B3R Garage: A Surprising Resolution

As you may know the Mad Scientist has been driving his 1970 Ford Maverick around for almost a month know. Interestingly enough, he has been doing so with an unidentified Ford 302 block with a Frankenstein Holley carburetor. That's right the carb was put together with parts from three different carbs! Unfortuantly the car would move but the secondaries would never open up. So, we never knew exactly what the old car could do.

That was until the Mad Scientist went out and nabbed a brand new 600 cfm single pumper Holley of the shelf. He threw the new carb on and guess what! The car sounded like CRAP!. It would idle real nice until he put his foot anywhere near the pedal. This was confusing to say the least.

After about two weeks of insanity checking the timing, replacing sparkplug wires, spark plugs, and the distributor cap and rotor the Mad Scientist had enough. He was about to push the old car into the back yard and tarp it over for good. Until he got the idea of removing the valve cover and watching each of the valves open and close as he manually cranked over the engine.

As it turned out, the timing was off. Way OFF! What the Mad Scientist and I though was a standard Ford 302 block (With regular firing order 1-5-4-2-6-3-7-8) was actually a Ford 302 HO motor (with a firing order of 1-3-7-6-5-4-8) .

I won't lie, this discovery simply blew my freaking mind! Just one week before the Mad Scientist put on the new carb we where out driving though town. Granted we where only going about 35mph the car still sounded PERFECT! It was quite, smooth, and not backfiring.

Now that the Maverick's kinks have been worked out and we know everything there is to know about our little Maverick, the car drives smooth and has no problem breaking the 100mph in a relativity short distance. If we could just get the back tires to stop spinning when we hover over the gas pedal we might even be able to get the front end off the ground!