Ownership Verified: 1967 Ford Fairlane 500

NotLaw said:
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Honey, looook! "Van Dodge" (c)

NotLaw said:
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That narrow twisty hump of ice and cliffs looks like a jolly good load of adrenaline. :evil:
 
CraigB said:
What do attribute the burnt valves to?

That Moki Dugway looks like an interesting drive. The name also had me slightly confused as my dad owns Mo-Kan Dragway. :D
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Craig, I suspect the burned valves were due to running too lean. When I first put my AFR gauges in last July, at first I thought they might have both been broken, because once the O2 sensors got out of the warm-up stage, both gauges pegged up to 18 while idling. It was only when I drove it and saw the AFR drop down into a more normal range under power that I realized just how lean I must have been running at idle.
 
NotLaw said:
... I needed to change the distributor back to a small cap unit with divorced coil anyways for a later upgrade I have planned, so I'm not too bothered by that.
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:think: Now what could that be?

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:D

Glad it's back on the road and running right man. That Moki Dugway looks like an incredible drive.
 
Did some work on the car over the last few weeks, including installing my new exhaust system that I ordered around christmas time, I'll do a full writeup on that later, but for now, here's what I did yesterday:


Sadly, the people running the Dyno did not set it up properly for my car, and the dyno was not reading my RPM correctly. Their dyno sheet was saying I was making ~690 to ~1500 RPM runs, when in reality it was 1500 to 6000 RPM.

They were also not properly accounting for gear ratios, so their sheet was reading 740 Ft-Lbs peak, torque, and 173 horse on the highest run (the first shown in the video)

Accounting for these errors as best I can after the fact, the car makes 320 Lb-Ft torque @ 3200 and 285 hp @ 6000 (I think these are "corrected" numbers, for sea level, and at wheel power)

This is the corrected chart for the second run (first in the video):



and here's my source data:

 
Something a little different.




I'm in California! Monterrey to be specific.

Going on a roadtrip down the 1 to LA, which is the leg I'll be doing today, then up into the mountains around LA tomorrow morning, and back to Utah.

Already done 1050 miles, passing by Virginia City, Lake Tahoe, and spending pretty much the whole day yesterday playing around in the western foothills of the Sierra Nevada's.

Its been an awesome trip so far.
 
Well, I've been back from my trip for a few weeks now, and I just got the photodump from my friend of all the pics he took.

Trip was 1900 miles in total, the full route of which is shown in the following two map links:
https://goo.gl/maps/2upycPhhjxm
https://goo.gl/maps/iPFUkdjWoEF2
(Too many waypoints for one map)

The full photodump can be found here

The car of course, ran absolutely perfectly in just about every way. I thrashed it hard on this trip, and as you can tell from the maps, there was lots of opportunity for thrashing.

We ran from Cedar City to South Lake Tahoe the first day, by way of that wonderfully twisty road shown in the second TG america special, (where Clarkson and May fell in love with their 'Vette/Cadillac, resp.) and yes, I may have laid a little rubber powering out of that corner Clarkson drifted around. I've got some not great video that I took while my friend was driving the car, but I still need to process it, and I'm lazy, so it might be a while.

From NV 722 we made our way up to Virgina city, by way of the hill-climb route, before dropping into lake tahoe for the night.


When we woke up early in the morning at Lake Tahoe, we were greeted by an inch or two of snow.

Following that surprise, I had to change the planned route a bit (originally we were going to take CA 4 down out of Lake Tahoe, ended up taking US50)

Once into the foothills, we took CA 49 (mostly) down towards the Fresno direction, though we never made it quite to Fresno, before busting across CA to Monterey.


After spending the night in Monterey, we drove the 1 down to LA, passing through Malibu.

We stopped for the night in Corona, so that first thing in the morning I could visit a company by the name of TMI Products, to test out the future seats for the fairlane (The Pro-Series is rather more then I want to pay, but good god is the build quality worth it, and they are super comfortable, yet quite supportive for someone my size. In other words, absolutely perfect, more on that front in a few months I hope)


After my visit to TMI, we went up to northern LA so I could drive Little Tujunga, before busting ass back home to Cedar City via Las Vegas.




Some thoughts on the car and the trip then. First off, as I mention, I absolutely flogged the car on this trip. I thrashed it mercilessly. A respectable portion of the miles driven were at WOT, and over 4000 rpm. The car came respectably close to vmax once (5100 rpm in 4th, Oh Yeah) and I pushed it hard enough that even with the oil cooler I recently added in for the trip, oil temp got up to 240 multiple times.

With all that thrashing, the car started first crank, every time, and even in the stereotypical LA traffic, it never once overheated or stumbled. It ran absolutely flawlessly, and the super loud exhaust wasn't even that annoying. I even got a 18.5 average mpg over the whole trip. I'll call that a win.

Not long before the trip I also installed a set of EBC yellowstuff pads up front, and did a general brake overhaul, and I couldn't be happier, braking performance was more then acceptable for almost the entire trip, with only a little bit of softness in the pedal when the car was being thrashed down the last canyon of the trip (sand canyon).



As for the roads and traffic, I don't know if I am the luckiest road-tripper in the world, or if I just lucked into a perfectly scheduled weekend, but traffic was nearly non-existent over the whole trip (at least until I started to approach Malibu, that was hell)
and the quality of the roads I was driving on was sublime. For the most part, people even pulled over and got out of my way too.

All in all, it was a pretty much perfect road trip, and there will be at least one, maybe several videos to come later, when I can get around to processing the footage.

Hopefully sometime in the next few weeks I'll write up all the stuff I did to prepare the car for the trip, with pictures and more detail. The short version is tires, brakes, carpet, headliner, fuel pump, and driveshaft...
 
Thanks for the pics. I really must get back to the south-west US in the not too distant future. Haven't been too that part of the US since '95. Way too long ago :cry:
 

Congratz man! :)


I should also say: you handle yourself really well on camera! Also, I was gonna post the thread link at Youtube, but I thought you should be the one to decide whether it should be there.
 
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:clap:

Really enjoyed seeing and hearing the car in that video.
 
Thanks, I commented on the video with a link to this thread.

Sadly though, All is not well with the Fairlane right now.

I'm not sure of the exact chain of events, but I was merging onto the interstate, and everything was going fine. I pulled for the next gear, and the engine had 0 power. As the engine lost RPM, it started to make a death clatter.

I pulled it apart this last weekend, and I found this:




Not good.
The spark plug in that cylinder was also missing the entire porcelain. I suspect that the porcelain dropped, got wedged in the exhaust valve, and valve met piston at 5500 rpm. That, or the valve failed, and took the cylinder, piston, and spark plug with it.


Having said that, I view this as an opportunity to make the engine even better. I'm not sure what route I am going to take, Resleeving this 302, rebuilding my original 289, or finding a different short block entirely, but at the end of this, it's going to have a better balanced bottom end, a set of AFR aluminum cylinder heads, and slightly higher compression ratio. Should be good for at least another 75 horsepower, and from the research I've done, that's a conservative estimate. :mrgreen:


The $300 bottom end made it 30,000 miles. All the money I spent on this engine went into parts that can and will be transferred to the new build.
 
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Ugh!

When you play hard, stuff happens. I bet it is fun when you are playing though. :D
 
I saw that thumbnail in my subscription list and went straight here, totally expecting it to be what I think it is :D

- - - Updated - - -

And just finished watching.

- dat grinding noise.. damn..
- dat exhaust - DAMN! :D

Great to see it move, sad to see it fail though now. I'd probably suggest some ancient lump that was built by someone else and now needs a new home for cheap. Or a late model coyote 302 :D.
 
Now I understand your username :lol:
Great car and fun video :thumbsup:
 
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