The next "big" project for my Cobra

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It's easy to get in that "wait till I have all my ducks in a row to start" mindset. I am notorious for it. And then those projects never get off the ground.

I finally came to the realization I will never have all my ducks in a row. And if... by chance they are in a row... a hurricane... err umm life..... will come along and destroy the rare alignment of the duckies.

Christine sat for 20 years until a dying friend gifted me a carb. Was the carb holding me up? No. It was the "I am going to wait till I have my ducks in a row" mindset. We had a group of 5 who had been friends from middle school. 3 of which are no longer with us. Thats what kicked me into gear. If I wait til the stars align I will be dead before anything even gets started.

My worthless opinion is to do what your doing. Tackle smaller portions and then once you have the garage you won't have as many smaller projects to get done to finish the big project.

Hell of a catch on the loose bolt. Sometimes the smaller projects prevent a bigger project!

Get some wire loom for those wires that are near the header.
Yeah good advice. I almost didn't put on a new serpentine, was going to wait until I got new pulleys and tensioners, spark plugs etc. Belt had been ready to put on for a couple weeks and slapped in on last night.
 
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Small bit of progress tonight - pulled the carb and gave it a quick cleaning and prepared to reset the floats. Also stopped at O'Reilly's and paid for a new battery, should be here tomorrow when I get home from work. Will have to finish the last little bit of wiring under the hood Thursday or Friday, replace the clutch pedal bushings, and I'd like to re-do some wiring in the dash before I try to drive it again, but we'll see. I may forego that stuff for the time being to make sure it's running correctly and tackle that stuff at a later date. I'll probably wait on the seats too, unless I try to tear into the pedal assembly.

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Figured out the flooding issue that popped up. The new float that came with the jet extensions had a spring on It when it arrived. Apparently it was too strong and wouldn't let the needle and seat close. Once I removed the spring it stopped spewing fuel through the vent.

I still have some wiring stuff to figure out, my A/F gauge isn't working at all now. And I'm pretty sure I'll need to fine tune the primary accelerator pump as it backfires through the carb when I try to blip the throttle, but it started up and ran for a while tonight. :)
 
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So I ran into this on Marketplace......



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While I think it would look pretty awesome when you lift the hood, I don't think it would give much of a bump in power...... would it?? :rlaugh:
 
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Back to the project at hand..... I found that the fuse was blown for the A/F gauge, so I went and replaced it and started the car again. It still has a lean backfire and the gauge is reading 15.5 and not jumping around like it did before. While I'm 99.99% sure it's a lean condition off idle, the fact that the gauge doesn't jump at all has me concerned that the power surge that blew the fuse has somehow done some damage to one of the components. I'm hoping that it's not the controller, but with the burned wires that I discovered under the car I'm almost certain it is. I tried to richen the mixture with the idle screws just to see the reaction and it had no effect. Since I'm working alone, I couldn't see the reaction when I bumped the accelerator pump, but doing so just killed it right away anyway. So I may try to work on it a little over the weekend when I have a second set of eyes, but as it is now I'm expecting to have to buy another wideband controller..... :nonono:
 
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Unless someone de-tuned it already I would think it will run too rich and rob you of power and fuel mileage. Correctly tuned it would be badass under the hood. Once properly tuned it may give you a bit more but there are other bottlenecks in a 302 that need addressed to make it worthwhile performance wise.

Appearance wise... Dual carbs goes from Nice Ride to uh oh, :poo: got serious.

I have an autometer A/F gauge and it is just an o2 sensor and gauge. No separate controller to worry about.
 
Yeah, I figure that that set up is more about the :oops: factor than actual performance. I mean, the way I see it, an engine can only burn so much fuel and take in so much air, having more carburetion really won't do much. It MIGHT give it better throttle response or climb the RPM band faster, but power wise it really won't do much more than a typical 4 barrel. But then again I've never operated anything with multiple carbs either, so I really don't know. I'm only speaking from a theoretical standpoint....
 
More carbs is more failure points. Looks cool but ....

When I got my first II back in the prehistoric times. I threw a holly 600 on it. That thing fell on its face when you punched it. Just too much fuel. Had to be detuned to run right. Those engines had a 500 cfm carb from factory. It was more then enough. But it wasn't a 4 barrell. I couldn't get respect with a puny 2 barrell. Come on. Even if the 2 bbl ran better. It had to go.

So as I see it. You go to install the dual carbs now. I was talking you out of it but now I see the light and cannot in good faith continue that dark path. Those teenagers just wont respect a mere 4 bbl with all them fancy injectors and electrons and coding and turbos and what not they play with today. Hell there 4 cylinders have 4 injectors. Here you are with a v8 and only 4 venturies and 2 of which don't even work all the time. :rolleyes:
 
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Dual quads should be setup, that you run the most time on the primary of the first carby. Than with 30% or 50% opening the Primary of the second carb should come in (linkage should be designed like that). So far you are running a double pumper. If you step onto the pedal the two Secondarys come it additional. In the upper RPMs you get more air trough the engine. So the engine should turn much more freely above 5000 RPM.
That is the experience of a friend who is running dual holleys on his 302 roller cam with AFR165cc heads. So he has a healthy engine, as you also do.
Downside is, that he doesn't get idle as low as with one carby. And you need to fine tune the two primarys similar to a double pumper. It helps if you have a manual transmission (which my friend has).
4 barrel (if not way too big) is usually better, than 2 barrel because the primary venturis are smaller. This means you have higher air speed and a better atomization of the fuel, which means better MPG and performance. But you need to tune a universal carb much more to work perfectly. The OEM carb will run nearly perfect, because the OEM set it up. One point: OEM sets it up, that it is running everywhere (altitude, quality of fuel etc), so he has some secruity factor on the stock setup (this is also valid for ingition timing).

Regarding AFR at idle: forget the reading, there is to less mass flow, that the reading will be right. Manifold vacuum is at idle the better way for adjustment. But I understand that you are wondering that it shows a fixed reading. Hope the device has no defect.
 
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I'm not going to get the dual quad setup, just posted it for :poo: and grins. It would be fairly impressive to open the hood and see them in a II though! :D

And yes, I'm not as concerned with the reading as I am that it's not fluctuating like it was when I first set it up. But, I got to thinking on the lean condition and think that I should probably get some fresh gas before I really mess with anything. I mean it was set up pretty well before, and all I did was spray some carb cleaner through the jets and stuff as well as take care of the float issue. I'd like to think that it hasn't changed as much as I feel it has. I think it's a distinct possibility that it's mainly an old gas problem right now, but that gauge issue.... :mad:
 
I didn't mess with the car at all this past weekend as I had hoped. We'll see what kind of progress I can make this week aside from dealing with the A/F gauge....
 
Spent about an hour out working on getting these seats ready to go in. Found that the II's seat tracks are not a bolt on affair as I thought they were. @Enzio - what trick did you use? It's looking like there needs to be some sort of offset bracket made and maybe risers of some sort to accommodate the II's tracks.

I'm back to having trouble uploading pics again, I'll have to see what I can get done on my laptop later.... :shrug:
 
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Attempting to load the photos I couldn't get done yesterday.....

Here's the comparison between the original II seat and the late model after cleaning them up.

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The underside, obviously before I pulled the power mechanism from the newer seat.

Seats2.jpg


I ended up breaking one of the mounting bolts off in the old seat. :nonono:

I then attempted to bolt the II tracks onto the new seat. The bolt spacing is off by about an inch. It is also offset height wise, with the back being lower and the front being recessed. The II tracks have a radius to them that is raised in the center which, in this case, hits the seat bottom. (I didn't think to take a pic of that....)

Track.jpg


The front mount location:

Mounting location.jpg


As you can see, the hole doesn't line up with the seat bolt location AND needs some sort of spacer.

Misaligned track.jpg


But here it is sitting in the car. It almost looks like it was made to go in these cars. :)

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I have some work to do, but I'll get them mounted in there! :D
 
It's been a long time. I didn't have to do anything to the passenger (non-power operated) seat. Just remove the old rails and slides and replace with the original II rail and slide/ratchet.
On the driver (power operated) seat I had to remove all the power equipment other than the lumbar air pump. The right side of the rail went right on same as the passenger seat. The left rail took a little bit of work. After removal of the power devices I had to add a spacer and then buy a longer bolt on the front left attachment point. I think I just used some fender washers until I had it level with the other side. (always ment to machine a solid piece in there but it's still working fine) It bolted right in.
As far as the mounting holes on the seat. I think there were multiple holes on the back side of the seat. They were hidden under the folded upholstery? Once I found those then the bolt holes lined up with the original tracks.
I may be wrong as I said it's been a long time. At first I thought I had waisted a bunch of money.
 
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Finally had some ambition and nothing else to do, so I went out and got the driver seat installed. Just a quick heads up in case anyone tries this and runs into the same issues as I did: the distance between the seat mounting holes in the floor is about 14 inches. What I did was went to Home Depot and picked up some 1 inch square tubing with holes punched into it every inch. The holes just happen to be the appropriate size for the seat tracks which is 5/16. I ended up cutting a piece with the appropriate amount of holes (14) and used that as a fixture along with the old seat tracks. I'll take pics when I tackle the passenger side for illustrative purposes.

Also, while I had the seat out, I replaced the clutch pedal bushings. They had given up the ghost quite a while ago but I never had the ambition to get it done because I didn't feel like contorting myself. It's much easier with the seat removed, so I figured now was as good a time as any. :)
 
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