Finally building a new motor, need some help

[blueroo]

The carb on the 170 I have cracked. Yes, it is easily remedied but the car has not been the poster child for reliability lately. Coupled with the fact that merging can be a rather scary experience I've decided to get another vehicle and do some work to the Fairlane.

First off I'm ditching the 170 in favor of either a 200 or a 250. On one hand there's the 200 that provided it has the setup where I can bolt my 2.77 bell up to it, I can use the T5 I have now from the 4 cylinder 87 Mustang.

But then there's the 250. 50 more cubes should mean more potential. I know there's been 250 swaps into Falcons, but I've never seen one done on to a Fairlane. Is the 50 cubes worth the hassle of the low mount starter, taller deck height and most important to me, can my current T5 be swapped over without having to change the driveshaft?

Or would I be best off taking a 200 and punching it out slightly?

 

[CoupeBoy]

In '64 they had the 260 and 289 so the bellhousing and low mount starter are not issues in your car, so don't worry about that. I don't know if you are going to run into hood clearance issues (probably will, unless you can find some '69 250 frame and motor mounts). I think your biggest problem is going to be the transmission. Since the transmission is for a i4 you can't directly use it on a bent8 bellhousing so you are going to have to get an adapter for a 3.03/4spd bellhousing to work with the transmission that you have. And since you had a 2.77 it requires a different adapter (if you had already bought one)

In short I think you should stick with a 200 for fitment and ease of parts re-use, and I have NO idea about the shifter, I thought that was a 'round body' problem for Falcons, I've never heard of it being an issue for '64+ cars.

-ron

 

[fordconvert]

I think a 200 is already punched out, probably why the 250 ended up being such an oddball, they just kept having to modify stuff to make it work. If you start looking at the costs and risks of a serious over bore and offset grinding of the crank you will find much more practical ways to make more power. Do you have E85 in your area? If you just build a high compression motor with a fuel system set up to run on E85. That way you get 'race gas' performance out of stuff that is cheaper than regular. I have thought about trying it but getting enough fuel into the stock log may be difficult and my car has been running so well lately I hate to mess with it.