Gary Lewis

Good pics, Jonathan. And a good tip on the removal of the steering wheel. I recently had to repair the threads on Big Blue's wheel because someone used the wrong bolt. On the bushing, heat is what lets you remove it easily. I fought with one for hours until someone suggested heat and then I had it off so easily. But heat isn't easily had in the salvage, and some won't let you for fear of fire. So in that case you'll have to lube them and pry them off as you did.

Matt - You are now in Lexington. See if that's what you wanted.

I'm pretty sure our 1993 E350 RV only got 8mpg...maybe 8.5, but that was an EFI 460 with an E4OD. It was also 31 feet long with dual wheels, so it was certainly wasn't light. It had great power though! We were lucky enough to have owned it during the lowest point of the Covid lockdowns when gas was only 70 cents a liter here, and even then it cost $150-ish to fill. It would be $450-$500 now. Eeek. Yes, prices on gas/petrol have gone bananas. But 8 MPG on a rig that big isn't bad at all.

Some of y'all attend car shows where the vehicles have "cards" that proclaim what they are and what's been done to them. I think it is time that I make one for Big Blue and am asking for your input on what I need to change in the document below. Basically my idea is that I'll print the pages out, laminate them, and put them on a piece of cardboard that I can prop up on/near the truck. So I've increased the font to as large as I can go, 18 point, and still get everything on two pieces of paper. Will that work? Thoughts, changes, input, deletions, etc please.

Right. I guess if the bed is 8' long, then the camper is every bit of 12' not including the part over the cab. I didn't even notice that it was made for a Supercab haha. It even looks wider than normal to me. What would a 460 with a C6 hauling that camper get for MPG? Good grief...I can't even imagine. A 460/C6 combo does poorly with no load, so I can only assume that with a load like that it would be really poor. Our '72 F250 w/a 4V 390/C6 carrying our 9 1/2' camper got as low as 7 MPG in adverse conditions - like a head wind.

The answer is no, our trucks probably won't run if hit by a massive EMP. It is expected that the DS-II or TFI ignition systems would be killed if the truck has a simple system, and the ECU would die if the truck had one of those. Basically the theory is that the only way a truck would run is if it has a points-style ignition. So get a distributor with points and a coil and you could make it run - until you run out of gas.

That is a HUGE camper! We had a 9 1/2' self-contained camper back in the 70's and that one looks more like a 12'. On top of that it was made for a Supercab truck as the overhead is extra long. Yikes!

Might that have something to do with where you live? YES! hahaha, of course...but my point was that usually when trucks are "optioned-up" with AC, they also usually have V8's. Most Lariats and XLT's are not 300/6 trucks. The only Bullnoses with AC in Canada are the ones that were imported from the southern US in recent years lol. Yes, I understood the point - many of the trucks with the 300 six were base trucks and, therefore, w/o A/C.

Might that have something to do with where you live?

On a slightly different topic, I called DB Electrical and talked to Karla Paddock. I explained what I'm looking for, charging amps at various RPMs on the alternators listed above, as I'm trying to understand if the 160 unit throws as much at idle as the 200 vs the 220. She said she'll talk to a tech and get back with me, probably tomorrow. I was impressed with her willingness to help.

David - That's a must-read for anyone with an engine that hasn't been well maintained. For it to happen to you after all of your babying over the years is proof that it can happen to anyone. Thanks for sharing that link.

Thanks, David. But I'm confident that someone has been here before as I see his footprints. However, he didn't leave any notes . Today's testing with the "bad" threshold set to 12.0 and the "good" at 13.0 had the same results as previous tests. IOW, it appears that having the limits only .5v apart (12.0/12.5) wasn't the issue. In the chart below you can see where I switched the compressor on at about 320 seconds and the voltage went south, quickly. Notice that the idle speed control's duty cycle goes up in a stairstep trying to get the idle speed back to 640, which was the desired idle RPM at that point. And you can see that the actual idle speed dropped when the load of the alternator came on, so the regulator is working. (Try that with your carburetor.) The desired idle speed goes up to 736 at 334 seconds in, and then one second later to 784 where it stays for the rest of the test - even after the air compressor is turned off and the voltage comes back to 13.6. Even blipping the throttle like I did at the end of the test didn't get the desired RPM to come back down. I had to turn the engine off and back on to get the desired RPM to go back to 640. Also, wondering if I have a bad connection somewhere I did some voltage-drop testing and proved everything is well. From the starting battery to the aux battery there was a .38V drop. And from the aux battery's positive terminal to the positive terminal of the cable running to the inverter there was a .17V drop. And my DVM was showing the same thing as the ECU was seeing. And all of this was when the air compressor was running. So I'm at a loss as to why I can't get the desired RPM to up past 784 when I'm asking it to go to 1136 after 255 seconds. Nor why it won't come back down when the voltage comes up. But I'm going to quit chasing this rainbow and worry about other things for a bit.

That's what SEM is for. Make it match.

OH MY GOODNESS! You win the prize for sludge! I've never seen anything like that. That's awful, and you'll have to be very careful getting rid of it. Yes, you can plug the drain holes in the head and use degreaser. But I think I'd start with a putty knife and get as much out as you can by hand to give the degreaser a fighting chance. But, what you can't see is what is in the pan, and there is surely similar stuff down there. David/1986F150Six has a story about the stuff in the pan of his 300 that let go and plugged the oil pump pickup screen, and he had to have a mechanic pull the pan and clean it out to get the flow going again. I don't really know what to tell you about the best approach to prevent that. But you might consider biting the bullet and pulling the pan while you are at it, 'cause you stand a very real chance of having all of whatever is down there coming loose and plugging the pickup. Or, you could and use some ATF in the oil, changing frequently, and hope for the best. But I wouldn't plan any long trips until you get it clean for fear that it'll let go while on the trip and strand you. And to add more to David's story, he had been changing oil religiously for years and had driven the truck on several long trips, only to have it happen an hour into a 600 mile trip. Luckily he was able to limp home with no damage, but it was a near miss. The point being, that you won't know what is "down there" for years - unless you pull the pan.

Dale - In the words of Paul Simon " "Ain't we walking down the same street together on the very same day". In the fall of 1966 I was a freshman at Kansas State and we used a 1401 with punch cards. I didn't use paper tape until 1970 when my employer, the local electrical company, purchased a Supervisory Control And Data Acquisition (SCADA) system that was driven by a DEC PDP-8L. The "L" was very important as the "Straight 8" had no core and instructions were fetched from disk while the L had a little bit of core. But in both systems disk latency was a big deal so you kept track of where the disk was in its rotation in order to minimize the fetch time. And all of this was done in assembly language. As for not having computers in these vehicles, that is a significant advantage in many ways. However, that means you have a carb and as I'm aging (you might know about that as well) and want to hand my trucks off to my kids, that becomes problematic. Neither kid can rebuild a carb, so I've decided to implement a system that can be more easily maintained - one that gives them an OBD-II port with a computer that will tell them what is ailing it. And for a 460-powered truck that happened in 1996 and '7, but only in CA. So that's what I'm running.

Welcome back! And happy homecoming in Hawaii for HBF! Do you have time to wrench on HBF or are you enjoying paradise too much?

I changed the "good" battery voltage to 13.0 and ran another test. At 1 second after turning the compressor on the desired idle RPM went from 640 to 736, which is the +96 I called for in the table. But then 1 second later it went to 784, or only +144 when I called for +200. And it stayed at 784 until I turned the truck off and restarted it. I'm really confused by this, but I'm going to drive the truck some tomorrow to see if things might change. I doubt it, but I'll try. Otherwise, I'm about to give up on this approach.

It went for $14.5K.

Use the calculator at Documentation/Driveline/Calculators to figure out what your RPM will be at any speed. But with 3.55 gears and 33" tires I'm running ~1900 @ 65 MPH.

Dale - You are now on the map. And yes, I cut my teeth on IBM machines with core memory. In fact, the first one didn't even know how to add and the first thing you had to do was to load the math tables into memory, without which you got strange answers. Then DEC computers with core and hard drives with 4K of memory and paper tape. Man, we've come a loooooong way. I have a computer in my truck that is far more capable than the room-sized one we had at K-State with thousands of tubes. Its MTBF seemed like only seconds.

Dale - That happens, so if you've read the guidelines then we are good to go. Where's home? We have a map (Bullnose Forum/Member's Map in the menu), and can add you with a city in upstate NY. Big Blue? I almost worked for them at one point, but worked on a whole bunch of their equipment. And you are right, it is all ones and zeros. But you have to know how to group them - in threes for octal or fours for hex. (Had to use some of that knowledge recently to set a mask on my EEC-V system to turn off certain tests and to watch for certain flags.) B-52? I worked on the H while at Boeing. For some reason they didn't like its tendency to shed the tail surface, so we put a strain gauge or two on one to find the problem. I was on the ground accepting the telemetry and writing it to ... tape. (Unlike the one that almost crashed, as described here, we thought it best to transmit the data back rather than writing it to tape on the plane since it might crash.) Anyway, I see why you want to go with a mechanical system. Yuk! I wouldn't want to have to fix all that, so think dumping it for a simple mechanical pump is a good idea.

Looks great! And those tires tell the tale of sitting for years buried in the mud. But the frame and engine show a great level of detail. Ford called that shock arrangement "quad shock", but it does look factory.

Dale - Welcome to the forum. Glad you joined. But you may have missed the email I sent you asking you to post first in the New Members Start Here folder to introduce yourself. We do that because we have the guidelines posted there and want to make sure everyone has had a chance to read them because we hold everyone to them. So, have you read them? On the fuel situation, the reason the factory went with the electric pump and the vapor separator was due to the heat produced by the 460, which tended to cause vapor lock. But that was a bigger problem on vehicles with A/C, so you would probably be fine with a mechanical pump in your usage. But do you only have one tank? Or only need one tank? That will simplify things greatly.

Interesting. It says: Might be pretty handy if you had that intake.

83/87 F250/350 — 8 cyl. 6.9 diesel E5TZ 9J288-CB #E5TA-CB, E6TA-AB