Gary Lewis

Dane - Does it take an EVA to cycle the tanks? I think that's what you are implying. Jim - Thanks! Yes, it has been a looooong road, with a whole lot of work. I'm ready to sit back and rest for a bit now. As for weighing it, I suspect that everything has added up to a lot. Using really heavy wire for the charging, starting, and grounding systems. The inverter and its #2 wiring. Two PDB's with fuses & relays. All the wiring to the EFI system. The compressor & tank. The aux battery with isolator. The Highliner w/the GMRS radio. The security system. The storage rack in back. The bed cover. The D60 up front & its OX locker. The side steps and their reinforced mounts. The Warn bumper and winch. The backup lights and fog lights. The switches that control everything. Yikes! But I'm not ready to start on the rear bumper. Maybe Welder Scott will when we rebuild his 2150 in a few weeks, but right now I just want to get this phase done and enjoy it. Speaking of which, my son and I are headed into the wilds of Arkansas this fall with Big Blue. That was my Christmas present from him.

Congratulations! For $500 you cannot go wrong if you can drive it home. And a daily driver is ideal as they can't have anything major wrong with them. However, there are likely to be lots of little things you can do that will be easy but satisfying. As for your wife, get it cleaned up and take her for a ride, stopping at her favorite refreshment stand.

No! Please NO! I don't want any more under the hood!. Seriously, this has been quite the quest and I'm ready to use the truck rather than work on it. And while I'm sure I'll do a few more things, I suspect they'll be pretty minor. Like a lighting upgrade or install the bed lights I've already purchased.

Thanks, Bill. Since I have the headers and duals I ran the cable for the wide-band O2 sensor down the back of the engine and tied it to the support for the fuel lines. That'll give me the ability to put it in the left bank's exhaust right behind #21. As for what I did today, I finished up the wiring! As far as I know, it is D.O.N.E. And testing starts tomorrow. But for the most part I just need to test the power wiring and everything on top of the engine, like the injectors, TPS, IAC, ECT, etc. Plus I probably need to see that my wiring to the inertia switch and fuel pump relay is right. But I've already tested all the wiring that radiates from the PDB and/or connects to the ECU. Why am I going to test all that? Because I thoroughly messed up yesterday's work and had to fix it today. So who knows what else is wonky? Not only did I have the HO2S signal and return wires swapped in the connections going to the O2 sensor, I didn't have power to them. As it turned out I'd picked the wrong wire from C110, although how I did that I don't know as my wiring diagram, above, had the right wire. Anyway, I got that fixed, the cables run back down to the O2 sensors and tested, the air cleaner and MAF sensor installed, the jumper made and installed from the EFI PDB to the battery isolator, and even the coil wire installed. So what I have left to do is to test EVERYTHING, then set the timing, add the air intake plumbing, see if the fuel pump will run, and start it up. Here's a view from the front: And here's the view from the side:

I know of two vendors of the 1980 - 89 MPC - HIPO Parts and David Forel. The one sold by HIPO isn't OCR'd (optical character recognized" and you cannot search it for things. The one sold by Forel is OCR'd, but not well, meaning that less than half of the instances of things I've searched for have been found. (I've told him about that, but got absolutely no response.) And yes, that does imply mine is OCR'd, very heavily. Contact me offline for how I did that.

From what I saw, a whole bunch of 351M and 400's used that motor. But I didn't check to see that all did. If you have a specific application I can check that.

That vacuum motor was widely used for 300's, 351M's, and 400's so should be easy to find.

Welcome. But, I just had a thought - that info is for an air cleaner that would have come with this truck. But maybe this air cleaner didn't come with this truck? If so then I need to go back and find the right PN for whatever truck the air cleaner came from.

Excellent progress!!! The reason you can't find the info about the vacuum motor is that they are shown in the calibration codes. So you have to find the calibration code in order to get the right PN. Looking at the applications list for 1984 Broncos for a 300 Six I see that there were codes 353, 355, 358, 361, and 364. But you have a manual transmission and I assume you don't have a CA-spec vehicle or the Hi-altitude specs. And that means I should go look at #353 or 355... And it looks like D7TZ 9D612-B Motor assy, (carburetor air cleaner vacuum) *CX-120 Color code: brown The CX-120 is the Motorcraft #.

I agree with that approach - although I'd suggest testing your engine/meter combination to see how it works at certain reported AFR readings. I say that because I'm told that the AFR meters themselves vary, and that how far you put your O2 sensor from the cylinders varies the reading. On Big Blue I saw 16:1 at times w/o adverse effects, although anything leaner caused the power output to wane and I had to give it more throttle which popped the rods up and provided a richer mix. But with a different meter on David/1986F150Six's truck I saw 17:1 w/o a noticeable loss or power or pinging. So the meter and the installation in the exhaust makes a difference and you should find out what your engine likes before setting a goal. As for a tight range, I've never been able to get that to happen with a carb. The AFR varies by speed, RPM, load, etc. I gave up trying to adjust for anything between idle and 55 MPH as that seemed futile. And at 55 and up it varied from 14 to 16 depending on the speed, hill, wind, etc. So I wound up picking a stretch of highway that was level and trying to get it to mid-14's on that stretch at 65 MPH with no wind. Then I'd see it go leaner as I gave it a bit of throttle to climb a hill - until the rods popped up and made it richer. But I'd see it go richer as the speed dropped off down towards 55 MPH. And even that description is much too tame as the AFR was very active. Given all that you can see one of the reasons I'm going EFI. It'll have a target of something like 15:1 and should hold that until it is time for the power mode, wherein it should come in around 12:1. (Where's the fingers-crossed emoticon???)

That's AWESOME! It is really going to cause a lot of head-scratching at meets.

If you are going for low-end torque and not high-end horsepower then the smaller passages are what you want. The small passages are good for torque but hurt horsepower. To me that's what you want in a truck.

That around town bit tells me it's a truck you could use to run around town with for a decade, but one trip across the country on the hwy might ruin it haha. The slide a bed is one of those bed drawyers or slide out floors. I had a truck that was fine around town but lost coolant on the highway. Bad headgasket. But that slide a bed might be valuable. They are sought after.

Thanks for doing that, Thomas. As for a meeting, that's a wonderful idea!

Now that's a good buy. Drives and is only $2k. But I wonder about the "around town" bit? And what's a slide a bed?

Yes, 359 is return common to a lot, but I appear to have it swapped with the signal wire on both sensors. I'll check tomorrow. As for the wideband, no need for the pic. I forgot that you have a wye-pipe and I don't. So you can get both banks up close. My banks don't merge until the back edge of the cab, and that is sure too far back for a good reading. So I think I'll have a bung put in whatever side is easiest.

Bill - Thanks for that. But your info is backwards from what I think I found on the HO2S Sig & Rtn. I will check in the morning to see if I have that the wrong way 'round, but it looks like I do have from your drawing. I'll compare that to the harness I have and find out. Also, where do you have the O2 sensor for your wideband? As said earlier, I can't get to a place for both banks until the back of the cab, and I'm not sure I even can then. So are you reading just one bank? Last, below is a page from the '96 EVTM that I've marked up. Note that it says Ckt 359 (GY/R) is "12v with the brake pedal depressed". I figured that was an error, but do you know? It also feeds the ECT, IAT, and TPS sensors.

I wrench on steam locomotives for a living. Ding, ding, ding!!! I win! D&RGW!

I had to go check to make sure I wasn't fibbing Gary...lol. It wasn't for the entire run of Mercury trucks. Apparently just for the first 11 of the 22 years. Quote below: "But, although Mercury’s trucks were essentially F-Series, they did have some unique features. For one, until 1957, Mercury trucks were exclusively V8-powered; in the F-Series, it was an option. The M Series also had different grilles and bumpers with more chrome and more interior trim options."

Ha! That's a great idea Jeff, very creative. That will get people asking questions at car shows and wherever else you stop and get people looking the truck over like they do! Can't wait to see the finished product. I like special touches like this that are unique, but still look factory-ish. My current project truck is a 1952 Mercury M1 that I bought last year. It's currently getting a drivetrain "makeover", albeit a slow one... Gary, I knew the last year was 1968 for the Mercury trucks, but I can't remember the first year...it was around 1946. It's an interesting story, but because Canada was so sparsely populated back in those days, many towns and regions were not big enough or populated to have both Ford and Mercury dealership. To get better coverage, Ford Canada offered Mercury pickups so that all of the towns that didn't have Ford dealerships could still buy pickup trucks locally. They were of course just Ford trucks with Mercury badging, but they had their own unique features. One thing was...if I'm remembering correctly, that Mercury pickups only came with V8's. It you wanted an inline 6, you'd have to buy a Ford....at least for part of that time. As far as I know, the Merc's came in both Styleside and Flareside, and even one tons and medium duty series. Basically the same thing as Chevrolet and GMC, except it was Ford and Mercury in Canada...at least for a couple decades, back before we adopted the metric system, haha. (I was going to insert a USA joke here, but I won't pick on you guys!!). In any case, this is a cool project that Jeff has going. Can't wait to see the end result. Cory - I didn't realize that you couldn't get a six in the Mercurys. Interesting. As for GMC vs Chevrolet, in the early 70's an acquaintance at work was a GMC guy and he was planning to buy a new one. But things had changed since he'd last purchased, which was when the drivetrain was different, along with some other things. We tried to tell him that the only difference was quad headlights on the Jimmy and two headlights on the Chevy, but he bought the Jimmy anyway. When it came in there were GMC badges on one side and Chevrolet badges on the other.

First, I was wrong. 14.4 is not right for stoichiometric. For pure gasoline it is roughly 14.7:1, but that varies by the type of gas and whether or not it has ethanol in it. Second, the book Designing & Tuning High Performance Fuel Injection Systems has several charts that are informative. Here's the one on max fuel economy, and while it shows that max economy is at 15.4 it also says that "there is almost no difference in raw fuel economy between stoichiometry and leaner mixtures." However, that maximizes NOx, as shown below. (Lambda is also soiciometric.) And then there's max power.:

I decided I'd start with the O2 cable, and that's as far as I got, although I did get it done and installed. But not w/o a bunch of head scratching. The issue was that the '96 EVTM doesn't have the pinouts for the connectors going to the O2 sensors. And while I have a connector that plugs into C101, it isn't the right one for this application and had very different wire colors. Plus I was using O2 extension cables for their connectors to mate to the O2 sensors, and they have their own wire colors. And the O2 sensors themselves have different wire colors. So I had a whole bunch of wire colors and and was going bonkers. However, I did remember that I have another harness and, fortunately, it has O2 connectors on it. So I was able to determine what wires went to what pin in the connectors. And then I mapped out this: (Sorry for the smudges, a whole lot of erasing went on today as I worked through this.) And with that I was able to put the cable together shown below. It is now installed, but that's a bit of a story as well since I wasn't sure how I wanted to run the cable to the sensors. But in the end I decided to run it across to the engine with the harness from C101, back along the side of the valve cover, and then down over the back of the engine on each side. So in the pic below you see that there's no convolute on part of the cable, and that's because that section is covered by the heat-reflective covering, and it is just barely big enough to handle the two cables w/o a covering on them. So now it is not only done but installed and I can move on to the last few things tomorrow. However, I'm in a conundrum about my AEM AFR meter. Looking today the first place the two sides of the exhaust come together is right under the rear edge of the cab. And even then there's very little, if any, place to tap into in order to "see" both banks. So it looks like I'll have to tap into one side or the other instead of both

Excellent! Love the report that everything works. Glad to see that the Blue Top is such an improvement. John/Machspeed just put one on his truck and hopes to have it on the road this weekend, and I'll bet we get another good report. As for the AEM, glad it is working, but you should see 14.4:1 at cruise. So you are still quite rich.

The email system is sorta broken. It does send, but it doesn't show that it does. I always say "Send a copy to me" and that proves it sent. I'll see if I can't get that fixed, but it is doubtful.

That's cool! I assume that Flaresides were sold in Canada as Mercurys? I see on Wikipedia that production ended in '68, but it doesn't tell if they were Stylesides, Flaresides, or both.