Engine Progress

After the distributor glitch was solved, the next glitch was the crankshaft pulley.  Here is a picture of the pulley. Notice the ridge on the back of it (top in the picture):

And here is a picture of the crankshaft harmonic balancer that the pulley bolts onto.  Instead of a recess for the pulley ridge, the balancer has a ridge also:

 

the pulley ridge and the balancer ridge butted up against one another making it impossible to bolt the pulley to the balancer.  Turns out no one sold a pulley that fit the balancer, which was only used on half of the 1969 302 Mustang engines.  I could have opted to get a different balancer, but the whole rotating assembly of the engine was balanced by the engine builder and replacing the harmonic balancer might have upset this balance.  I went to my neighbor, who is a retired Boeing machinist who has a bunch of machine tools in his shop, and he used a boring bar to hog out the pulley center, eliminating the ridge and allowing it to fit snugly on to the balancer:

 

Next, I mounted the alternator and the fan pulley to see how they lined up.  It had to be perfect in order for the fan belt to not get derailed or wear out quickly.  With the help of some 0.19 inch shims on the fan pulley I got the line up perfect:

 

About the same time I installed the new red spark plug wires.  Normally this would be a simple 15 minute plug-in job, but the spark plug wires were the "universal" type, which meant I had to cut them to length and crimp on the  connector at the distributor end.  This took most of an afternoon and I had to buy a special crimping tool, but it looks like it came out OK:

I ordered some really trick looking aircraft type fuel lines and fuel filter, but they didn't fit the fuel pump, so I sent them back and bought hard lines and bent them to fit.  I had a tube bender that I used for the brake lines, but the fuel line was too big in diameter to use it, so I bought another one for the fuel lines.  That thing next to the fuel pump is the oil pressure sending unit and I had to add the extension pipe to get it to clear the cylinder head:

 

I added the cowl braces (angled pieces behind the engine), and now things are looking a little busy in the engine compartment, but still more to come: