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

Let's try this:

This is one of the pics that I tried numerous times to load:

Now that pic looked absolutely normal before I committed to " Post Reply" but again, no worky.

But on photobucket, there is a
" Recent uploads" tab as well as my Bucket. I use both, but some pics display, while others do not.

Here is the same attempt from my Bucket:


Anndd still no worky.

This pic shows up perfectly in both versions over at FEP

So, I'll try to enable the Richie Rich editor then?


And I chk'd, and it's enabled already.

I

95BlueStallion said:

Your pictures suck. Rear bumper filling thingy done yet?

Click to expand...

I can see that I am in fact "gonna have to come back there".

If you read my blog thingy, you'd know that the HG and the engine are the next step.

Ok, two things. First I'm looking for advice:


This is the start up video of the car when it was sucking water. I won't bore you by asking that you watch the whole 4 minutes, because the crux of my question centers at the start up of the engine at about 2:23 in on the vid. There is a squeak that you'll hear, particularly when it's first started. That squeak seems to be dependent on if the engine is accelerating (like when it first starts, and while the engine surges) I have the belt off thinking that I may have a bad idler pulley bearing, despite the fact that they were both new. Unloaded, they roll perfectly smooth, w/ no evidence of friction. I also ck'd for a possible interference issue where the pulleys may be rubbing on some metal part, and I couldn't see anything obvious there either. The belt itself was fairly tight so I don't think it's slipping. That brings me to consider whether or not there is enough belt wrap around the crank pulley.



When I built this belt system, I assumed that having the idler on the drive side of the pulley would be high enough to keep everything tight w/o any slippage, but now, I'm wondering. There is no real way to check this short of adding another smooth idler on the other side of the crank pulley, which would effectively wrap that crank pulley 180+ degrees.

But,...I don't want to have to do a bunch of extra work, just o end up finding that I had a bad idler bearing that only showed it's ass when it was loaded, so what do you guys think it might be?


Secondly,.....

The HG came in.

After looking at it,...it is the lowest form of a stock HG money can buy. Paper fiber surrounding a metal shim, w/ a steel fire ring integrated into the gasket. I called Cometic to see if they wanted it to go on dry, or have me add some sort of sealant given this engines' fondness for puking it's fluids back out, and dude tells me that the gasket was intended to go on dry, but if I wanted extra insurance, I could shoot it w/a couple of coats of copper coat for an extra sealing margin.

What do you think I did?

You damn right I sprayed that pig w/ Copper coat.

I just hope that I can get a safe 10-12 lbs of boost out of it w/o pushing it's ability to adequately fasten the head. It is not my life's ambition to change out the HG every time I turn around, but at the same time, it'd be a damn shame to have an engine like this that I have to hobble because of it.

I gave the head a bath in soapy water, blew it off, set it on there, and torqued it in three steps to 75 ft lbs. Tomorrow, I'll give it a run through one more time, and I'm gonna put the rest of the engine back together.


Huh, the Headless Horseman managed to get his back where it belongs.

OK @Noobz347, The top pic is a direct load from photobucket, and the bottom is a copy and paste from FEP where it displays properly.

WTF?

I give up. It will not allow the pic to post even directly from the iphone.
And why the hell do they show up down here but you cant click on them to make them bigger?

Whether or not the lack of belt contact was making that noise, I went ahead and changed the routing to allow more belt to contact the crank pulley.
It's good to be able to post a pic, and have others look at it, and potentially see things I do not. Thanks go yo a guy over at FEP for pointing out what was right in front of my face.
He did some drawing, and re routed the belt using the existing setup I currently have.
That drawing ended up looking something like this:


Unfortunately, there's a condenser in the way that won't allow me a straight on pic, but simply changing the path of the belt allowed me to get the crank pulley over 180 degrees wrapped.

It did hurt a little, as I had to cut the existing brand new belt, and an additional smaller one (that also was perfectly good) to use to determine the actual additional length that re-routing the thing took up. That new belt cost 40 bucks, and I'm sure that the one I cut up was similar in price.
That ended up being an additional 14" but now, I have effectively wrapped the crank pulley, and the AC compressor at the same time leaving only the alternator with only a small section of belt touching it. I can put in an additional idler if that becomes a problem, but for now, Im' in "wait and see" mode.

As far as using the old (new) belt as a guinea pig, I'm not too worried about that. It only fits the old pulley system. How many old serpentine belts that don't fit anything I currently own do I actually need anyway?

Well, another hour and I'll be back to where I was 4 weeks ago.


This time, I'm gonna go ahead, and fill the damn thing w/ anti-freeze.
We're just gonna assume that it'll stay inside the engine instead of pouring out everywhere else.

While it was down I took some parts over to the powder coater as they kept getting all banged up if I even looked at them sideways:

That stupid hard pipe lower rad hose has to be snaked in there, then twisted to get the "s" orientation correct. When it was just painted, it was trashed by the time all of that snaking, and twisting got done. This time however, not even as much as a mar.

The upper was the same way, but not as bad.
Additionally I took the hood latch, and some other non-installed as of yet stuff over there. All-in-all it cost 100.00. Tough money for me to spend when it all could've been painted w/ a 7.00 spray can. Obviously though, the durability is beyond compare.



Since this guy was off completely, it got repainted in VHT 2000 baked in the wife's new oven, and wrapped from head to toe. Now I get to look forward to the heat fracturing that'll come as a result of wrapping thin gauge mild steel that sees extremely high exhaust temps.:tu:

I also had Medusa (exhaust manifold) sandblasted and I painted that thing in the same paint.

Two things:
For those that are saying to themselves "Dumb ass, painting a turbo exhaust manifold w/ a spray bomb. He should've known better when he burned all of the paint off the first time he started it."

To which I'd say: "Not all of the paint"

The first paint that I put on there was silver, and it was applied according to VHT's instructions:
30 mins in an oven at 250; follwed by a 30 min cool down. 30 mins at 400; followed by a 30 min cool down. and finally, 30 mins at 550 in order to heat cure the paint.
If you were observant in those last pics of the flaking black paint, you'd see that the silver was absolutely intact. I did not follow the instructions when i topcoated the silver w/ black, so that's why that junk promptly burned off.

This time around however I followed the instructions to the letter, and all in the wife's brand new 1500.00 LG gas range.
Done when the outside temp over 100 heat index, the humidity was 85% and I had the garage door open all damn day.

To say that she was not happy when "A" She was greeted by the paint fume smell that was permeating the entire house when she got home, and "B" the fact that the oven was still in the 3rd cook phase and indicated that it was in fact 550 degrees, making the whole kitchen into a chemical waste dump on the surface of the sun,
would be an understatement.

I'm lucky to be alive.

I argued that It was only 3 stinkin' pieces, and the house would eventually cool back down.

She told me I could pay the 300.00 electrical bill.

Anyway, I paint my exhaust, heat cure it, and now that is back on. The engine is re-primed, and the only thing I lack is a few hoses, water (antifreeze) and a keyturn. (about an hour or less)
I tell ya, this build is nothing like the red car. The red car was a daily wrestling match where I had to get the thing done. The Monster is like a Califonia dude,...and just hangs out down there and waits till I get around to doing something to it.
PPffshaww! No worries dude! Come and see me when you can bro!

stangboy said:

When I post pics via photobucket I don't have any issues. I just make sure I pick the

Click to expand...

I just did that. Originally, I posted them from the direct link like I always have, but just on a whim, used the img link and that fixed it. So,...fixt.

Thanks.