Engine Running Again

Lauren had to work this St. Patrick's Day so I went to my parents house to work alongside my dad and get the motor put back together on the Mustang and get it running. We had to make a couple of trips to Auto Zone in order to get the correct drive belts. Both the alternator and power steering belts were a little too long causing them to squeal although they were as tight as they could go. I don't know it's application, but the alternator belt is a Duralast V-Belt #15390 part #303842 and was $8.99. The power steering belt is a Duralast V-Belt #15490 part #304154 and was $8.99. I discovered that the vacuum advance was hooked up to a dead port on the carburetor. In other words, there was no vacuum off of the carburetor so the hose to the distributor was doing us no good. Once we hooked it up to the other port on the front of the carburetor it bumped up the idle a good 500-600rpm. We were then able to adjust it back down. 

I pulled a lot of the wires under the hood that were on running off of the starter solenoid keyed power source and hooked them up to the new fuse box that I ran under the dash. I ended up moving the wire for the electric fan relay, and volt gauge to the fuse box under the dash. I completely disconnected the amp gauge in the dash because it always reads right in the middle anyways.

While I had the car up in the air I changed the speedometer cable and wrapped the exhaust pipe on the driver's side since it is hear the clutch cable, speedometer cable, fuel line and parking brake. I also bolted up the exhaust pipes to the headers.

I hooked up the tachometer to the coil wire since I don't have an MSD ignition box to hook it up to. The switched power is run off of the extra fuse box. The tach seems to run smoothly and appears to read accurately. Once it's warmed up it has been idling around 500-600rpm. 

Both heads were checked and there were no leaks in either. We re-installed them with new gaskets and all appears to be normal. I think we can chalk up the pressure problem to having a bad head gasket.  There was no sign of bubbles in the overflow tank. My dad is going to adjust the valves tomorrow and I'm going to adjust the toe since both tires are currently pointed outward instead of 1/8" inward.