 27 Mar 1996 21:34:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: coolant filter and stuff (long)
To: fordnatics@blob.best.net

I finally got one of the coolant filters I posted about a few weeks
ago.  None of the auto parts stores would order a Fram part for me; they
claimed the master warehouse in Little Rock didn't carry Fram, and they
wouldn't order from anywhere else.    There's one warehouse that
supplies all the auto parts places in Central Arkansas.  Back in the old
days Johnny at Jacksonville Auto Parts would have had anything I wanted
in from Memphis the next day, with my choice of a dozen brands.  Alas,
Johnny sold out to a major chain and retired at 38.  The chain, of
course, went bankrupt within six months.  If you needed a left hand
water pump for a '37 Ford, or a set of points for a '48 Allis-Chalmers,
or a distributor cap for a new Lamborghini, Johnny could get it.  Alas,
the chain only wanted to sell Class A items and rebuffed the somewhat
strange people who had made up the store's primary clientele.  And back
in the back, he had had his little machine shop, where he ran his Class
II gun business on the side, cranking out full-auto conversions,
sawed-off shotguns, silencers, and whatnot.  We used to test-fire the
machine guns in the storeroom, blazing away at Khomeini posters on the
far wall. You'd pull a box of 7/63 pilfer grommets off the shelf, and
it'd be half full of spent brass...

  Ah, anyway, one of the stores managed to
cross the filter itself to a Wix (24070, if anyone cares) but refused to
even try to get the adapter block.  The local Western Auto tire store,
which is rapidly becoming one of my favorite places, told me if the part
number was still good they would have one for me Wednesday.  "Order
two," I said, after finding out they were only $13 each.  They were
there this morning.  Hot dog.  And they're cast aluminum, not zinc like
the usual generic oil filter adapters.  These are just like remote
filter adapters, except they have an 11/16 filter nipple instead of the
usual 3/4".  There are 3/4" coolant filters listed, but they all have
built-in additive packages, which I preferred to avoid.

Looks like I'll mount the coolant filter on the firewall over the
heater tubes.  I have a hose that jogs from the water crossover at the
back of the manifold to the heater inlet.  After reading the horror
stories of Mustang owners blowing up heater cores because they didn't
know there was a restrictor in the heater hose when the replaced it, I
have a restrictor in that line.  The filter itself ought to make a dandy
restrictor.  Also, this is a full-flow line, regardless of thermostat
position, so the filter will get a good shot at the muck in the cooling
system.

A couple of people have opined I might be overdoing the filter thing.
After all, there's the remote engine oil filter block with two 1-quart
filters, the 1-quart filter in the transmission cooler line, now the
1-quart filter in the cooling system.  I guess nobody would care I found
some neat spin-on fuel filters, too, cataloged expressly for the type of
two-stage fuel system skod has been talking about.  They have a high
volume, low pressure filter for recirculating low pressure fuel lines,
like back from the tank up to the fuel surge tank in the engine
compartment, and then a high pressure, low volume filter for from the
surge tank to the injectors.  I now have some nice aluminum tubing to
make a surge tank from, too.

On the other hand, maybe it *is* a little peculiar...

It has been too cold to do much to trace the Capri's electrical
troubles, much less crawl underneath to do serious track prep.  I am
giving serious thought to doing a quickie alignment on TRX, borrowing
Ron's trailer, and running it at the PCA event next month.  The Porsche
people would probably turn mauve when it pulled up for tech - from the
windshield forward there's the hood, two wheels covered by the little
plastic inner fender liners, and... nothing.  The radiator and all the
unmentionables are flying in the wind.  Power to weight ratio, yeah.
Of course, both fenders, the bumper, header and splash panels probably
don't weigh much over 50 pounds.

Despite TRX' delicate condition, work on the new motors continues.
Hopefully this weekend I can try some of my new tooling out, boring the
pin ends of some junk rods.

Somehow I have wound up with two licensed, insured, running, but
undriveable automobiles, two complete, assembled, running engines in the
shop, one complete engine lacking only assembly, and two engines 90%
complete (only rod resizing and balancing needed).  Oh, and the 351X,
which is still in the living room, which AB is using as a laundry rack.
And what's really weird is, for all this engine stuff, I've never been
able to successfully repair one of those thrice-damned Tecumseh
lawnmower engines...



Date: Sat, 29 Jun 1996 20:16:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: GLobal west uppers for '67 mustang
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> > Probably because they had no idea where the new roll center was.

> im gonna assume that youre not just kidding.  i kinda thought of
> that, but the guy i talked to seemed intelligent (i think he was the

I wasn't kidding, but I wasn't really slamming GW either.  Finding the
roll center of an SLA front end is not a trivial process.  That's the
reason I get a charge out of people who think a $59 software package is
going to do their front end geometry for them...

Simply getting the X-Y measurements of the A-arms is a big job.  You
can't just measure from the suspension pivots to the ground; stuff is in
the way.  Some of those pivots are eccentrics, so the real pivot is not
the center of the bolt.  Then you have to figure where the pivot point
of the ball joint is - and it's not the middle, by the way.  Then you
measure the A-arm inclination and skew, get the spindle inclination and
offset, and you can make a good start, except for steering...  it took
me several attempts to map the geometry for my early Capri, and it was
just struts.

It's entirely possible GW used whatever parts they selected to move the
roll center as far as it would go; if that's all they could get, why
go through the hassle of measuring it?  They're in business to make
money, and the time to make those measurements isn't free.  It's
entirely possible you were the first person ever to ask them about the
roll center.

If it makes you feel any better, MidAmerica Corvette and Doug Rippie
sell roll center relocation brackets for the rear of the Corvette, and
neither one of them has any idea where they move the roll center either.
Pretty much par for the course, like people who sell sway bars and
don't know the bar rate, or people who sell cylinder heads and don't
know how much they flow...


Date: Wed, 09 Oct 1996 10:27:00 +0000
From: dave.williams@chaos.lrk.ar.us (Dave Williams)
Subject: Re: Even more BS about ABS?
To: fordnatics@lists.best.com

-> IMO anybody who judges a sport by virtue of how "archaic" the
-> sporting equipment is suspect.  Hey man, whatever floats your boat.

They seem to market the hell out of the Olympics with throwing,
lifting, or just plain old running and jumping.  Can't get much more
no-fangle than that.

Now, if you wanted to see some sport, make no-wing sprint cars an
Olympic event...