Vintage Thunderbird Club International

Hello KlogsDonJr, The upper bump has no holes to feed a cable through. The lower one (closer to the bumper) is a hole covered by an access plate. This is screwed in place by one screw (can be seen in the picture at the left side of the access plate). The picture shows what I think is going on and ho...

Hello Chambers, I am not familiar with your carburetor model in particular, but that behavior can be observed on any carb with the following problems: A) Acceleration pump not working B) Choke not opening fully or overly rich by some other means (idle screws or even jets) In fact I think it is two s...

Hello Klogsdonjr, I think the only thing that makes sense is the connection on one of those bolts. That little metal strip just connects the housing to the other bolt. So your 1956 is a 12V negative ground car. So the power (positive) should be cocnected to the bolt with the "+". The small...

There was an article once in a T-Bird Magazine.
I have only this scan.
It might give you an Idea about what to clean and to see if the wires are all ok and if the coils are grilled.
Good luck!
Bob

Hey Paul,
I checked my 1955 Ford Service manual and it describes the dual sensor/switch setup in it. Now in 1955 there were no more Flatheads sold. So some Y-bloks must have had that sender setup somewhere...
At the same time a single sender setup is not described anywhere...
Just confused.

Bob

Hello Allans, The reason is that the ford Y-block and the ford small block (221, 260, 289, 302, 351) have completely different engine mount concepts. The Small block has two front-side mounts on the engine block and one rear mount on the rear of the transmission. The Y-block (original to the T-bird)...

to finish this discussion: You can run a car without a choke, especially if you live in the southwest or drive only on hot days. However, for anything below 90° you will need a choke or have to compensate for it not being there. Running a car without a choke usually means you will have to enrich idl...

Hello Londonbird, (As ins London, England?) I don't know what you mean by "bypassed". Is is rendered inoperable or does it get heat from somewhere else? If it is a later carb it might get heat from the coolant? Anyway. The original automatic choke was heated by exhaust gases from the exhau...

Hello Sir Sawyer, Looks like you have an aftermarket soft top. The original soft top frame has mainly flat irons of 1/4" thickness stamp and bend while some parts are even cast. If your top is mainly pipe or tube bent and flattened at the ens (as it looks from the picture) it is aftermarket. He...

Just an Add-on. ICONs picture above also shows that there shouldn't be any resistors or switches between temp sender and gauge. So this might be from other cars and you have a later truck engine. I know the removal of the gauge is horrible, because you have to remove the entire speedometer. You have...

Hello All, Bruce send me an e-mail about the wiring and the resistor. I wanted to share the answer here, because it might help someone else. In the '50s, Ford used a strange combination of temp sender (variable resistor) and temp switch in line: 1switch_temp.jpg In this case the gauge would read lin...

Hello Bruce, My 1955 wiring manual states that it is Red-White wire all the way from Gauge to Sender - no connectors, no different wires (different wire colors). But I don't know if there is a difference in 1956 cars. You sated you changed sender "and resistor". What is that resistor? You ...

Hello Fairlane, Sorry, I was operating with outdated information. I thought they were available some years ago when I was toying with the same idea. Jim is probably tight. The part he mentions is shown on several hotrod pages online and I bet it is some sort of generic part. Taking into account the ...

Hello Johnny, Watch out if you want to go from non-power brakes to a power dual master cylinder. If you want to do that you will get clearance issues with the battery. I think a regular non-power dual master cylinder will fit, but I am not sure about the brake line routing. If you already have power...

I think we should all list all the ways we already broke down and then you can make plans to mitigate each problem. Here is my list: -water hose:make sure you also have water, just fixing the hose is not enough because you probably did loose water. -electronic ignitions can also die - I also always ...