Hey guys, i was wondering if you could help me out here. Since ive had this car its been nothing short of a nightmare for me. Let me break down the basics..
1985 GT, the previous owner bought it as a roller, so now it has a 1995 F150 302 in it.
When i got it it ran good, i never really jumped on it or anything, but it ran and drove, it just had some solenoid problems where i would have to jump it off the solenoid to get it started every 3 out of 5 times. Now let me explain a bit, somewhere in the cars previous life someone butchered the wiring, im almost certain that every wire that is in the drivers side fenderwell for the duraspark box and probably the headlight harness, etc has been spliced. It has a 1 wire HEI distributor controlling all of the ignition functions. I didnt like the looks of that HEI dist plus i wanted to use the dual snorkel air cleaner on it so i bought an aftermarket Ebay distributor and went to the local autoparts and picked up a replacement duraspark box. I could never get that to work (im pretty sure that was my fault because of the wiring issues) so after messing with it for what seems like forever i put the HEI back in.
Problem with the HEI is it had to be positioned with the vacuum advance at the 3 oclock position so i could give it crazy ignition advance to keep it from backfiring and running like crap. During all of this testing im pretty sure i blew out the powervalve on the Holley 4bbl i had on there, so i replaced it with a new Edelbrock 600. I thought maybe it was possible that the carb was giving me alot of these issues. The car was at the point where it was running good, you could nail the gas in neutral and no backfiring. Problem was that if you put it in gear and tried to move it off of my carport it wanted to die. You have to completely feather the clutch and gas to get it to even move, I dont think its the clutch because it seemed to have enough life left in it when i brought it home. So once again im thinking that it had to be something with the timing. The only other thing i could think of was maybe the timing chain was stretched, or it jumped a tooth or something. So this past weekend i put a new timing chain on it, but the timing chain that was on it was perfect. It wasnt really stretched and the marks were lined up perfectly so its not like someone had it installed incorrectly which was really my hope. I was aggravated enough in seeing that so i just left it, and thats how she sets 3 days later. Im seriously at a loss on this car. I want to restore it as i think this could be a great car, its completely rust free, has nice interior and i just replaced all of the rubber and restored to the ttops. It has great potential.
It would start just fine, but maybe something is incorrectly wired with the ignition sequence that is causing all of these problems? Could my timing be off that much because the wiring through the ignition is messed up even though im using the one wire distributor?
I mean it is called "ignition timing" right? Does anyone have any guidance for me, im about it lose it on this car.
Thanks
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