It was rather appropriate that it was raining on the trip back...
November 2007 - Engine Wiring
My next goal was to get the engine started. After getting the coolant system buttoned up, the main item left was the engine wiring. I considered just throwing the wiring on enough to get a start, but I decided to take the time to setup the wiring correctly the first time rather than doing it twice. I'm striving to keep the engine bay as "clean" as possible so I'm hiding as much of the wiring as possible that that takes a bit of work. I started by fabricating a drop down panel with some sheet metal and an old piano hinge as the fuse box mount. It drops down from the space in the pedal box over the driver's legs.
I installed FFmetal.com's trunk battery box and it looks terrific. For the wires routed from the front to back of the car I decided to install a flexible conduit along the trans-tunnel backbone. The main connection comes from the battery box in the trunk through to the firewall right behind the engine. I put holes for a few wires that come out to the cockpit/trans area and another one in the trunk before the battery box for the rear light wiring.
I installed a battery cut off switch above the trans tunnel that you can see in this picture. It's a removable key and I think that will help a bit with security. I know the key isn't fancy, but not very many folks have them laying around, so it would at least slow down the average thief. You can also see some white strings in this picture. Those are feed strings for running additional wires through the conduit. Before I installed the big battery cable, I ran some loops of string through to the trans hole and trunk holes. When I want to run a new wire through the conduit, I tape it to the appropriate string loop and use the string to pull it through. Works pretty well.
Here's a shot of the backside of the battery cut off switch. All the engine and starter wiring go through that area and I'm fabricating a metal panel that I will use to cover up the bundle of wires. I also have black plastic sleeve that I will be putting over the wires for protection and looks (although these and most of the other wires will be hidden).
After getting the battery wired up, I then proceeded to bring out the American Auto Wire harness that came with the kit and start the main wiring. I figured the minimum was engine coil, alternator, radiator fan, and 2 instruments, oil pressure and coolant temperature. You can see here the bulk of the AAW harness piled up in coils organized (barely) by logical group. You can also see my "dashboard" of oil pressure and coolant temperature, duct taped to the dash hoop :-).
For the radiator, horn and headlights, relays are needed in order to take the remove the current load from the main switch. In order to keep the engine compartment as clean as possible I decided to fabricate a box in which to place these fuses and fit it in the left front wheel well. It doesn't look like it will be in the way, but it's getting pretty tight in there.
Here's couple shots of the engine wiring. This is an older Ford alternator so it has an external voltage regulator (top box) and a duraspark 2 distributor setup so there is the separate coil (black) and ICM (Ignition Control Module) (lower box). I chose to use a coil with internal ballast to avoid the ballast resistor and its heat, but that seemed to be uncharted territory, so I hope things work out OK.
December 2007 - Engine Start!
This day was greatly anticipated. I filled the engine with oil, trans with ATF, diff with oil, radiator with coolant, and charged the battery. The previous day I pulled the spark plugs (reduce pressure on the components) and valve covers (visibility) and cranked the engine until oil pressure built up. I continued to crank and make sure that each pushrod was delivering oil as it should. This process attracted all my family and several of the neighbors who found it very interesting to look at the rocker arms opening and closing the valves.
Through the long process to get to this stage I'd had many friends and relatives ask me to call them when I was ready to start it up. So I planned a bit of a party and invited anyone over who wanted to come. There were about 20 people who came to witness the event. We first discovered that I had aligned the distributor exactly 180 degrees off (so it was sparking after the exhaust stroke. Ooops. After fixing that, we got it to start, but only by putting gas directly into the carb. The fuel pump didn't seem to be working. I had suspected it may be an issue because when I'd cranked it to run up the oil pressure, the gas never pulled up to the carb. I had picked up a new fuel pump (mechanical) at napa, but didn't have time to install it and some folks said the old one might just need to be run faster in order for it to start to draw fuel. But, no luck. While many looked on, several of us (especially Ken) scraped knuckles to replace the fuel pump. That did the trick and she started right off. Just watch the video. It's much better :-).Engine_Start_Video (I'm the one in the Green and white Jacket, sitting in the car in the last picture)
I was quite pleased to pull it into the garage as my "first drive". There were a couple of coolant leaks; one around the temp sender that I easily fixed, and another around the thermostat housing. I've tried once to fix the thermostat housing leak, but need to try again. I've started it a several times since then, but the last time, superbowl Sunday, one of the primaries was not feeding any gas and it didn't run very well. The carb was a bit rough anyway, so I think it's time for a rebuild.
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