1961 timing cover pointer.

[Naykid]

First I want to say Thank you so much for letting me in to this forum. Really appreciate everybody's experience and information. I currently have a 1961 Thunderbird 390 that was pulled out of a wrecking car and I had it rebuilt . My engine builder does not recall nor do I , if the pointer was originally on the engine when it was dropped off to him . The strange thing is in the picture you can see where hes painted it black. There was something there obviously but for some reason he cannot recall now. I have installed it in my 1966 F100 . I'm coming across some conflicting information as to what pointer I need. . The code on the timing cover that I have is.C2AE-6059-C . I'm not sure what the "C" indicates ... maybe car...?
Which is onto the 1st conflicting info . From what I have researched , this is technically a 1962 timing cover, however we all know that Ford did some weird things back then. This certainly could be a late production 61 with an early part release of 62. I do not know. The next bit of information is I see pointers that are straight with a 45ﾟ angle to a tip and others that are straight with a bunch of jagged edges at the tip, also there's another one like the 1st which is a straight pointer with a 45ﾟ angle to a tip but it has a round notch in the 45° angle area . I will include some pictures. Hopefully somebody with some great experience could point me in the right direction. I have also attached 2 pointers I found on Ebay, And the yellow one is off of my 352FE that came out of my truck and the problem with that is it actually touching the harmonic balancer.
Thank you so much for everybody's time in reading this hopefully I can come to some solutions.

[Alan H. Tast]

Timing pointer styles were changed during the course of production in the early '60s at least a couple of times. There was a TSB from around 1963 that called attention to use of the single-point style being used to replace the multi-point one, and another that provided instructions on how to modify the multi-point version to a single-point one.

I'm not going to do a "deep dive" into this like I typically do for T-bird restorers as you're not concerned about originality/authenticity (that you've dropped this engine into a '66 pickup tells me you could care less about that). As a previous poster noted, your first concern should be to mount a pointer, find Top Dead Center (TDC) and file/grind marks into the crankshaft damper to indicate where TDC falls; from there, you'll want to establish in 2-degree increments where 10-degrees BTDC falls. If the rubber that bonds the ring to the crankshaft pulley has deteriorated to the point where the ring has slipped, you'll want to get it rebuilt (look for "The Damper Doctor" - www.damperdoctor.com - for one of the best-known sources to do this) anyway.

Along those same lines, if the damper has shifted, you'd be better served to learn how to time the engine by using a vacuum gauge. There's plenty of info on this on engine-specific websites like the FE Forum, and this topic has been covered in the VTCI Forum over the years. If you type in "timing vacuum gauge" in the Search box at the upper right corner, you'll find a bunch of threads on the subject.
https://www.vintagethunderbirdclub.net/ ... cuum+gauge