Build Thread 1978 Mercury Cyclone. The pig is in the pen.

Man o man....things are moving now.

Because it’s Sunday, part of this day was shared with my wife. At 2, she wanted to go to a sports bar, and watch the Chiefs game With some of her football watching female friends.

I’d rather have the flu.

Since she knew that I wasn’t gonna be up for that, she offers that I spend the rest of the day in the garage, and she would go meet her friends to yell at a bunch men chasing after the guy that has the ball.

Why,....I don’t mind if I do.


This is my fuel cell. It’s Chine. I have to modify the thing to accept my pump, and either buy a longer sending unit, or make a drop to allow it to recess. Either way, it’ll be wrong. If I drop the thing an inch, it’ll never read full, if I leave it where it is, it’ll say the tank is empty when there would still be several gallons left.

i think it’s better to have the thing say the tank is empty when it actually still has gas in it. ( It’s not like I’ll ever allow this car to run that low anyway)

When there are so many things to do on this car, I’m bouncing around trying to get as many things started as I can. I decided to put the head on the car...


But one of the studs didn’t want to go in nicely. Seemed like there was damage to the threads in the block. The bolt that came out of it threaded in smoothly, but that stud acted like it was gonna gall. So,..I grabbed the bolt, and headed to O Reilly’s to buy a tap. I figured it had to be metric. When I got there, I threaded the bolt into their thread test board that they had hanging there...thought it might be a 10mm fine thread, 10-100pitch. The bolt wouldn’t thread into the nutsert they had that was that size, but at Oreillys, cave men have tried to thread the wrong bolt in almost every nutsert they have, so all of them are phcked up anyway. I looked for that tap. Didnt have it anyway.
Just to be sure, I go back to that thread board, and check the bolt one last time, only this time I’ll check the SAE stuff instead.
It threaded into the 7/16-20 insert..

Go figure,...a domestic thread in a Japanese engine..They didnt have that tap either.

Turns out, I did.

But it wasn’t right. The engine is a Japan spec version, there just isn’t a way that they used a domestic bolt in any part of the engine. A 7/16-20 tap didn’t thread in right either,..I chose not to force it. Instead, I dicked with cleaning the threads and working the stud in and out till I got it all the way in. When I finally got the stud issue behind me, I set the head on the studs.

You couldn’t get some of the nuts to thread,..the holes were intended for a socket head bolt, and there was a bunch of of casting slag in the way. I had to remove the head, remove all of the spring cups ( cause grinding sht was gonna get everywhere again). Once I got that all clean and smooth, and after blowing off the head extensively, I put the thing BACK on, and threaded the 14 nuts on, and torqued the head down to 75ft lbs.

I needed to do some work to the oil pump. Information online recommends rounding off the sharp edges to aid oil flow. That meant the pump had to come apart..There’s like 8 Phillips head screws holding the back on,...you have to remove the back to remove the gears. You have to remove the gears because........grinding dust.

Except,..those screws were torqued down like a sonofabitch. One of them got mangulated and the philips head screw slots became worthless. I had to drill it out. Fortunately there was the old pump that I could rob the screw from.
Once that was done,..I painted the pump GM copper, ( not General Motors) and bolted it on.
I got the new water pump out, it’s part of a two piece unit. I cleaned the old back side. It had a nipple that was intended to feed the old water cooled factory turbos. I removed it, and tapped that so I could plug it. Put the two pieces together, and painted it. Unfortunately, I don’t have the freakin o ring that seals the pump to the block ( Although I thought I did) bottom line..it didn’t get bolted on.


You can see every freakin Oring I had trying to find one that would fit...Not today..
Pretty well ended my engine progres...but I wasn’t done..

This is the VVTI intake gear. When you have one of these engines and start doing homework, you find out that they’ll leak in certain spots. This gear has an Oring seal that sits in the groove you see. That Oring becomes brittle with age, and oil starts to get past it. you can see the crotchety broken Oring in the pic. Even though they pressure wash these engines there was still evidence of leakage. This engine had leaks, and one of them was this gear. Fixing it is easy, you just have to make sure you put the gear back together the way it came apart, otherwise the cam timing could get all phcked up. It’s just a matter of lining up the grooves in the gears. and of course,..you gotta have the right Oring..on this one, I do.

I removed the PS rack. I wanted to keep the alignment, so I locked the two front rotors together before I removed the rack.
I also transferred the bumpsteer kit over to the new manual rack. I checked that thing too,.....3.5 turns lock to lock.
The last thing I did was remove the column,..and that is all the news that fit to tell.

Because you can only post 5 pics per reply.

The prius EPS unit was delivered according to my FedEx app...
Time to see if I've thrown more money away.