1993 F-150 Flare Side

[DerekTheGreat]

That's how this truck was, no blow-by in his driveway. Then we get it home, I start sorting this thing out, put it back together annnd blow-by. -But it runs better! ..My one buddy had a 318 in Ramcharger he used as a plow truck for his property. He had two breathers on it routed straight to the exhaust. I'd never seen that before, but he said the blow-by was so bad that it was sick, said it was the only way. I believe the tail pipe tips were oily even. Ran silky smooth though... Strange.

Right, going to pay attention to how it runs and check on things if/when it starts misfiring. Surprised it's gone almost 1,000 miles without drinking an entire quart, yet has this much blow-by. Given my Town Car and Firebird practically guzzle half a quart per tank of gas with no blow-by, I'm perplexed. Although the Town Car tends to abstain from it's drinking problem right after an oil change for about 1,500 miles or 3 months, whatever comes first. This truck touched no oil for about the first two tanks of gas after the oil change. Could be that shitty Restore I dumped in along with the oil change. NFC, but I probably won't bother adding that stuff again.

How often did you need to check on the plugs in that 302?

[DerekTheGreat]

Yesterday I finally adjusted the speedometer. Was reading about 6mph too fast with these short tires @ 70mph. Didn't do anything until now because I figured we'd have a set of original wheels cleaned up & tires mounted. Well, the fat short tires and wheels have grown on me.

I researched how and used these websites to come up with something:

92-96 speedometer calibration the easy way | Bronco Forum - Full Size Ford Bronco Forum (fullsizebronco.com)

Programing for tire size - Ford Truck Enthusiasts Forums (ford-trucks.com)

Reseting Recalibrating your PSOM for the Correct Speed (archive.org)

web.archive.org/web/20070324124950/http://www.arkansasmud.com/psomcalc.html

The last two links were the most helpful for me. I measured the tires from the top to bottom to account for actual rolling diameter and got ~26". I then stabbed that into calculator found on web.archive (last link) and got 10.81 as my conversion constant. Wanting a second opinion, I then used this calculation sourced from Mcleod's post (#13) on Ford-Trucks.com, "32x3.14=100.48/12=8.37 5280/8.37=631x.0135=8.52" That netted me with a conversion constant of 10.48. My cluster speedo fired up with 9.72 as it's conversion constant with 6 "tries" remaining. Cool, means no one has messed with it before. I tried 10.81, which ultimately ended up making the speedo read about 2mph slower than actual. Ok, on to 10.48. That made the speedo read about 2 mph faster than actual. Split the difference! (10.65). Stabbed 10.65 in and now the speedo reads about 0.5-1.0mph faster than you're actually going at 70mph. I can live with that. It is now actually the most accurate speedometer in our fleet behind my Town Car. Pic because I took one:

[gadget73]

I think they can only be re-calibrated a limited number of times. Fairly cool that it allows it without any special tools though.

I remember fixing one of those for someone. Cap blew up, puked its guts out and rotted some traces on the board. Had to bridge the rotten parts with wire to make it all go again.

[DerekTheGreat]

Yeah, super cool and easy to do. If no one has touched the thing before, you get six tries. I burned up three of them... Really wish you could test before you commit or that there was an unlimited amount of times you could reset the speedometer. Not sure why there's a limited amount of resets anyway, as the range is 5.00 - 11.00, so odometer fraud would be really tedious.

A side question that cropped up as a result is: Can you reset the amount of allowable tries? If we ever change wheel & tire size again, I'll probably end up locking this one out. "Get another from a junkyard!" Sure, but how would I reset the odometer to match the original?

[VicCrownVic]

If it gets locked out you could always get something like the Ford Speed Dial. I have one in my garage that I pulled from The Ice Car. Trans that I swapped into that car has the wrong number of teeth on the output shaft drive gear. Since there is no driven gear that exists to make the speedo correct for 2.73 and that drive gear I had to install the Ford Speed Dial to make it right. Fairly certain it would work for this truck too

[DerekTheGreat]

Oh, that's neat, thanks Vic. Installation instructions here:
Microsoft Word - FordInstShtM-4209ADPT-A.doc (fordracingparts.com)

Side note is that the EEC-IV computer for these trucks must link fueling with speed. After making the calibration change, there was a very slight hesitation when taking off at low throttle, that's gone now. Shift points are definitely linked to vehicle speed as well as the TPS signal, as it still shifts into OD roughly at 45 mph, although the truck is actually doing 45 now and not 40.

[gadget73]

I've never liked the solution of "just go get another out of production item from decades ago". Eventually that well goes dry.

[GM_Guy]

Theres probably only 6 memory addresses allocated for the calibration, of course ford assumes you will stick with stock sized tires and use some table to enter the correct correction factor the first time.
If you are one of those super genious microprocessor programming types you can pull the chip and write zeros to the appropriate address--maybe. Depends on the chip, some are write once end of story. If its in the processor, theres a good chance that may be the case. If its an external memory chip, might be able to get away with a new chip and dump any other date minus the correction locations into the new chip.
Something those $2000+ programmers do that also let you adjust odometer.

[DerekTheGreat]

I've never liked the solution of "just go get another out of production item from decades ago". Eventually that well goes dry.

Haha.. Yeah, you're right. I don't have a solution for that. I have thought that the cars will dry up too. Not sure what I'd do when that happens. I like driving old stuff, I have zero interest in just about everything made the last fifteen or twenty years.

Theres probably only 6 memory addresses allocated for the calibration, of course ford assumes you will stick with stock sized tires and use some table to enter the correct correction factor the first time.
If you are one of those super genious microprocessor programming types you can pull the chip and write zeros to the appropriate address--maybe. Depends on the chip, some are write once end of story. If its in the processor, theres a good chance that may be the case. If its an external memory chip, might be able to get away with a new chip and dump any other date minus the correction locations into the new chip.
Something those $2000+ programmers do that also let you adjust odometer.

Bingo, six tries exactly, provided no one else has touched it before. I killed three attempts already as I am no genius, probably closer to one or two steps ahead of a neanderthal. Didn't get it right the first two times, still didn't get it right the third, but it's close enough to live with. Really? What kind of programmer would that be and it all just plugs into the speedometer or EEC-IV test port?

[GM_Guy]

For new stuff, most is through the obd port, old stuff is usually desolder the appropriate IC, stick it in an eeprom programmer and run the included software. Basically, you are paying big bucks for the software that allows you to change things you are "not supposed to" and usually involve software you download from suspicious chinese websites.

One example of an odbII tool. This is not an endorsement for any product as I don't own any;

https://www.amazon.ca/Odometer-Adjus.../dp/B07KFM8F3Q ($1699)
cut 'n paste;
[code]https://www.obdprog.com/product/Maintenance/2704.html[/quote]

And an eeprom programmer; around $2000.
[code] https://www.x-tool.org/ [/quote]

[DerekTheGreat]

Ooh, certainly cost prohibitive in our case. $1,700 is more than we paid for the truck