It has been a while since I posted. I have been driving the car as much as possible and crossed the 3,500 mile mark today. It seems that I never wanted to put miles on my former fun cars and worried about keeping them clean all the time, but my objective with this car is to add miles as often as I can.
The car is an absolute hoot to drive and I have been enjoying the Oregon wine country roads this summer. It hasn’t been trouble-free, however. I am keeping track of the amount of days that I am down due to issues and it has been “down” about half the year. None of the issues have been particularly difficult to fix, the time delay is primarily due to other priorities… like work. A major contributor was a six week gap to have a custom radiator built as the RCR unit failed in December. I went with a shrouded Griffin and although not cheap, I highly recommend the company as they were incredibly thorough and professional throughout the process.
Besides the radiator issue, the car had its first flatbed ride when my coolant down pipe from the thermostat housing to the pipes that run up to the radiator became disconnected at a hose connection. This was my error as I didn’t have the pipes flared when made. I subsequently had the ends of the piped flared and have had no issues.
I may have posted that last summer my right headlight mounting failed. As I assumed that RCR used the same construction methods on the left light, I expected to have an issue… and did when the left mounting broke loose in June. I now have a much more robust headlight mounting system on both lights and think I should be good for the future.
I was getting a smell that I first thought was a slipping clutch under hard acceleration/high revs. I eventually realized that my vented oil fill cap was venting oil onto the headers at high revs. I subsequently (on Keith Crafts advice) eliminated my PCV valve and the vented oil fill cap and vented both valve covers to a remote Canton vented oil catch can that I mounted back by my oil filter and oil cooler.
My most recent failure was a failed MSD coil.
Along the way I needed to adjust my alignment as it was set up with too much negative camber at the front. Chris Kouba (once again) generously donated a bunch of his time to help me re-do the alignment. We had a great couple of days and converted my garage into a GT40 garage as Chris worked on his car at the same time.
Besides all of the above, I have been driving the thing. I have had a couple of outings with a neighbor’s Ferrari 488. He noted that wherever we take our cars, the 40 gets all the attention!
Keeping with the Ford versus Ferrari theme, I made a FvF themed cornhole (bean bag tossing game) and think they came out really cool.
I’m hoping to hit 5k miles by the end of the year as we will have great driving weather the next month and a half and with the moderate Oregon weather, I am usually able to drive all year.
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