I think this is my next project car

I looked into different places to buy the diff. Quick performance was about $40 less, but it's a used standard used ford housing. The speedway is nodular iron and they say it's got 4lbs more material in it, and has the daytona pinion support and it's all brand new. I just didn't want to take a chance on another used one. Not that I really need the higher strength, it's nice to know it will easily handle it.

Fedx here is rated the worst terminal in the system. I bought an exhaust kit for the nova and they had it on the truck 11 times for delivery. I called summit racing and they sent another kit by ups and I had it 4 days before the fedx one finally got here and it was trashed. Summit was great, they told me just to dispose of the kit. I cannibalized it for other projects.

I've only ran the engine for a short time on my lift so I don't have enough time on it with the hei to see what the plugs look like. And I don't have the cooling fans hooked up yet so it gets hot pretty quickly. I think I'll open the plugs up to .045 gap and see how it goes. That's the factory setting as far as I can tell.
 
Last edited:
.045" gap has always been called for as far as I know.
 
Not only that, for a 78kV HEI, the .045 is the minimum gap. With multiconductor plugs like splitfire or Bosch +2, you can run quite a bit more gap. The way I always ran them was to open the gap and do lots of ignition claning and prevmaintenance. .045 is where you leave it if you abuse your maintenance (set it and forget it). This is assuming you are running a single spark system, CDI and MSD plug gaps are better off closer to the .045 baseline, for obvious reasons.

Edit: The stock HEI coil has great specs. I've run Accel and aftermarket coils, the gains are tighter to the margins with the coil-on-cap setup over upgrading a canister coil (on any system, ballast or none). The GM coil is really good. It planted the seed for the LS coil per plug coils, which are also very good compared to aftermarket.

Edit again: Good call with the Speedway nodular housing. They get their castings from somewhere, and as a hot street/race third in nodular, there are not very many choices. I wouldn't be surprised if Speedway sourced the same thirds as Richmond, Detroit, or Currie. I'm assuming the third has improved oiling to the pinion, which benefits a street car as well.
 
Last edited:
I'll regap the plugs soon. For now I'm just happy it's running after fighting the pertronics unit. I understand it was good in it's day, but the hei has been around for 30 plus years and drops right in with a two wire hookup. Just made sense to me to go the easy route and upgrade the ignition at the same time. Hopefully it will last through the summer until I put the fuel injection system on.

The new diff came in today and surprisingly fedx didn't damage it too much. I swapped the 1310 yoke our for my 1330 one. To me the diff is a thing of beauty. Yeah I guess I'm weird calling a car part beautiful, but beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I just want to build a glass case and put in and have it rotating so I can see all of it. Seems a shame to hide it in the rear axle.

Behold................automotive "art" :grin:

20230505_141351.jpg20230505_141647.jpg20230505_141742.jpg20230505_142331.jpg
 
I got the diff and the driveshaft installed today.

I was concerned that the driveshaft would be too long as others reported in the feedback on the speedway site about the diff. I put my 1330 yoke on the diff and honestly I can't see any difference in how much yoke in stinking out of the trans. I suspect that the 1310 yoke the diff came with was longer and the people that reviewed it didn't catch the difference.

You been the judge.

Before new diff.

old.jpg

After new diff.
20230507_194747.jpg
 
Well she saw the light of day today for the first time in 11 months, Took her down the road for some BBQ. Seems to drive fairly well, the ford rear is really quite. The bad things...........left power window quit working, no fan blower motor or AC, and just as we got home the temp starting climbing. Not sure what happened there. I think I need to bleed the brakes again also. And the BBQ sucked. For $34 I couldn't went to micky d's instead and had change back.

But it's a driver now kind of..............just not very far for now.

20230527_142658.jpgIMG_20230527_154708.jpg
 
Nice!! How did the driveline work out? Everything fit with the third, no issues?
 
The driveline was perfect. As you know I'd read about others saying it was 1/2" longer and they had to shorten their driveline. I pulled the 1310 yoke off and put my 1330 wide yoke on. Was easy, they used spacers to set up the pinion instead of a crush sleeve so just had to pop the yoke and and put mine on and torque it down.

What I think was happening with others is the 1310 yoke on the differential was longer than what they had on their old one. I didn't see where anyone changed the yoke out and solved their problem or even measured for any difference. I was worried because over a dozen people reported the same issue. But I should have realized they didn't do anything to research into what was happening. Monkey see, monkey do it seems.

I'm very happy with the differential. Definitely would buy it again.
 
Beautiful '55; very little matches '55 Chevrolets. Except '57 Chevs... :D
Going to keep it that color?
 
Yes keeping it black. She's got a few nicks here and there, mostly from me working on it. I don't like working on a car with nice paint doing so many repairs and upgrades. I have fender covers, but I turn my back and they fall off. I've used small clamps to try and keep them in place but it's a losing battle.

57 chevy? You are one of those that use the "gun sights" on the hood :p
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top