I'm afraid our furry companion has gone and done something rather rash.

Trans_Maro wrote: Removing a badly installed aftermarket -anything- and returning the system to factory specification is the easiest way to eliminate problems. Lots of people -think- they know what they're doing. The reality is that most of them know just enough to make things worse.

But when I say that most people should have their wrenches confiscated for the Good of Mechanical-kind, they think I'm being arrogant...

Trufax: 30% of the reason I want to do more EFI conversions is that I'm sick of spending time doing a razor sharp supertune on a carbureted car, then it comes back in six months "it runs like crap EVER SINCE YOU TUNED IT" and the timing is way off from where my little notebook says we put it and the accelerator circuit is FUBAR and one idle screw is four turns out and the other 1/4 turn out, and when pressed the guy says "Oh yeah, last week my buddy came by and said he could make it run better"

Then like magic, I put things back to where I wrote down where the final settings were, and suddenly it's awesome again. Well, until the guy's buddy comes over for beers again, anyway.

I had one guy get told that the open spacer on his carburetor was causing a tip in stumble so he needed a 4 hole spacer. This was on a Roots supercharged engine where the carb sits over a big eggbeater. The spacer's only purpose was to keep the accelerator pump arm from hitting the blower case... 4 hole, open, it didn't matter one bit to the carburetor. In that guy's case, it was the worn out plugs causing the problem. That's not as sexy a repair as throwing new speed parts on the car, though!

So I found some interesting tidbits today when I tried to time the car. First off to add to this Frankenstiens Monster of a car, it used to be an automatic... still is running the automatic ECU, not sure how bad that part is. The next thing I found when timing it is that it has an aftermarket adjustable timing pointer, hmm sure hope they set that up right. Next, you see those numbers on the balancer, well apparently they don't mean spit. That little scribbled line I guess is 0 degrees. I unhooked the SPOUT connector, hooked up my light and fired her up, 10 degrees is what should be stock and that's what I was getting according to my light.

I dialed it up to 14 based off what I read on the Mustang forums. So during all this timing, I noticed every once in a while the rpm would drop slightly and when it did, the timing would be off, that can't be a good thing, or is that normal? Next up is when the car got up to operating temp the engine said eff this and began coughing till it died. It would start back up, but would only run with throttle input from me. This was while I had the SPOUT still out, when I put the SPOUT back in idled fine, but I might have to do some more testing on that as it had a chance to cool down before I put it back in.

I also found this guy on the back of the fuel rail.

I spliced into the vacuum line on it that was going to the manifold, and hooked up the vacuum/boost gauge that was in the car, slapped it on the hood GTO style and took it for a spin. So at idle it's pulling about 20hg and gets less and less the more throttle you give her like it should. Had the window rolled down and noticed a whistle/sucking noise when the motor starts to die off, sounded like a vacuum leak, I heard it before, but with the window rolled down it was much more noticeable. So I think I need to start looking over every inch of rubber on this engine, or it was just the sound of the air going in the intake.

Might just be the sound of air going into the engine. The idle air control motor is going to yawn like a mofo if the engine starts to stall. It still won't hurt to check, especially if you yank the upper plenum off and check the evap/PCV hoses that go under there. At least, they go under there on the stock plenum, I'm unfamiliar with that particular setup.

Timing pointers seemingly always have to be set up for every individual engine. Fords are especially bad for having timing marks in multiple places depending on all sorts of arcane factors. Pretty much the only constant is that there isn't a standard place for the pointer to be.

One of the nice things about the Mutang with the Windsor motors IIRC is that there's only like 5 vacuum lines total.