That's when you're supposed to make a romantic gesture towards the woman in your life. That's the woman who lives in your house. Your house is the building next to the garage where the kettle and the clean clothes live. And apparently, farting in bed but then NOT holding her head under the duvet doesn't count as a romantic gesture.
For Valentine's Day, I've given the missus a Pinto. Now bearing in mind that, in some South American countries, a "pinto" is slang for a tiny penis (oddly enough, Ford's Seventies compact was renamed for sale south of the border), there's much mirth to be had there. even more laughable is the fact that the space in the '92 Mustang convertible that used to house a fuel injected 5.0 V8 now houses a carburetted 2.3-litre four-pot.
Even this wasn't easy, despite the fact that the subframe is the same for both motors so the Pinto engine mounts drop straight onto the slots in the subframe. In theory. First, I waited until it was dark and cold, because every major job should involve blundering round in the dark. Ford handily made the Fox Mustang with a bonnet that opens to 90-degrees, so you don't have to remove it to extract the engine. It's almost as if Ford knew that 20 years on they'd all have their engines whipped out and the rest scrapped. You can see the length of all-thread propping the bonnet open.
When I removed the Pinto from its previous accommodation, it was a rusty four-eyed 1980 model. I'd taken the bumper and nose-cone, so when it came time to remove the engine I just hacked off the slam panel and whipped the engine out in seconds. What I now found was that the aero Fox has a mighty front overhang, and the Pinto sits a long way back in the engine bay. When you're trying to push a loaded engine crane - a supposedly "long reach" engine crane - over gravel, the little release valve on the front of the ram has hit the bumper and scraped all the paint off long before the engine is anywhere near where it needs to be. To drop the engine onto its mounts, you need a jib at least 42" long. This one was 39". Blood-buggering arse-biscuits.
It got done, though, and the engine mounts just dropped into their slots in the subframe. Eventually... after an hour and a half of levering, swearing, jacking up, letting down, cursing, and manoeuvring that involved a scissor jack between the chassis leg and engine block at one point, while I informed the engine that it was, in fact, a bum-rutting bastard son of a mother-f**king bitch's bastard's whore, it dropped in.
I'd salvaged the entire engine-bay wiring loom all the way to the ignition switch from the donor car, but it seemed that though the '92 had had its engine loom and ECU removed, all the other systems were still wired in - the engine loom was stand-alone and separate from the main body loom. This was great, as it meant I just needed the handful of circuits used on a carbed Pinto. So I set about paring away all the no-longer-required circuits from the loom... a job easier said than done when you're trying to follow circuits in a Haynes manual that, frankly, lies so unashamedly that it should have been part of the Plebgate inquiry. In the end, approaching the end of my tether, I cut one last redundant wire and the remains fell into two parts - the charging and external voltage regulator bit and the ignition control box bit. I wired the alternator bit in (AFTER realising that I was going to have to relocate the battery to the other side of the engine bay), then mounted the ignition box and coil. This left me with half a dozen wires to connect to a factory connector on the bulkhead - oil pressure, water temperature, tacho, two ignition-fed lives and one that's live when you key the starter. Should be a piece of cake. Let's see.
In the meantime, I've taken delivery of this. It's another engine-less breaker, even though it looks rather handsome in its Eleanor silver. I only really wanted the PAS pump and the wheels. Even so, having dragged it home, removed the power steering pump, removed the pulley from my old pump (using the correct special tool, kindly loaned by one of the Fox Doctors), fitted the new pump to the Pinto bracket and driven the pulley onto the new pump, I'm still no further forward as the pipe union on the car is different again to the new pump! The one on the silver car crumbled like a little bitch at the mere sight of a spanner, but fortunately, Steve the Fox Doctor may have come to the rescue with a PAS pressure hose to suit.
Don't forget - Valentine's Day!
Eugene
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