Gary Lewis

Amen, brother! And the mounting method is much better.

Glad you are getting help. That's what we are all about. As for "a group of SU's", they seemed to come in flocks, and looked like hungry birds.

I also got the dome light mounted. The map lights are traditional amber/non-LED bulbs on purpose, I want a less-bright light if my wife uses the map light while I'm driving, and also I have probably a dozen of that kind of bulb floating around. The center I did put an LED into. It all turned out really well but there was one disappointment. Oh LMC... They sell a "clear dome light cover" for this unit and it was cheap so I got it. But caveat emptor, it doesn't fit very well. It won't stay on, it seems like the cover is just a millimeter off on the width and the mounting tabs are so short they don't grab the slots they go into very well. It's hard to tell from the photo but it's actually hanging down in the back here. The neoprene gasket did do its job. This is the "wrong" light for my cab ceiling so my mounting boss is a smaller rectangle. I used the gasket both to trim out / fill the air gap where the new light sits on that boss and also make sure the terminals don't contact the roof of the truck. I could have made it about a millimeter smaller all around but it looks fine if you don't look too close. The dome light looks good, save for the lens. Obviously the one from LMC isn't acceptable. But your adaptation is well done. And the bed rug should serve you well. Dad had one in his truck and it didn't cause the bed to rust. (But it did trap .22 casings - he shot a lot from the bed.)

Looking good! You are getting a lot of details done. Can't wait to see the thing completed.

Piece by piece you are getting it together. As for the MPC, how many pages are in it? Just curious how the MPC might have grown. Ours is a bit over 5000 pages.

LOL! Yes, there is a BBK throttle body for Big Blue awa the upper plenum, powder coated of course. And the fuel distribution manifold is there, and powder coated as well. Plus twin-snorkel air cleaners.

Thanks. Yes, I like the rectangular style. And yes, that's the mike for the hands-free part of the Sony radio. Works well.

Got a bit done today. First, I drilled a hole in the right back corner of the cab and installed a gland nut in the hole with the rear camera cable running through it. Then I got the front & rear camera cables as well as the switched-power wire routed under the edge of the Highliner, down the A & B-pillars, and across the top of the windshield to the mirror. And then I got the trim and dash pad back on. You can see how it worked out in the pic below, but I think it turned out nicely. The right-angle connectors from Pormido prevent going straight up with the wires, so that's about the best I could do. And the square thing above the mirror on the windshield is the GPS antenna.

Here's an excerpt of a recent post of mine: There are two versions of the oval that I'm aware of that fit our trucks: Original: These are marked E2TB-9843156-A and are part number E2TZ 9842528-A. 1987 & later: These are marked E7TB-9843156-AA and are part number E7TZ 9842528-A You can see the differences in the two in Rusty's post here. And while the E2 version is more "correct", Big Blue came to me with the E7 version, so I'd be happy replacing it with one of those. And now to answer your question - I don't have a good source. I did quite a bit of research and came up with this on Amazon: Genuine Ford F2TZ-9842528-A Nameplate. But in spite of Amazon saying it'll fit my '85 I'm very sure it won't, although I haven't canceled the order yet. As John/Machspeed pointed out, the reviews say it won't fit and the dimensions are wrong. So, back to the drawing board, and all of the early ones I found were something like $75 plus shipping, and the shipping was significant. So, since the one that was on Big Blue when I got him was the later badge I ordered this one: E7tz9842528a Name Plate Oem Ford. And in spite of Amazon saying it won't fit, I know it will as it is the same one that I took off Big Blue - and damaged. But, if you find a good source please buy a few and then let us know.

Dave - I wouldn't bother to pull the dizzy and change out the spring until I'd tried turning the vacuum advance full CCW. Maybe that will back enough out to make it work. Then, if that doesn't work I'd go for the big spring. It probably won't work, but it is a whole lot easier than pulling the dizzy, and you really should start with the least vacuum advance and add some until it pings and then back off instead of starting with all you can get. As for the loop in the heavy factory spring, it lets you get a little advance early on and then slows it down when you hit the end of the loop. But I really don't think you want to start the advance early, so the MSD spring might do the trick.

Yes, you are right, Matt. We don't really "hear" the sound and are having to use someone else's ears and words to describe both the sound and the location. Which is why we are guessing. But with testing I'll bet we can get it right.

Into the carb should speed it up, but won't prove there's a leak. Another trick is to use a piece of hose as a stethoscope to listen for leaks.

In my experience hisses are usually vacuum leaks. However, Welder Scott's 2150 hisses, and I don't know why, although we are going to work on it soon and I may find out. One way to find out if it is a vacuum leak is to spray brake or carb cleaner around the area where the noise is coming from. If it is a vacuum leak the engine will speed up. We did that with Scott's truck and proved it isn't a vacuum leak. So it must be the carb. So you might try that.

Ok guys, we could add a folder in Projects called Completed Projects, or somesuch. Or, what did you have in mind?

Well, memory would be a good thing to have. Turns out that I have the truck-related bits of the 1985 Emissions Fact Book on the site at Documentation/CALIBRATION INFO & PART #'S and then the 1985 Emissions Info tab. So you can find all of the info there. However, for the 4.9L engines I've put a link in the Index. And I put a link specifically to your calibration code. (I'll put in links to the other engines later, probably during the football game tonight.) Also, since my scans at 600 dpi and 50% contrast aren't crisp, I scanned that particular page at 1200 dpi and 80% contrast, which gives a much crisper rendering. (However, it is also much larger, file size, so I don't want to do that with every page.) Then, realizing that it is hard to read the vacuum routing turned 90 degrees, I rotated and cropped that page to give the view below. But, even cropped to just the vacuum routing that is a 2.1 meg file, and that won't post here. So the one below is downgraded to .9 meg to get under the 1 meg limit. However, if you want the high res file you can download it here. Hope that helps.

That's the right approach - sneak up on it. And since earlier it seemed to be starting ok at 16 BTDC I think I'd dial in up to that pretty quickly. You want to get your initial + centrifugal timing nailed down before working on the vacuum advance. But you should be at work right now, having driven the truck to work with the initial at 14 BTDC and no vacuum. Then you'll connect vacuum to the can for the drive home, so I'm looking for a report when you get home. I believe what you will find on the vacuum is that will give you a whole bunch of advance. That's because it is set up for EGR but you don't have EGR enabled on the engine, right? The addition of exhaust gas to the air/fuel mix slows the combustion significantly so they had to dial in a whole bunch of advance to compensate. However, the exhaust gas is only added when the engine vacuum is high, so they added the advance through the vacuum advance unit, so those vacuum units can add a whole bunch of advance. Looking at your previous notes your unit appears to give 35 degrees of advance with the screw all the way CW. I believe that may be too much, but maybe not with the really slow centrifugal advance. Still, I'd want to get the initial set to 16 before I did much tuning on the vacuum. Good luck!

Hello, Steve! Glad you finally came out of hiding. That will be a cool truck. I'm looking forward to following the work to get it on the road. And, by the way, you are now on the map.

Pormido has been great to work with. I have way over 100 messages to/from Melissa, and she is quite helpful. If she doesn't know she'll tell me and then go talk to an engineer. For instance, she recently said they've not tested to see how long the cable can be to the front camera since they expected it to be installed inside the vehicle. I think my 30' of cable was well over the limit.

Hadn't thought of it that way. And I guess it could be a "resource" to someone needing it. But to me I'm just documenting a project I did w/o all of the rabbit-chasing, missteps, etc. We obviously don't have guidelines or definitions for where to post, so I guess it is up to the poster.

I wasn't aware of any "pin cushion cowl". Is there a part number or photo or link or something you can share? Part of me wants to try to reuse my current cowl since it's in really good condition considering the age of the vehicle. Around here, cars parked outside tend to get murdered by hail over the years, and despite being weathered almost to bare metal, it's pretty straight and not deformed. But if there's a drop-in alternative with a smarter vent design I'd definitely consider it. This design is... not Ford's brightest idea... Today was a big day. I was finally ready to lay my carpet down plus do a bunch of other interior "trim" finalization: dome light, kick pieces, etc. And the moment I started it all went wrong. I dropped the shifter-cane alignment pin into the transmission! I was SUPER careful the first time I took this out - I had read about the problem and was ready with a magnet to grab it. What I didn't realize is that the pin itself had become a bit magnetic somehow, or maybe it just came that way. I got the pin in place just fine but when I went to drop in the cane, the nearby metal yanked the pin out sideways and down it went! Oh no..... Suddenly this is a bigger job than I'd originally planned but I'm a "life hands you lemons, grab the vodka" kind of guy. I had always intended to check the transmission oil level and now I had the perfect excuse for that and a visual inspection of the gears. I yanked the drain plug and pulled off the PTO cover so I could retrieve the pin. That was reassuring. I was worried for a 30-yr-old vehicle with unknown history and a manual transmission that there would be some gear damage. I had mentally prepared for a transmission rebuild at some point. But I think I have some time. The gears mostly look good, as much as you can tell at a glance. No broken or damaged teeth, and the magnetic pickup tool only pulled out a few small metal slivers (plus the pin). Nothing I wouldn't have expected for a tranny this old... I'm 99% certain work was done to this thing at SOME point. The sealant on the cover was clearly Permatex Black, I would recognize that stuff anywhere, and it was very sloppily applied. So I'm wondering if maybe this thing had some transmission work done already. Here you can see all the scratches, which is where I'm betting somebody in the past cleaned up the original Ford sealant. Those are (almost totally) not from me - I used a brass bristle brush for my cleaning. Unfortunately AutoZone was closed and Walmart didn't carry the right weight of oil, so I've got an order coming from Amazon (more waiting!) Thursday with the right stuff. But, since I was finally able to reinstall the shifter cane by this point, I was able to cut the hole in the carpet in the correct location, and lay that down. And that... well that just looks amazing to me. This isn't something you'd ever have in a showroom, but for a hunting rig for my wife and I to fart around in? It's perfect. I had bought some floor mats from Amazon to go along with this but I hate them so I'm going to spring for some nice Weathertech's to round it all out, and I should be able to finally start installing interior trim. One last project for the night, I may have mentioned I wanted to convert my dome light to the dome/map combo. I had already run an always-on (fused) circuit a week or so ago. But I didn't have one of those oddball black plastic screw/wire terminal connectors Ford uses on the dome light and wasn't in love with that setup anyway. I was also missing the plastic "spacer" piece the map/dome combo needs. So I cut that out of neoprene, and using some ring terminals, star washers, and a crimp style connector I converted the map light to have a nicer connector, then cut a spacer out of a sheet of 1/8" neoprene: I'm pretty happy with how this all turned out. The only exception was at some point over the years I had bought a terminal/connector kit of some generic style (not Weather-pack). I had never used them because I like Weather-pack so much but figured this was as good a time as any to try it, since it's easy to access/replace later, and a non-critical item. (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B092Q11S98 if you're curious) Well... they're OK but not great. The pins don't seem to seat as firmly and the alignment isn't as smooth. If you're in the market, Weather-pack is where it's at IMO. You had a big day! Well done! The truck is really coming together, and now you know the tranny is good. There's a silver lining in every cloud. As for the pin cushion cowl, it came out in 1987 so you should be able to find one in a salvage. The part number is shown below, and they obviously think the pin cushion version, which is the E7 part number, is superior to the Bullnose version 'cause they took the E0 Bullnose number out of the catalog. And here's a shot of the one on Big Blue. It is a bolt-in on a Bullnose truck, and seems to solve the leaf or pine needle problem.

Yes, it was a good day. I feel good about it and I know Steve does. As for the fuses, I don't dare pull any harder. They surely are connecting to the test point, and they'd have to be in there tightly so the test point would make a good connection, but they are in so tightly that I'm not sure they are intended to come out. I've complained to Pormido about the instructions, which don't provide any guidance whatsoever on those fuses, and they've just come back saying: I fully agree the fuse boxes in various vehicles are surely quite different, and these would work as taps. But my complaint is they they don't tell whether or not the fuses come out to be replaced. And, they are the small fuses that not all vehicles use. So I'll provide some feedback, but after I tap into their wiring to shorten things so I don't have oodles of wire in that radio cavity. As for power from the fuse box, I tapped into the power that was intended for the digital clock. I'm using that for various things in the Mission Control switches, so I just ran a wire to the right, up the right A-pillar, across the windshield header under the Highliner, and then into that radio cavity. There was already always-on power there, so I'm set.

Well, "the plan for tomorrow after church is to finish the power wiring and then run the camera leads" didn't really come to fruition. Steve/Foxford33 has built a shop and is trying to get the tools he needs to restore his Grand Wagoneer. He needed heat, so an unused kerosene heater is finally getting some use. He needs to be able to pull the engine, so the extra 2" tubing I've had taking up space in the attic is going to a good cause - an A-frame engine hoist. And the extra engine stand I've been tripping over is going to hold the Chrysler engine that the engine hoist will pull out. So I feel like I had a productive day in spite of not getting much done on Big Blue as I now have more space in the shop. And, a buddy is getting to work on his projects. Plus, he helped me carry a blue seat that is in "excellent condition" up to the attic out of the back of Big Blue. (To be fair, I robbed the hinge cover off of it to replace the one on Big Blue that I put a screw through to hold it on.) But then I did do a teeny bit of work on the camera system. As you can see in the pic below of the "hardware kit", the power feeds are through two small fuses that are intended to plug into some fuse holder. But I don't have any holders that size, and even if I did I wouldn't want to use them 'cause I cannot get those fuses out of the connectors they are in. So if I blew a fuse at some point I'd be stuck. Given that I've ordered several in-line fuse holders and will use them to shorten the wiring to the "snake head" shown at the bottom of the pic. That's the brains of the power supply, and it both converts 12v to 5v as well as monitors battery voltage and shuts the system down if the voltage goes low. The best laid plans...

Man, that made a huge difference in the advance. You shouldn't have pinging even with the vacuum advance connected. But on the way to work w/o the vacuum advance see if you think the truck has as much power as it previously had. I think you may have given some away with the slow centrifugal advance. You may want to put that heavy MSD spring in if it is lighter than the factory heavy spring. And I'll bet on the way home with the vacuum connected the part-throttle response is better. However, since the vacuum, and there for the advance, goes away with much throttle I fear you are still leaving power on the table. Maybe boost the initial to 16 degrees if it starts ok?

F-Series trucks can have either a mid-ship tank on the driver's side or that plus an aft-axle tank like the Bronco.