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1967-1972 Ford F-series Pickups FAQs

"Poor Man's 427"  -  Page 13
by Wes Adams

 

WEBMASTER'S NOTE: The following is an ongoing project by Wes Adams to build a "Poor Man's 427", using a Ford FT 330 block and other 'cast-off' parts. The posts were saved from the FordFE.com forums and reposted here with Wes' permission.

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"The Poor Mans 427" Gets on a Weight Loss Program!

October 9, 2005 at 7:52 AM
http://www.network54.com/Forum/74182/message/1128869527/

Ok today I'm going to show you how to set up your bobweights. After this fine issue, we're going to spin the crankshaft on the balance machine (a hard face balancer). We'll talk about that later. Grab a nice cup of Joe and sit down, relax and enjoy the journey!!!

OK I'm going to show you on how to weigh the rod's rotating end and the rod's reciprocating end. For those who don't know, the rotating end is the big end of the rod that goes on the crank side and the reciprocating end is where the piston is on (small end of the rod).

Here I lay out all my pieces that are going to be weighed out. I want to make sure that I have all my parts and I'm not missing anything.
So here I weigh out my pistons, pins and locks. You have to make sure that all of the pistons weigh the same. You can be a .5 grams off, but I spent the extra time to get them dead on nuts zero (on everything)!

You set your lightest piston aside and shave the others till you get the same weight as the lightest one out of the set! Make sure you record this on your balance card (I will show you the card later).

Do the same thing with the rods as you would with the pistons. Set the lightest one off to the side.
Here you can see how to set up to weigh out the small end of the rod! You want to take out the weight from the balance pad (that's at the top of the rod).
Here we decided to shave off the balance pad. We did that to save weight off of the bobweights. You may ask why are you doing that? Well, we will free up some horsepower and torque, since it's less weight that the engine has to spin up, and also it will help out the block strength as well. For us the lighter the better. And yes that is yours truly!
So here is our weight on the reciprocating end of the rod.
Here is what the rod looks like.
Now we are going to do the rotating end as well. Do the same thing as we did with everything else. Lightest one off to the side. Same steps as before.
We got it down to 500 grams. My second-to-last rod was 2 grams off. We are now at 498 grams, so I had to redo all the other rods again.
Just to show you I was dead on nuts!
Here is the finished product.
Here you can see that I did a little bit of rounding off to get our weight down.

Here is our stock 390 rod. The other two rods are a H-beam rod and the last one is a LeMans rod. I just wanted to show you how light our rod is!
Now it is time to weigh out the piston rings. Only set out for 1 piston and 1 piston only. Then do the same with the rod bearings as well.

Here are the balance cards including "The Poor Mans 427"! But this will give you an idea on how much weight that we saved. Small blocks come in @ 1900 grams (Stock small block Cheby). And we are very close to that. WOW!!!!

Now that is cool. Just a little bit over 2000 grams! In the next issue, I will show how to set up bobweights and spin the shaft! I hope you guys like the issues of "The Poor Mans 427".

If you have any questions please call home (541)882-5177 or cell (541)331-1484 or email me at kwadams@charter.net.

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