They didn't advertise whatever they wanted they changed from advertising Gross HP to Net HP (or the other way around).... basically they were testing flywheel HP with NONE of the power robing accessories attached then switched to measuring with them attached to give a better idea of what would make it to the wheels...Also by the 70s the insurance companies had made it their mission from God to charge muscle car owners up the wall so that hurt muscle car sales and the makers actually started advertising HP lower than actual so owners could get cheaper insurance....

The automotive world would be a vastly better place if government had kept it's damn nose out and let the market drive the industry the right direction.

Heh I didn't even know there was a Ford 250ci I-6, and at 88 HP that is abysmal. I think the 223 in my '59 custom has more than that, It allegedly has 140hp (at a pretty high rpm) but I have a hard time believing that.

Take an I6 and put a quad carburetor on it and sup up the parts and you'll be surprised what it can do. The I6 was commonly advertised as an economy motor and was built to under achieve. I saw a Chrysler 225 slant six turned into a real tiger!

To be fair, when you fix the two main problems the old muscle car V8s faced (horrid exhaust systems and extremely inefficient accessories) the rear wheel numbers start to get a bit closer to the hype. There's a reason why these old engine designs, when properly built up in the modern day, produce MORE power than the old gross ratings. Like this pretty moderate Oldsmobile 455 build, for instance:

https://www.hotrod.com/articles/ccrp...-engine-build/

All in all, the manifolds were WAY more easygoing on this project than I expected.

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I expected a lot of seized bolts, instead I found everything finger-tight. Even when there was studs they were loose in the head AND on the nut. The rearmost one to the firewall was even completely missing. I replaced both with bolts and their special washers salvaged from another Eagle.
Though to be honest, torquing them was not as fun. It wanted 26 foot pounds each and you could only get to them with a socket U-joint, so I put them all in at 15 and we'll see how that lasts.
The EGR tube on the last eagle I salvaged from was seized on pretty tight and had to be cut off. This one, again was easy to crack the threads on.
Bolts on the electric heater? No problem! Even the EGR was fine.
I did however notice that I was missing an exhaust manifold gasket. I assumed that this was someone previous neglecting to install it but no, that was normal. The gasket kit I ordered made sure to note that while one is included with the kit, finding manifolds without an existing gasket is perfectly normal. Man with how loose everything was this probably explains why this car ticked like a sewing machine so much.

Fixed that for you.

I'm stunned at how few hoses there are in that engine bay. Normally early 80s carbureted engines are a mess of vacuum hoses.

For the same reason Canada got the Hyundai Pony and the United States did not, an Eagle built in Brampton has the dealership option of a Secondary Air Injection delete. This thing rolled off the production line with an EGR, PCV, Tank/carb vapor control and that's it. I mean, there's still a lot of lines I have removed right now to work on the engine but significantly fewer than a normal Kenosha built Eagle.

I imagine that makes it about 2000% easier to tune!

That statement isn't broken in either form we've written it...

Lacking a secondary air system hardly makes that kind of difference. All the vacuum tubes and switches are still there for the EGR and evap. In fact, the AIR system (other than being physically in the way) is pretty much non intrusive. It helps the catalyst do its job, and in theory makes the exhaust system last longer - by raising the exhaust temperature and preventing condensation.

Of course, the pumps have a bad habit of falling into disrepair and seizing up. Plus they're kind of just extra crap in the way (as previously mentioned).

My '83 Dodge with the slant six had about 6 vacuum lines from the factory.

The late '80s Japanese cars that still had carbs were the ones that had about a million hoses, check valves, and other forms of nonsense.

Can confirm. My '79 Toyota pickup had spaghetti out the wazoo on the factory Aisin Seiki carb. It got swapped with a Weber 32/36 DGEV 2bbl.

I know, my first car was a 1987 "Chevy Nova" (a Corolla in disguise) with a single-cam carbureted 1.6 engine that was just a constant nightmare to start, especially if it was hot out. What a frustrating little car, when its transmission failed I was honestly kinda thankful.

Lean Burn. It was semi-computerized, that may be why.

At this point I have every vacuum line memorized. A bunch of my extra plumbing comes from several temperature controlled valves which modify the vacuum advance or enable and disable he EGR when it's cold. I actually added a new T-junction for the manifold vacuum when I ahd the intake off so now I have all the ports roughed in for the center console package. I just need to drill a hole to pass the wiring harness and bulkhead plug through and it's ready to go.

So today I finished off the upper control arm bushings and balljoint on the drivers side. This time I had the proper coil spring compression tool which sucks the spring up and into the pocket and it worked AMAZING. The parts were cleaned up and painted before being reinstalled. Ignoring the day I left the paint to dry it was a two hour job.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...080&fit=bounds
https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...080&fit=bounds

I also received my replacement harmonic balancer today. I found when inspecting the old one that the rubber had swollen and was starting to come out of the sleeve and was causing screeching and nasyness like that. Turns out when I compared to the replacement my timing mark had also shifted four degrees, explaining why the car was such a pain in the ass to tune.

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lol good thing you found that timing mark issue.

We had an '84 Corolla and an '87(?) Chevy Nova. They were both total junk. Those had to be the worst cars Toyota ever made.

The Corolla ended up having a cracked engine block, and the Nova lost 4th gear in it's manual transmission for no apparent reason. We kept driving it without 4th gear, and before long, something in the valve train took a dump. They were both rust buckets, too.

And I can confirm that they had about 100 vacuum hoses.

Yes, it had the Lean Burn crap that controlled the ignition timing. It had a regular Holley 1945(?) 1bbl carb, though.

Huh I hadn't heard of 80 series 3a/4a powered corollas having issues like that. The one my sister had had issues with the carb for sure, and a tie rod end broke lol. I had a '91 Geo Prizm GSi (redtop 4AGE engine)for a few years and that little turd was a blast to drive. It's 5 speed was making strange clunking noises when I sold it a few years back. :scratch2:

The Nova was definitely a turd, and it sure wasn't fun to drive.

Being an automatic, the Corolla was probably worse. I say probably because I bought it not running correctly. It supposedly had a bad head gasket or cracked head. I had a known good head overhauled by a machine shop and installed it myself. It ran ok for about 5 miles, and then it started pumping oil out of the breather tube and lost all power, just like it did for the previous owner when he put a head gasket in it with the old head.

I was pissed that I had wasted all that time and money on a POS, and beat the ever loving crap out of it and sent the remains to the scrap yard.

LeanBurn was really cool in concept. It even worked, too. Unfortunately, it suffered from two things. One, being that computer-ish electronics were still somewhat in their infancy, and two, they put a delicate piece of technology on top of a hot vibrating engine. Not Chrysler's finest moment...

Mine still worked, surprisingly for being ~35 years old when I had the truck.

What was the actual benefit of it supposed to be, though? It basically read the ported engine vacuum and advanced the timing? Didn't a regular vacuum advance distributor do the same exact thing, and according to many people, do a better job of it too?

The regular vacuum advance was not precise enough to produce the right setting under all conditions. Plus, spark was deliberately retarded from optimum performance on the early pollution-conscious cars. And with no feedback, the result would deteriorate between tune-ups.

My dad was a Ford mechanic and later service manager. Back before mandatory smog regulations, my dad's car was ready for a tuneup, so he did it and said let's have some fun; and on a fine Saturday we took it to the Lung Association free smog check. The guy running the test did it twice because he thought his instruments had failed. My dad told me that of course, it wouldn't stay that good and would also vary greatly with weather conditions (mainly temperature?).

How was that primitive Lean Burn setup any more precise? It didn't monitor any other engine parameters like temperature, exhaust gasses, air flow, or anything else. I'm pretty sure it literally just monitored the vacuum from the same carb port that would have went to the distributor, and nothing else. The Lean Burn "computer" even had a diaphragm that looked very similar to what is mounted on a regular vacuum advance distributor. At least that's how my '83 was.

On paper it might have looked better, but nearly all people that replace it with late '70s electronic (no points) vacuum advance distributors report better performance and usually economy too.

I didn't mean to imply anything about the primitive Lean Burn System, which I know nothing about, just pointing out what it was supposed to improve.
All the early smog fixes made performance worse, as far as I know, and I can easily believe that this one made no reliable improvement in smog either.

https://www.allpar.com/mopar/lean-burn.html

The short version is that the guys at Chrysler discovered that if they had super precise control over the ignition timing, they could run the carb super lean and still achieve the same performance as a richer mixture with a regular old fashioned vacuum advance distributor. Yes, it was motivated by meeting emissions standards, but in theory that sounds plenty better than the 'old way' and it should improve fuel economy and keep the same performance.

It was a simple system, but not as simple as you might think.

As for the old fashioned carburetor and ignition system being 'better' - that sounds entirely typical of all the grumbly old farts in the repair industry. It's not that anything is 'better' it's that they are used to something being a particular way. They all said the same things about fuel injection, front wheel drive, unibody, disc brakes, MacPherson struts, I could go on and on. I'm sure that 'many people' also thought that hand cranking your engine was 'better' than having a starter, and that acetylene lamps were better than those new-fangled electric lights. lol You could probably go even further back and some guy would've said that steam was better than internal combustion.

Computerized fuel control using Carburetors was never going to work well. too slow, too imprecise. Things only got better when Fuel Injection became the norm.

GM dragging their feet on fuel injection compared to Ford and Chrysler really was pathetic.

This weekend was just more odds and ends work, mainly tightening hoses and oh, fitting the instrument package.

When I was working on the car I added a T-point on the port for the oil pressure switch to add an electronic pressure sender and on the intake manifold replaced the single vacuum port with a dual and plugged it off temporarily. Today I pulled out a box of parts I salvaged from a donor car which had the full package. The pressure sender, the wire and hose harness and bulkhead plug and the console package itself. The idea is you knock out one of the ports int he firewall, route the harness through, everything just plugs into awaiting connectors and the package fits around the automatic shifter.

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https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...080&fit=bounds
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Initially it did all work great, then after a few hours the oil pressure reading dropped off and I was able to determine that internally a seal had failed and it flooded with oil, so a new sender will have to be purchased. Again, they seem to be really simple devices used by a number of manufacturers so another one will be readily available.

https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...080&fit=bounds
https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...080&fit=bounds

My new hurdle however is this interferes with the mounting bracket I fabricated for the car phone and the satellite radio controller, so I will need to fabricate something new to fit in its place.

Vacuum gauge? That's interesting. When you said you added a tee to the vacuum port, I thought maybe it would've have a fuel economy gauge. Same thing, I guess lol.

This whole project reminds me of my Chrysler LeBaron. Which I got beat up and bone stock, I went to a lot of junk yards and scavenged a lot of LeBarons to get just about all the factory options.

A vacuum gauge is pretty handy as a diagnosis tool but otherwise it will normally just wander between 20 and 5 inches of mercury most of its life as you accelerate and coast. Don't knwo why they settled on a 40 inHg scale. You'll never even touch 30.

https://www.mtfca.com/discus/messages/29/13704.gif

The more head scratching thing is the package includes an analog clock, but if you already have the digital clock in the dash there's not a lot of purpose to it besides it just whirrs away constantly.
One thing that the harnes DOES help with in that matter is it adds the tachometer wiring which goes in the place of the digital clock. I have a salvaged one but they are apparently prone to failure. Mine on inspection seems that the adhesive that fastens the needle to the coil has failed and the needle is decoupled from the actual gauge. I'll need to work on that at some point but installation will require pulling most of the dash trim and the cluster out.

The v8s might have had all of those sensors, but most slant sixes did not. It seems that only the very last couple years did. My '83 didn't have most of them. As I said, it had the Lean Burn box on the air cleaner, but it had a normal 1bbl carb with no sensors attached. And no, the truck hadn't been altered. It matched up exactly with the emissions tag on the inner fender and the rebuild kit that I bought for the carb, and no wires were cut up.

Like I said, that system might have looked good on paper, but like most of those abortions that were created as a stop gap between regular carbs and fuel injection, they didn't work well in reality. Especially as they aged.

I was eventually going to ditch the Lean Burn setup for a regular vacuum advance distributor, but I sold the truck after hitting a deer with it.

I mean, I don't have much experience with them, but they kind of need 'all' of those sensors to work. By modern standards, it was very rudimentary, didn't control the carb in any way.

Aaaand we got oil pressure again.

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https://hosting.photobucket.com/imag...080&fit=bounds

So it seems that for some reason an 80psi pressure sender is not a common part anymore. The Borg Warner catalog only lists a sender rated for 100PSI for the Eagle and pretty much every other car made by AMC, Jeep and International Harvester going back to the 60's. TSM doesn't specify anything either. It also doesn't list the scale resistance and at the same time I've never seen a factory oil pressure gauge on any car for that matter that was scaled for 100psi. Only the aftermarket stuff.
Anyways, lets assume that the variance in range resistance between the 80 and the 100 is about 12%, so with a reading of 63psi I should be seeing around 50psi which for a hot idle should be excellent and if I compare to other people on the internet, should be fine for quick visual indication and MILES above all these randos seeing stuff like 13psi at idle.

I wonder if you could just put a resistor in series to adjust the reading. Might want to get an oil pressure gauge (like, you know, a hydraulic gauge) to get an accurate reading for a baseline. But hey, it is working now.

Also, are you sure a 100psi sender would not be used for the 80psi gauge? Could just be the maximum pressure rating, not necessarily its usual top end.

I'm driving down the highway going 100 and my needle just sits at 75psi. I mean in this application that should be fine but I straight up don't believe my bearings are in that perfect of shape.
I actually can't really find a spec for the gauge or the sender. If it drives me crazy enough I'll, have to dig out the dial-an-ohm, find the upper and lower limits on the gauge and start seeing what other 80psi senders have the same range.

As long as it's accurate at Zero you're fine.

Oh here was an interesting failure.
I took a pothole on the highway and the engine went totally dead. Couldn't restart it. I had to call to get some tools brought in and found out I lost my TACH. After a bit of investigating I determined while still on the side of the highway that it vanished after leaving the ignition module.

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If you don't know what this is, these are great. I might of mentioned it before.
So points-type ignitions suck and require a TON of maintenance and I'm sure anyone old enough to know points will tell you how much it sucked. the Duraspark system however replaces points with a hall effect pickup in the distributor and electronic amplification system that generates the TACH instead. It's all solid state and requires no maintenance.
Anyways, you can potentially forget it's in there from how little you will need to touch it and mine has been in there so long the connectors have become brittle. One such socket had split repeatedly and the electrical connections had pulled themselves out through the back of the connector.

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Note the green wire in that harness. That's TACH. The bump must of slipped it out and that was my issue, so a ziptie and pushing the pins back into the plug and I was off and running again.

Okay, so if the module has bunk connectors, why not just replace the module?
So, Duraspark and Duraspark II came in a number of variants for different types of vehicles. They were normally identified by the number of connectors they had, plus the color of the grommet. An AMC Eagle uses a module with three connectors (distributor pickup, harness wiring and computer electronic retard) and a yellow grommet. Most people sell a version with only two connectors and a blue grommet. Even other eagles I've salvaged from did not have their original module because if you do the Nutter Bypass you don't need the OEM unit, therefore a blue grommet version was cheap and easy to get.
While you can get replacement plugs on the harness side, the sockets on the module side seemingly are not sold separately, so I'm waiting for a chance to get a beat module with good sockets I can steal and splice those on. No point replacing a module that isn't defective.

lol most old mechanics piss and moan about electronic ignition in much the same way as they do about LeanBurn and anything else computery. I guess they'd rather clean their points every 100 miles. MUCH easier.

https://www.rockauto.com/en/catalog/...ule+(icm),7172
Here you go, yellow grommet on the 6H1016. Likely both are the same. Interestingly it's only for 1982. I wonder if they only did the electronic carb in 82 or something. Or rockauto's listings could be wrong, wouldn't be the first time.

Also I love the AMC sticker on the Motorcraft-branded box lol. Nothing to see here, folks!