Chris S

Hi I am new to this site, found it while looking for info on a blower, I recently bought a 40 ford pu that was in storage for a long time, it has been choped six inches shaved door handles nine inch ford, turbo 400. The truck is all steel and the nose was made to tilt. It is the first vehicle I have owned that is blown,the blower has the name Mike Kuhl stamped on it. The engine has only 600 miles on it. Anyway after sitting as you can imagine the carbs are dried out, so we rebuilt them and go the car running, what a bear! but I need to know how rich should the carbs be set, I noticed the headers were getting red hot while setting the timing and after finding the balancer had spun we stopped and am putting a new one on today. A friend told me that blown engine need to run richer?

 

welcome, sounds like you found a beast. gets some pictures posted of it. maybe someone here knows the history of your truck. I dont know what you were trying to set the timing at but guess is that what ever the timing "needs" to set at will not be marked on the balancer. Since the engine has a Kuhl blower on it one can assume that it does not have a stock cam, therefore the timing that the engine needs will probably not be anywhere near a factory stock setting. Since your headers were glowing I think it is safe to say that the timing was way retarded. You are going to need to get alot more information about your engine to get in the ballpark for a tune up. What engine is it, what cam, what compression ratio, blower overdrive/underdrive, advance curve in the distributor? Blown engines dont necessarily run richer than a normally aspirated engine, they just move alot more air which will require larger jets. Alot of people will run a blown engine a little on the rich side to be safe. The biggest thing you need to avoid with a blown engine is detonation. Being a little rich, and setting the advance on the conservative side will help prevent detonation.

 

Hi and thanks for the reply, I know I have to find out alot more about this engine I know it is a 454 60 over and is 90% underdriven there are #'s on the block and heads I don't have the car in front of me but I think the # was HRE1257 and the rt. head had HRE 1257 1. I do have a magazine this was in 1992 before the blower. I am in the process of building a new shop and am planning on going thru the whole truck this winter. I was hoping I could drive the truck before I redid it so I had to hide the color that was on the truck, it was a pinkish pearl, with that color you would expect Liberarchi to come skipping out. The body is in great shape so as soon as I got it I sanded it down and painted it with Black sealer, much better. I will send before photos. Thanks