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Confirmed. I did a drum-to-disc conversion recently and thought I might have to remove the residual line pressure valve and found that it had none! The brake drag from takeoff turned out to be a sticky hand brake lever on one caliper.

The Lokka is basically a locally made version of a Detroit Locker, possibly changed enough to get around design patents.

Yeah been looking at the Lokka centres, they sound tough but I'm worried about the clunking/shunting and general roughness of operation, particularly in a family car like mine. I've shoved in a 2-pin one-legger for now, so far going well, no groans or clunks. I'll leave it at that while I take my time and build a 28 spline with the bits I have. It's still got me stuffed why the limo centre failed. I don't do burnouts and I generally don't abuse my cars.

Ok reviving... That 2-pin LSD centre I installed just shit itself. Hemisphere bolts all sheared off and walked out into the housing and cap. Made a proper mess. My brother has a theory that the 2-pinion diff is insufficiently strong to deal with 3.27 gears and 6-cyl gearbox ratios, coupled with V8 torque. I just don't know how I could have fucked it up putting it together for this to happen. Anyone experienced this?

Got the camber tipped in fairly well (having such tall squishy tyres) and the castor wound out a lot too (as I like it) so much so that I noticed that the lower arms are angled quite far forward. It drives well for a manual-steer V8. I wonder if the tyre hits the leading edge of the lip because the wheel sits too far forward? Hmmm....

The pick of the bunch, of course, is the Konis. They're adjustable on rebound only I think but are fully rebuildable. The ones on my wagon are getting on 30 years and will still outperform brand new oem-style ones. One thing I don't get is the L/H front tyre rubbing on the lip whenever I hit a speed bump or driveway. I can see that the bullshit-lowered XE with snowies seems fine. I'm only running 205/70/15s so it should clear it by miles. Anyone have any tricks?

I bought my XE wagon as a 6 cyl and it had super-high springs all round. It was stupidly heavy in the steering, particularly as you wound on more lock, so I'm convinced it had geometry problems. After throwing a V8 in it, with the same coils in it, the steering's actually lighter (yep!). So beware of stuffing around with coil heights. I swapped out the hi-set leaves for ute ones minus a leaf and it sits sweet. If you want some extra height, go for some 70-series 205s on 15" rims. Popular on small-med SUVs.

will cost way more to cut and shut a tailshaft than to just pull one out of a wreck

I found a similar difference when swapping an 81 Corty single rail for an 85 XF one. The Corty had metal to metal, the XF had a nylon insert. I do remember the bushed one having a smaller diameter spindle to allow for the extra thickness in the bush. I definitely couldnt use the XF shift lever in the Corty shifter, as they were different lengths from the ball. So what might seem like the same box may be totally different and not interchangeable. What I think has happened here is your box that was apparently out of the XE may have actually been made up of a whole bunch of different bits lying around. I think you have the later shift lever (designed for a bush) with an early (non-bushed) shift rail crank. I had the same problem in my Corty with too much slop in the gear lever (having to re-use the old worn one) so I took it out and welded some metal all around the knuckle and ground it back to shape. Took me a few goes but got there in the end, worked well.

For the price they want, I'd be looking elsewhere first. Revhead you say your rack is E-series, but in other posts I've read, the travel is insufficient to retain standard steering lock. Is that the case with yours? I'd like to find out that it's all good, as e-series bits are as easy to get as fish and chips.

I used a set of Allen-key 10.9 bolts on my EF flywheel, drove it for 5 years thrashing it and no dramas at all.<br /><br />If it's a Crossy with imperial bolts they will be grade 8 (imperial has a different scale) with six strokes on the head.

Ford inline 6s are all neutral balance engines, as the crank throws cancel each other out at each end of the motor. It's only Windsors and Clevos that have imbalanced (externally) flywheels and balancers.<br /><br />I think what Thom was referring to was that the early log motors need a well-balanced flywheel/clutch to avoid harmonics and crank breakage. This however should apply to any engine you're doing in my opinion. For 80 bucks or so on top of the clutch kit, you can get your flywheel skimmed and assembly balanced. Cheap insurance really.

I pulled off a set of hi-lift leaves from my XE wagon not long ago. I'm in Sydney, so if you're local, you can have 'em.

That's why the Boss 302 could scream to 8,000 rpm... It had those big nostrils to suck through!

All this e-series talk makes me want to build one. I still miss my EA, and I definitely rate that car over my EF. An AU/EF hybrid donk in an EA s-pack sounds very nice indeed.

Ok never ported a head myself but looking down the bowl, it seems to be the smallest around the circumference between the short turn and valve guide. Also the throat on the short-turn side looks like it needs a bit of meat off. Being a hemi-style head, it may take a different approach to a wedge style in that the direction you want to bias the flow may be different (ie away from the cylinder wall and into the chamber). I've got a feeling that hemis can be tricky. Again i'm not an expert and you can tell me to get stuffed. Sometimes you just might need an outsider's eye to see it. Even the missus might be able to help!

Great posts Clevo, if any test could show a timeline of engine development, it's this. After seeing some figures from a log head, an iron 2V, alloy cross-flow and now these E-series numbers you can see how over 30 years time, the flow figures have doubled. The DOHC figures are even more impressiveb. I do get the shits sometimes knowing that my 302C is about on par with a modern V6 for performance, (at double the fuel consumption) but then I do take some salvation in the fact that my engine was designed over 40 years ago. And that it sounds tits. I know you get it all the time, but keep up the good work. I'm always interested in the latest project you've got going.

Haha they even went to the trouble of importing cross-flow blocks and heads from here (There's a small but dedicated group of 6 cyl fans over there). Same goes for 2V Aussie Clevo closed chamber heads: they used to import them before the aftermarket was geared up for the Clevo.

The yanks never had the highly regarded 2V setup that Ford Aus developed, and in their Inline 6 circles, treat a 2V head like gold, hence the asking price these days. Otherwise, with the stock integral type head, they had to improvise with this very setup you've described. A big improvement but still has some tight turns into the cylinders from the pissy manifold. I read once (from Kevin Bartlett I believe) that back in the day, people used to mill off the manifold completely from the head, leaving the bare ports open. They would then port out the inlets and then press in some tubes to weld to their own manifold, or weld on some Weber flanges. Even injection was fitted sometimes. These engines were popular in race boats too.

T5s need some mods to go behind a Clevo. They have a different bolt pattern to a single rail or Toploader, so the bellhousing needs re-drilling or replacing to suit. Also the input shaft retainer (snout) is a slightly larger diameter than a SR or TL, needing some machining to fit it in the bellhousing bore. They also take a different crossmember, more like a boomerang shape than the straight one you see normally. If you don't want to modify anything, then that kind of rules them out.

They were created in the early 70's by Borg Warner for Ford and Chrysler as a locally made gearbox to satisfy local content laws for manufacturers. In Fords, they replaced the toploader on all models except GT. They came in various ratios, the one with the tallest 1st gear and highest torque rating is the V8 one, the others were for various 6 cyl models. I'm running a 6 cyl one in my 302 right now with no dramas. They are a pretty tough box as long as you don't slam them into gear. I think they have a much nicer shift than a T5, until syncros on 2nd and 3rd wear out. They are quite possibly stronger than a T5 due to the cast iron case (vs alloy) and less helical cut on the gears (less end thrust) but aren't as quiet as a T5. I like them myself... If only they had an extra gear.

This is the problem we have being so far from the US, in that we get killed on the freight if we do choose to buy from there, and if we need to return the item, it's sometimes not even worth it. Buying the same stuff here is no better, they import it cheaply then just mark it up to be the same price anyway. It sucks. I got my 6AL from a place in Puerto Rico, called "Performance R Us". Sounds dodgy but they have a good rating and were great, and price was the best. Took a while to get here but I'm patient.

Ok final update: MAP sensor is in and MSD dizzy is finally setup and working. All I can say is..... wow! It wasn't an easy run to install it (I'll go into that later) but the difference is simply amazing. Easy Cold starts, sweet part-throttle response and no detonation are what somebody running a mechanical dizzy could only dream of, especially if running E10. Some important points: • It's not well documented in the instructions, but rotor phasing is the biggest hurdle to overcome when running programmable ignition. Phasing is the relationship between the ignition trigger and where the rotor is in relation to the dizzy cap terminal at the time of spark occurring. Get this wrong and you'll be in a world of poo, and you'll definitely not get away with running a standard dizzy if you want to use the full range of 30 deg available from the MSD box. To check rotor phasing, you need to sacrifice a distributor cap by drilling a large hole next to #1 terminal and shine a timing light down into it to see where the rotor sits when the spark happens. It also shows how far the spark has to jump if it is out. • I had to modify my billet dizzy by pushing off the trigger wheel from the splined shaft and advancing it a couple of teeth to the point where the triggering happened just as the rotor approaches the cap terminal, that way as the computer retards the spark from that point on, the rotor still has lots of travel left to transfer the spark and not have to jump too far. • I also had to modify the rotor tip by soldering an extension to the trailing edge of it, to allow a greater range of operation. The length is critical, for if you go too long, the spark will jump instead to the previous cylinder and the engine will misfire and run like a hairy goat. • MSD wiring is not intuitive at all. The colour traces on the black dizzy wires are orange + and purple -, yet the MSD box has purple and green. Now you'd think the colours would sort of match with purple going to purple but you're wrong! It goes dizzy orange trace to purple + and purple trace to green - .... Stupid! Get this wrong and it won't run very well, if at all. Ask me how I know. • I can say that my fuel economy will improve no doubt. After putting annular boosters in my 600 Holley, I dropped my jets from 63 to 61, and it ran well. Now with the MSD fully functional, I'm trying 59s and it still goes really well, if a bit on the lean side. It does have a little bit of surge at cruise speeds just as the mains are coming on. Jet changes take 10 minutes so it's no drama to go back. Overall, i'd highly recommend this MSD box to anyone who runs a carby-equipped car. It won't give you EFI-like performance but is the closest thing to it and blows away any mechanical distributor out there.

That's very strange considering 4th is the only "gear" that is direct drive (no gears actually involved), so there should be no force on the gearset or the bearings in 4th, thus no noise. Have you ruled out the diff?