Operation 410

[471Magnum]

Clearance isn't quite as tight as that picture would seem to indicate, but it's probably less than 1/4".

I've had the car out on the road a few time in the last week. Runs really nice. Smooth as can be at 3000 rpm. Balancing shop did a great job.

I need to recurve the distributor to limit the mechanical advance. It wants lots of initial advance (like 18-20 degrees), but the stock distributor has 26 degrees mechanical built in. When I get it to idle happy, it pings at full mechanical.

Also needs a bigger carb. I'm running out of idle transfer slots, so the mix screws aren't responding. I've got a 72 400 T-quad with the bigger primaries that I'll rebuild and tweak out.

Both the distributor and the carb are projects for the coming week. I hope to have it tuned to "KILL" by the weekend. Then I can go embarrass some big blocks.

[471Magnum]

Man, this thing is slowly bleeding me to death.

Been driving the car sporadically as time permits and doing some tuning along the way. It's has some lifter noise since day one, so I figured I'd reset the preload on the Crane ductile iron rockers.

Ran through all the valves the other night going 1/2 turn past zero preload. Two days later I finally got around to driving it. Dang thing was noisier than ever.

Last night I went through again, this time going 3/4 turn. Got all the way through to the last one, #8 exhaust. Immediately noticed the lock nut was loose. HMMM.

Unscrewed the lock nut and half the screw backed out of the rocker. Dang.


Fortunately, everything stayed together with no harm to the motor. Looks like I'm a victim of Crane's infamous adjuster problem that initially reared its head about 10 years ago. I bought these rockers "new" off Ebay from a private seller. Figured they were of a new enough vintage that this wouldn't be a problem. WRONG.

Anyway, the car is out of commission AGAIN for another few days while I procure some new adjusting screws.

[gcoupe72]

What a b! Crane is back in business, you might want to give them an opportunity to "fix" this for you.

Good luck!