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ACL Hylomar spray is what we use on some Diesels that had common head gasket woes and can have up to 22:1 compression. Great stuff if you ask me.

Get the biggest, dumbest battery you can stuff in there.

Pull the sump is your best bet. 289 cranks had 1M cast into them, 302s have 2M. The block is slightly different at the bottom of the bores. 289s have shorter, flush bores whereas 302s have a small protrusion of the bore into the crankcase. Doesn't matter really because the blocks are otherwise interchangeable. Bores are the same at 4".

Everyone's pretty familiar with the good old Borgie 5-speed but I wanted to share a couple of tweaks I've done to mine. First of all, the shift throw. From a performance driver's point of view, the stock Ford shifter leaves a bit to be desired in this department. All of the aftermarket T5 short-shifters use the same concept: move the pivot point higher to reduce required movement at the gear knob. This also firms up the shift. I went with the same concept and this is how I went about it: I've kept the shifter body stock but made up some Nylon plates to space it up by about an inch. To make the stick longer, I dismantled, cut and extended the bottom part by the same amount as the thickness of the spacers. I used a cut up grade 8 bolt and MIGed it in. Voila.... Short-shifter! One drama was the clearance issues inside the tunnel on my EF once I spaced the shifter body up, but a hammer soon fixed that. If I were to do it all again, I'd ditch the spacers and cut and shut the housing itself to extend the ball pivot upwards. Now the gate.... The one thing that shitted me the most about my T5 was the 2-3 shift. It would always get hung up on the gate going into 3rd when trying to snap a quick change. Left me looking like a dickhead when trying to beat that shitty Honda at the lights and end up missing 3rd gear. Part of the problem is in the fact that these boxes are a yank design purely with left hand drive in mind. The shift gates are straight up and down with very little lead-in from neutral position. In a LHD car the 2-3 shift action is more natural in that you're pushing the stick directly away from you. In RHD, you're pushing the stick across your body as well as further away, resulting in less strength and precision.This is how the stock shift guide plate looks: As you can see the gates are the same top to bottom (except going into 5th) yet nobody ever shifts from 4th to 1st. Instead of resembling a "H" pattern, it should really be more like a "Z". A more suitable shape would have a chamfered gate on 2nd toward 3rd and also on 3rd coming from 2nd. Remember the pattern is reversed on the bottom side of the gearstick. 1st gate is bottom right, 2nd top right, 3rd is bottom centre. I got to work with my Dremel and this is the result: I've actually taken a bee's dick more off since the photo but you get the drift. It has helped a lot but the problem also lies inside the box where the gates on the fork selector might also be a little tight. Proof will be in the pudding when this goes behind my Clevo, hopefully very soon. Any other tweaks people know of please share

Yeah Adrian I did similar with the stocker. Those rubber bushes get soft and floppy with age (as I have) so I pissed mine off and solid-mounted the stick. If you like , you can even install a spacer block to bring the stick closer to you as Falcons are a wide car and it's a bit of a reach to shift some gears.

Cheers if only I had 3 boxes to fit them to

Oh good I can fuck up a few and not feel too bad

Ghetto is the word I'd use, but cheers anyway

E2 = 1982 T = truck P = auto trans

Loving the auto box knowledge here

I think the input shaft might be different with extra oil galleries for the lockup clutch, or something like that.

That sucks mate... You're really not having the best build are you?

331 would be a sweet engine

Not exactly household but anyway... When spray-painting parts, you might get a paint that needs like five coats to get proper coverage, a classic is gloss yellow over cast iron, where the edges thin out and go dark. I like to put down some silver frost as a sort of primer as it has high solids content, is bright instead of dark and dries very quickly. The rough finish gives the gloss something to grab and you might only need one or two coats instead of five. Won't run as easily either.

There are no bellhousing to block bolts below the starter flange, so it won't make any difference to the spacing of the gearbox, etc. just means that when you bolt up your starter you'll need to hold the bit of plate in place. You just might have a little gap at the point you cut it, but no big deal. Better line it all up first... measure twice, cut once, etc.

Bolted up:

I soldered in the studs because there is only about 1/4" of meat there, so I wanted maximum bite with the limited material. I'm rather shitty about the solder as there is some porosity in it, from a bit of flux boil-off. Still don't know whether to trust it or not as a bellhousing letting go whould be ugly indeed.

Roughly ground and filed:

I didn't think they were 3.23 but I might be wrong. I was under the impression that utes were 3.27, wagons 3.23, sedans 2.92. For cables you might need custom ones made as EF went to a hand brake lever instead of the old under-dash umbrella type, with different attachment points, lengths, etc.

Not as nicely as I wanted. I had some 40% silver rods at work that flow beautifully, but forgot to grab some (dickhead) had to buy some 15% ones from Bunnings. Nowhere near as nice to use I must say. The housing is cooling in sand right now but as soon as I dig it out tomorrow I'll snap some pics of the face. I soldered from both sides to be sure.

Wheel studs knocked in and plugs screwed in. Everything fluxed ready to put on the fire: other side:ready to silver braze:cooling down after job:gearbox side:

Ok I needed a way of winding the bolts in from the inside of the bellhousing to the gearbox and use as studs so thought I'd try and make a nice flat surface inside the bellhousing for the bolt heads to tighten on. After two attempts of making a spot-facing tool, I've failed. The first one had a carbide bit but I had the angle wrong. You can't correct carbide bits without a diamond wheel. The second had two tool steel bits but they failed within seconds. I think this factory iron is really fucking hard... Almost as much as my son's forehead. So I've moved to plan B: drill out the top two holes and knock some M12 wheel studs in, then silver solder in place.

Ok then yeah the air gap, itself an excellent piece of kit, may be a tad small for your combo. If a single plane would better suit, albeit one that fits under the bonnet, maybe something like this will do: http://www.trickflow.com/partdetail.asp?part=TFS%2D51600111&autoview=sku

Being a stroker with close to 4" of stroke, your piston speed is getting up there. Same concept as the 250 crossy, you can make them handle the rpm good enough but getting the power above those revs is more of a challenge. Rod/stroke ratio becomes less ideal the more stroke you give it. Not sure of your comp but with a cam like that you'd need above 11:1. Strokers are all about torque so 6000 rpm is probably about right for that setup. The air gap may be getting a bit wheezy by then but if you go swapping to a single plane to gain above that point you'll lose in the lower rpm band. I guess it comes down to which one you prefer.

I made this very mistake years ago doing a manual to power steer conversion on an XD. Went to the trouble of getting another column and shaft. Turns out all I had to do was bump the steering shaft up a tad on the collapsible spline so the flange would move and allow the box to fit in. It would be the opposite on yours I think.