Friday, May 1, 2009

Ford V8s

The timing is out on this red Mark 7 we have here at Colin's place. It is a Windsor 351. It's becomes hard work researching the problem because of the variety of different configurations in all of these V8s. For example, did you know that the Windsor 351 has a different firing order to a Windsor 302? and when you move on to Clevelands, they are different again. And Fairlane V8s have different specs to ones in Falcon GTs and XBs have different specs to late model XYs and half way through the XY model run they changed from Windsor to Cleveland V8s which makes XY workshop manuals confusing. So, it's time to look for timing marks and before you can do that you have to take the water pump off etc etc. I'm not pretending it's my problem (it's Colin Lucas's) but I find it all interesting nevertheless.

1 comment:

John L said...

Some feedback:-
1. from Chris G:-
"It's interesting. I've seen it stated that Ford changed the firing order for the 351s so as to create less imbalance and a smoother running motor. As camshafts are apparently interchangable between the motors, you just change the ignition order at the distributor cap - should we with the smaller varieties, 289s, 302s etc when re-camming our cars go to a 351 cam and change the order?"
2. from Tony B:-
"Ford V8s are a bucket of worms but once you get the hang of it it's OK - They are better than Chevs!!!"