Did I mention that whilst this was going on I was also managing the build of a brand new purpose built garage designed to build the car in, nothing like doing things the easy way! The engine now sat for 6 agonising months whilst the garage and surrounding works were finished and I made what I consider to be my next hasty decision. I got itchy feet and went out and brought a Jag rear axle from John Gordon’s in Accrington. Logic would have said concentrate on the engine but I had no direction with that yet and 6 months had allowed some cash to build up and start burning a hole in my bank account! Back to the engine!
Finally with the garage completed and kitted out I was able to get the engine up on the stand and begin stripping away the years so to speak. First off were all the rocker arms and out with the pushrods, the first and then the second head came away.
Things looked a bit ugly but I was happy to see the bores in good condition measuring out at standard 4.00, with only one showing a strange mark on the side.
I continued stripping stuff out until finally the bare block was left albeit with a hefty coating of sludge and old gaskets. Nothing for it but to get a set of gasket scrappers and start cleaning.
The block was now ready for machining so off to South Cerney Engineering Ltd in South Cerney we went, South Cerney chemically cleaned, decked to 8.2”, bored/honed to suit my 0.30” over KB115s and installed my new cam bearings. This was not cheap but their work is worth paying for, also every other shop I phoned locally to me said “a Ford what, is that a Pinto?” When delivering my block there were 3 302’s, 2 289’s and a couple of 351’s sat waiting to be collected, all of which were for a single customer who builds race engines, therefore I got the impression that Cerney knew what they were doing with the Ford block.
