Last weekend the oldest Incubus and I bolted a few goodies on his girlfriend's '76 Bronco. The little truck had obviously been abused prior to coming into her posession, but at some point late in the previous ownership cooler heads prevailed and it received not only a slick bright red paint job but a nice Ford 302 crate engine. Unfortunately, they bolted the stock (restrictive) exhaust manifolds back on, along with the original 2 barrel intake and (junk!) Motorcraft carb, leaks and all. What a shame...the shortblock has a mild Ford cam in it as delivered. We added an Edelbrock Performer dual plane intake, a Holley 650 with vacuum secondaries, and small primary Hedmann headers. I recurved the Duraspark distributor but I haven't finished dialing it or the carb in yet, but it feels like it grew at least 100 horsepower. Tuesday the kid got a nice pair of duals professionally installed. Currently the truck has 42's on it which don't do much for the acceleration away from a dead stop, but it sure steps lively from a roll-on at about 20 mph. Looks are important to the girl, and this one has that in spades between the color, the big meats and the 6 inch lift. Now it sounds good to boot and can back up those sounds. All in all, it was about a day's worth of work without strain, not counting 4 parts store runs for incidentals and a box of band-aids for my swamper, Knuckles.
Dang kids...now they've got me thinking about restoring my 1949 Ford coupe and stuffing a big block in there...or at very least putting a 4 barrel and headers on Ol' Hulsey, my '69 F100.
Regards,
Rabbit.
