1973 Ford Maverick Motor install (By Ryan Vink) 

I recently had the unfortunate pleasure of spinning a rod bearing in the engine of my 1973 Maverick.   The 347 stroker motor spun the bearing while going to lunch one Friday afternoon.  This was not a fun day sitting on the side of the freeway in Phoenix Az. in the middle of the afternoon waiting for a tow truck.   I spent that weekend contemplating my options.  I wasn’t sure of the extent of the damage and I didn’t want to have my pride and joy immobile during the prime car show season here in phoenix.  It was about to start getting hot and I wanted to get it up and running as soon as possible.   I was torn between rebuilding the 347 stroker or dropping in another short block.  I figured it would be cheaper and faster to find a stock bottom end to drop in with the rest of my top end parts on it.  So I got on my local Mustang club message board online.  One of the other members had exactly what I was looking for, an engine out of a 1989 Ford Mustang 5.0.  I wanted this particular engine because they came with a roller lifter setup and the pistons used in this year of Mustang were forged.  I already had a nice Lunati roller cam in the old motor and I needed the forged pistons because the car has a nitrous system installed and the forged pistons are stronger than the hypereutectic pistons used in most factory engines.

The engine build went pretty quick.  The engine had low miles on it and was in very good shape.  The bearings were in perfect shape and the cylinder walls were very nice with no grooves.  I decided to put some new piston rings in the motor before I dropped it in.  This decision was made by the previous owner of the engine as he had pulled one piston out and had already removed two rings and lost them before I bought the engine.  So I went to the local auto parts store and rented their cylinder hone tool and freshened up the cylinders and got a new set of piston rings.  The rest of the build was pretty simple.   I swapped out the stock cam with the Lunati cam out of the 347 engine, along with the newer roller lifters.  Put on a double roller timing chain.  I cleaned up my Trick Flow Twisted Wedge heads and put them on.  Then topped it off with the Edelbrock Torker II intake manifold with an Edelbrock 600 cfm carb.  I also took this opportunity to clean up the engine bay and put on some new Edelbrock valve covers along with some other dress up items that I got from www.motorweb.com.

So now not even two weeks after the breakdown I have the car back and ready to go.  It has already made a couple appearances at the local, weekly car shows.  I lost a little bit of power but I still have the 347 engine sitting on an engine stand in my garage.   I will put some new rod bearings in it and replace the rod studs on the rod that failed and have the crank polished this coming fall.   For now I just want to drive the car and get it out to the track before it gets too hot.