223 with loadomatic

Daves55Courier

Well-known member
True or false?
All Ford 223 I-Block 6 cyl engines with Ford-O-Matic and Load-O-Matic distributor had spark control valve on carburator, but cars with manual trans did not have spark control valve on carb? If not true, what was the criteria for whether or not the carb was equipped with spark control valve?
 
As long as it had a Load o matic dist it had to have a spark control valve, automatic or manual. A manual trans car did not require a dashpot valve. Joe
 
Found a old Holley 1904 with lot of missing parts that does have a valve body with spark control valve.
I removed the corrosion from the shaft holes, cleaned the valve body and acid-etched the exterior, cleaned and blew out all the vacuum passages and installed a new idle-fuel mixture screw and new SCV & gasket from Daytona Parts.
I removed the non-SCV valve body from my good carb and stole the shaft & damper from it to use on the other valve body. Now I have a complete, functional Holley 1904 with SCV but I discovered that it had originally been set up in the rich mode. So I repositioned the accelerator actuating rod in the normal mode. Now I will need to completely re-adjust the mechanical linkage and probably the Ford-O-Matic passing gear link.
I must have been in too much of a hurry to get the thing running years ago and wasn't paying attention to how the carb was set-up.
Hopefully everything will be alright once I get the linkage re-adjusted.
Some of you may remember my fight with this carb flooding due to high fuel pressure which led to me placing the car in mothballs back in 2010. I am now working on that problem also and will report results when complete.
 
after more research, I now answer my own question (did all carbs have spark control valve when used with Load-o-matic distributor). And the answer is NO.
'55 and '56 Ford car shop manuals show the Holley 1904 1bbl carb for the 223 engine WITHOUT spark control valve. This carb did use a combination of ported and venturi vacuum via tubing from the upper main body throat of the carb routed to the distributor vacuum advance and a ball-check valve located in a vacuum passage between the main body and valve body.
The 1bbl carbs that did include the spark control valve did not appear until many years later.
Since this system as it was originally designed did not have the SCV, I am tempted to switch my valve body back to the one that does not have the SCV.
Still have not started this thing up yet, although I do have fuel bypass between fuel pump and gas tank completed and installed a smaller piece of tubing inside the fuel supply line to the carb downstream of the bypass line as an orifice to purposely create backpressure in the line (which should help to cause filling of the bypass line). It is hopeful that this installation might alleviate carb flooding. In conjunction with this, I also installed a 1/4" spacer between the fuel pump and the engine block which I hope will reduce the fuel pressure coming out of the fuel pump.
Some time this year, I will start this thing up and report my results.
 
unibody madness":1y3ndcpv said:
Good to know, the more you post the more I attempt to learn. How would this affect a multiple carb set up?

Read this thread from a few years back
viewtopic.php?f=18&t=66065

Also, if you are familiar with HAMB jalopyjournal, there are a few posters there who have done it successfully..
 
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