Need Advice - Engine & Transmission stuff

[Mercracer]

BTW, has anybody ever tried one of the old 400's? I was under the impression that it was a Cleveland engine, but I don't know what family of engines it belongs to (302/351, FE,..?) I've seen a bunch of 'em in the wrecking yard; I'm wondering if they are a legit engine to build for performance and if they bolt in the box.

....400cui engines are related to "cleveland " engines....but are closer to 351m "modified" engines.....you can spend shitloads of cash on em,or just buy a true cleveland and do much better....(351m and 400m heads suck.....very restrictive....good for torque however,but not horsepower)...also these engines are not in any way related to a 302/351w...and wont fit in a panther without modification(i dont think an AOD trans will bolt up either,but dont quote me on that)

Here's the deal.... The 351C, 400 and 351M are all in the same engine family (335 series). ALL 351C blocks use the same bellhousing pattern as the 302 and 351W and SOME early 351Ms do. Most all 351M and 400 blocks share the 429/460 bellhousing pattern. There is ZERO difference between the ports and valves of 351C, 400 and 351M heads. They ALL flow the same. They ALL flow very well (not at all restrictive) and will put ANY factory 351W head to shame including the GT40 heads. The 351M is essentially a 400 with a 351W crankshaft. 20 years ago, before you could buy reasonably priced cast steel stroker cranks, people were putting 400 cranks in their 351W blocks for big cubes. This required a couple of machining changes to the crank and alot of balancing but it worked well.
A 400 makes 400+HP without even trying. The problem with all 351C, 400 and 351M blocks is that they have very thin cylinder walls and the oiling system sucks. This is why NASCAR uses the 351W oiling system in their blocks and not the Cleveland style.
Putting a 400 block in your Panther would cost you more in the long run than stroking a Windsor.

[Mercracer]

Ok, I'm gonna start a shitstorm, my experience is that a carburetor can be made to run as well as the lopo efi or TB, maybe better. The efi on the boxes is very "stupid", as efi's go; modern carbs are VERY good, and very tunable. Efi has the advantage of better cold performance and the ability to deal with higher elevations without the need for rejetting, but once set up, an Edelbrock, for example, is an extremely well-behaved and easy to live with choice. I also don't believe efi necessarily has the edge on fuel mileage, but it definitely does on emissions. And it is DEFINITELY cheaper to fix a carb.. and easier without having to run down the dozen or so possible sources of fuel system hiccups with the efi. My two cents...

This is subject matter for a separate thread, but there is no carb which can compete with EFI for fuel economy and driveability. Carbs are dumb fuel metering devices. You may be able to tune them for a specific altitude, temp, humidity, etc but the moment the air changes, they are no longer tuned "perfectly". EFI can adapt to changes. Carbs are less expensive to run which is why advocate them for a low budget performance build.

[t65neon5]

Here's the deal.... The 351C, 400 and 351M are all in the same engine family (335 series). ALL 351C blocks use the same bellhousing pattern as the 302 and 351W and SOME early 351Ms do. Most all 351M and 400 blocks share the 429/460 bellhousing pattern. There is ZERO difference between the ports and valves of 351C, 400 and 351M heads. They ALL flow the same. They ALL flow very well (not at all restrictive) and will put ANY factory 351W head to shame including the GT40 heads. The 351M is essentially a 400 with a 351W crankshaft. 20 years ago, before you could buy reasonably priced cast steel stroker cranks, people were putting 400 cranks in their 351W blocks for big cubes. This required a couple of machining changes to the crank and alot of balancing but it worked well.
A 400 makes 400+HP without even trying. The problem with all 351C, 400 and 351M blocks is that they have very thin cylinder walls and the oiling system sucks. This is why NASCAR uses the 351W oiling system in their blocks and not the Cleveland style.
Putting a 400 block in your Panther would cost you more in the long run than stroking a Windsor.

i stand corrected

[zoomie]

Ok, I'm gonna start a shitstorm, my experience is that a carburetor can be made to run as well as the lopo efi or TB, maybe better. The efi on the boxes is very "stupid", as efi's go; modern carbs are VERY good, and very tunable. Efi has the advantage of better cold performance and the ability to deal with higher elevations without the need for rejetting, but once set up, an Edelbrock, for example, is an extremely well-behaved and easy to live with choice. I also don't believe efi necessarily has the edge on fuel mileage, but it definitely does on emissions. And it is DEFINITELY cheaper to fix a carb.. and easier without having to run down the dozen or so possible sources of fuel system hiccups with the efi. My two cents...

most ppl who complain about efi also dont know how to deal with efi, i can for instance work on both efi and carbed cars, so it dont make a diff to me. it is in my experience that carbs, at one time did have the market cornered, and while yes they are esier to tune, there is alot of new stuff on the market now. I have yet to see a carbed stang run better than a efi 5.0 motor unless it was seriously built . and as for carbs go when it comes to perfromance forget edelbrock or holley, they dont have enough umph bhind them. to be honest with you, i fyou look at the vaporization of carbed and the vaporiczation of efi, youll find that the efi in general does a better and more efficient job at it.

[Mike_Windsor]

Geez, I sparked a debate.

Look, I'm not great at cars. I have a 1986 Mercury Grand Marquis LS that I love to pieces and I want it to last forever.

It's carbeurated, and yes it's a Canadian car. I live in friggin' Alberta, and it gets to -40 degrees out, and the silly thing stalls when it's cold, and it's because it's carbeurated.

Someone said get a 408 engine. Is that a Ford 408CID engine I should look at?

[johnunit]

A 408 is a modified 351 Windsor (what you have.) It's the largest durable engine configuration you can get from a stock 351W block. They never existed from the factory. They are built with aftermarket performance parts, namely a crankshaft with a 4 inch stroke instead of the 351's 3.5 inch, and a piston that is 4.030 inches in diameter instead of the factory 4 inches. As you might guess, the 4.030 inch piston requires the cylinders to be "bored out" to that size. However, this is usually needed with a 20+ year old stock block just to restore the smooth cylinder surface anyway.

You can either buy a 408W block (or entire motor) from a performance engine builder like Fordstrokers.com or have a machine shop bore your block out and install the 'stroker kit' crankshaft, pistons, rods, etc. in your engine.


While you could run everything else on the engine as-is with this new larger displacement setup, you'll see a pretty small performance increase if you do that since everything (heads, exhaust, intake, carburetor, etc) was "small" for 351CID and is just plain pitiful for a 408CID engine.



None of that, however, will get you a car that starts better in -40 degree weather. It won't harm it, but won't help either.

That requires the aformentioned EFI swap, or a different carburetor could be made to start better when cold than the tempermental and hard to tune Variable Venturi carb these cars came with. However, the EFI swap is not something I'd consider within the skill level of someone 'not great at cars'. I don't mean that as a dig in any way, but it's just the truth. It's a lot of wiring, engine work, test fitting, etc. for someone who doesn't seem to have a lot of experience under the hood of a car. You MIGHT be able to find a shop that would do that swap for you, but they've probably never done it before and I'd expect to pay well over 1000 dollars for it in labour alone.

Your best bet would probably be to have a 2 barrel carburetor put on by a shop that does some restoration or domestic performance work. Maybe a local mustang shop or something like that. This will be cheaper than the EFI swap, since it's basically de-activating some of the variable venturi stuff, slapping the carburetor on and tuning it, and then getting the tv rod (the connection between the throttle and the transmission, VERY important) to work on the non-original carburetor. You'll probably still have some issues in cold weather, but a Holley 2-barrel carburetor tuned by someone who knows what they're doing should have much better cold weather performance than an aging variable venturi.



You're sort of between a rock and a hard place, in that the logical answer is simple that a 351 Crown Victoria is a bad car by most logical standards for winter driving in alberta by someone who isn't particularly mechanically savvy, but I wholeheartedly understand why that logic doesn't matter in this case.

[gadget73]

Carbs can be made to work well, but quite frankly -40 is f'n cold, and an old tired motor and carb is not likely to want to run proper in those conditions. Even EFI can be bitchy when its that cold, though you have a much better chance of it running decently year round with EFI. With the carb, you'd be re-tuning it a couple times a year to deal with the temperature swings. Honestly you may not want a crazy performance build to deal with in such conditions. A basically stock motor will probably give you better year-round drivability than a heavily modified setup that is tweaked and tuned to the hilt.

[Mike_Windsor]

Sounds like I'm better off with the 351 then.

Well, the intake gasket is leaking oil I'm told, so it's about time to get the engine seals redone anyways. While I'm doing that I need to get the piston rings redone and, well, I guess that'll be as good a time as any to do the EFI conversion.

Someone took the variable venturi carbeurator off as it was flooding out and put some Edelbrock thing on it. Car's still not starting right, in that it stalls frequently when cold. I'm told that's just me trying to drive it like it's fuel-injected.

[t65neon5]

Sounds like I'm better off with the 351 then.

Well, the intake gasket is leaking oil I'm told, so it's about time to get the engine seals redone anyways. While I'm doing that I need to get the piston rings redone and, well, I guess that'll be as good a time as any to do the EFI conversion.

Someone took the variable venturi carbeurator off as it was flooding out and put some Edelbrock thing on it. Car's still not starting right, in that it stalls frequently when cold. I'm told that's just me trying to drive it like it's fuel-injected.

......if the choke isnt set properly it will stall a lot when the engine is still cold....let it warm up alil then try driving off

[Mercracer]

Someone took the variable venturi carbeurator off as it was flooding out and put some Edelbrock thing on it. Car's still not starting right, in that it stalls frequently when cold. I'm told that's just me trying to drive it like it's fuel-injected.

Is a factory exhaust manifold to air cleaner heat tube connected? Does the vacuum actuated temperature controlled "flapper" in the air cleaner function properly?

[Mike_Windsor]

I dunno what those things are, but I'll ask the mechanic dude.

[Mike_Windsor]

So I took a couple of pictures of the engine and the thing behind the distributor. Also of one of the head bolts.

Look like a 351W to you guys?

[zoomie]

I looked into a efi swap, so here are soem suggutions, the lower intake manifold: obviously the one to get would be the lower first gen lighting gt40 varient,but you can also use a truck lower and hook it up with a holley systemax or other aftermarket intake. it would be easyier to swap a wiring harness than making one. the only thing im not sure about ids the return style fuel system.

[Mike_Windsor]

You'd think that there'd be a kit specifically for our kind of cars for doing the conversion.

[johnunit]

You have a car with no "heat stove" pipe. there are a lot of names for it, but basically the car normally has a snorkel that leads to the air filter. This "snorkel"s main tube will either be sucking air from the engine compartment open ended, or have a tube that leads all the way to the grille area to get air from the outside of the car. The "heat stove pipe" is a pipe from that snorkel to the exhaust manifold. When the car is warming up, the vacuum-controlled temp sensor mentioned above makes a flap in the snorkel close so that it's sucking air through the "heat stove pipe" instead of the main tube. This means it's getting heated air from aroudn the exhaust manifold. Heated intake air, of course, makes starting in cold weather easier. The air filter on that engine is a "performance" model. Good for flow at high RPM's but not good for cold starting as it has no heat stove, or even snorkel


Here is the heat stove pip. It goes from the exhaust manifold (yours will look different, mine is actually a wrapped up header) in the bottom of the picture to the underside of the snorkel which is just above the top edge of the picture




Ignore the vacuum gauge I'm holding up. See the rounded rectangular tube coming off the air filter housing and pointing towards the camera? That's the snorkel. The little hockey puck shaped thing with a hose coming from it is the motor that turns the flap which makes the engine suck air from that tube you see under the snorkel (heat stove pipe) instead of the general air from the engine bay. The other end of that hose that comes off the hockey puck is attatched to a temperature sensor. When the air in the air cleaner housing is cold the sensor allows vacuum into that hose and the hockey puck closes a flap right under it so the engine sucks air from the heat stove pipe.




Unfortunately, someone has entirely removed that air cleaner, which the snorkel and heat stove pipe are attatched to, because it does not fit on the Edelbrock carburetor. As a result you've lost a significant cold weather startup feature.