Years ago I took a Carter AFB off a 63 galaxie station wagon. I looked to be a factory carb. And it had a vacuum secondairy. Ive still got it someplace I will try and get a picture. I know for a fact you can cut out the ring ridge at the top of the bore on a 360 and install a 390 crank using the 360 pistons and rods and the pistons will be almost flush with the deck. And a 428 has more stroke than a 390. So 390 pistons and rods on a 428 crank should stick above the deck. The 410 and 428 both had the same stroke and both where externally balanced.
Let's do some math. 10.170" Deck Height on all FE's 3.78" Stroke for the 390. So at 10.17 - (3.78*0.5) - 6.54 - 1.745 would work out to a 0.010" deck clearance. With a 0.040" gasket you would be fine, but without a dish or open chamber heads, the compression ratio will be up there. The math says a static compression ratio of 10.9:1 with a 70 cc D2 head and that thick gasket. That probably won't like 87 octane real well without the right cam setup. That is when you would want to switch to an early head with a 80 to 85 cc chamber and better ports. Something like that would be a pretty damn good street motor at 9.5:1 to 10:1.
Old Wolf - the latest production AFB used on Ford was 1960, although Mr. Shelby did use 2 as an over-the-counter package for the 289 Cobra as late as 1965. For the big Fords, something about Ford wanted a secondary diaphragm, and Carter didn't! Too troublesome in comparison to Carter's airvalve. As stated earlier in this thread, Dearborn Marine chose the AFB for their 427 from 1964~1966. Something about not leaking. Leaky carburetors are not overly desirable on a marine engine. Lincoln did use the AFB from 1963 to 1968, but it had the conventional Carter secondary airvalve, not a secondary diaphragm. I used the guts out of two of these in the modified Comp Series AFB's on my shop truck.
Bringing up the old thread again, I have a couple more questions. One would be, was there anything ever made so you could basically bolt an fe in instead of a flathead, I've seen them for small block chevys, just wondering of there was something similar for a fe? And 2, this isn't really about fe's it's about toploaders, I have a toploader 3 speed in my 47 right now, if I use that to mount the engine and make a trans crossmember would a toploader 4 bolt in or would I have to remake the crossmember? Thanks in advance.
Well, that is wrong. The Edsel Express 361 Engine IS an FE mill. The larger (1958 only), E-475 was based on the M-E-L platform.
So what to do with a ‘69 390ci with a stock two barrel to pep it up a bit. I have my Dad’s ‘69 LTD that he ordered to pull a trailer with. I haven’t driven it in years but it had pep without a trailer behind it and even with a trailer it got around 18 mpg it IIRC.
Same thing you do to pep up any internal combustion engine. Figure out a way to get more air (oxygen) and more fuel into the cylinders. Cam swap, 4 bbl Intake and carb, and getting rid of those restrictive log exhaust manifolds would be a good place to start.
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