Merkur Problems HELP!

Well, I was just about to go for a cruise in my 87 Merkur. I get in and start it up and for some reason, it's making a reasonably loud scraping noise. Now, I was just driving the car about 3 hours ago and it was running just fine. The scraping noise is definately coming from the engine bay SOMEWHERE, but all I had was a little flash light and its almost 11 pm here, so I couldn't see too well. It was making a smoke and it stunk pretty good aswell. It didn't smell like burning rubber, oil or coolant, but it was definately something burning.

Anybody have any ideas as to what could be wrong? I just got this car 4 days ago, so I'm really not to familiar with these engines at all.

Thanks for the help!

Well, I got it fixed. The starter wasn't disengaging from the flywheel, but it was still able to start the car. Drove it up on ramps, pulled the starter out on the street, push started it so i could drive it to my uncles place and finished up there.

I thought I blew the engine up somehow...thankfully not

Yeah, I hope so. I still need to fix my gauge cluster. The tach and fuel gauge are intermitant. The tach almost never works.