My friend picked up a 66 thunderbird for real cheap 3 years ago. The first year he just drove it to cruises. I kept asking him what that rumble is coming from the engine? It sounded just like bad mains, but too high, so maybe a wrist pin, Maybe Cam bearings? I asked him to drive over so we could diagnose it more. Used a stethoscope and still couldn’t figure it out. I said we need to pull this apart to really figure it out. Nothing looked right; I knew it had been apart before. It’s a 2 barrel and should be a 4 barrel, the heads were red, and block was ford blue. The casting numbers were saying the heads are from a truck.
Ok I’ll make a long story short, after pulling it apart; I kind of summarized what happened to the motor. I could see the look on his face when I took it apart it was all bad news, this thing internally was trashed! Once I really looked at the carnage I figured out what had happened, well I think this is the way it went.
Someone put a handful of beebees down the carb on one of the previous owners. This as you well know trashed the engine that explained the pistons (see pix) and different heads. But was really odd is they decided to put a new timing chain and gear set in while they had it pulled apart. Good idea, except they didn’t READ the directions with the new timing set. It said the shim is machined into the gear and NOT to use the original shim, discard it. Nope they installed the cam gear and the shim! This made the cam walk so much that the bearing surface of the cam ate 4 lifter bottoms and the lifters ate a few cam lobes. Also the cam lobes ate away at the cam bearings! It had spirals of cam bearings hanging off the cam! I had to pry the cam out with 2 crowbars. I included pictures of the pistons, I still have pix somewhere of the cam and lifters. Did a total rebuild , purrs , nice and quiet and smooth!
