The '95 engine used a distributor so it is possible someone installed one from an older car. I'm more familiar with Chrysler products. They were real good about making their parts interchange for many years and models. They were the first manufacturer to use electronic ignition in '72 on the Dodges, and it was easy to upgrade to electronic ignition on the '60s cars that still had breaker points by just dropping in the newer distributor and adding the small control box. I'm pretty sure you can replace a '60s Ford breaker point distributor with an electronic one too, but Ford didn't give up the breaker points until around 1976. The issue is the distance down to the drive gear on the camshaft and the number and angle of the teeth. There would be no reason to change that over the years, so I'm guessing a late '70s distributor can be used in your engine, and it would make sense then that the older breaker point distributor would work too and would require no other modifications under the hood.
My reason for bringing this up is if you still have a breaker point distributor, switching to an electronic system will be a big improvement. As the rubbing block on the breaker points wears down, it causes ignition timing to change, and on Fords, engine performance is influenced to a big degree by ignition timing.
As for the carburetor, the Holley 600 with vacuum secondaries is a good choice. You don't want to go too big because you'll actually lose performance. Carburetors have a restriction to air flow called the "venturi". Its job is to cause a vacuum under it so gas gets drawn into the air stream. The venturi, along with the rest of air passage is bigger on carburetors with a higher CFM rating. That means on a smaller engine the air will flow through there slower, and that makes it harder to draw fuel at lower engine speeds. The result is a stumble or hesitation on acceleration. We overcome the stumble by going to smaller passages, and we overcome the smaller passages at high speeds by going to a secondary, or two of them on a V-8 engine, hence, the four-barrel.
Anything else you do to increase power is going to come with a trade-off, either fuel mileage, emissions, or both.
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Thursday, February 13th, 2014 AT 11:47 PM
