It’s never happy days when you’re ruminating about the fuzzy but ominous radio voice pronouncing the doom of Steve Austin’s experimental rocket in the intro to “The Six Million Dollar Man.” But here we are, teetering on the brink of ignominious not to mention expensive defeat in the final stages of Avocado assembly. While not seriously entertained, rationalization of and plans for a reversion to the old 390 slither around the back of the brain and spawn more, sillier, more irrational thoughts: With 8 gears and a 3.55 rear end, surely you’d get north of 10 MPG! At any rate, this fixing/making thing will never be a viable outlet, and you’re doomed to a boring, talentless life of Ray Liotta at the end of “Goodfellas.” You should blog about something more substantial, anyway. Maybe take up the torch of Andy Rooney and bury WordPress in rants about toilet brushes.

“I don’t know WHY we use a toilet brush to clean the toilet. Seems to me that scrubbing dirt out of a large bowl that flushes out the dirty water and refills with clean water, and putting it in a tiny receptacle that doesn’t flush the dirty residue, or fill with clean water, is a recipe for disaster…”

We were puttering along nicely, putting in a steady 4-8 hours per week in and underneath our patient. Gauge pods were assembled and installed without evidence of a seizure during the process, a shifter cane was bent up perfectly for the T19, which had been dispatched rearward 6 inches to make room for the overdrive, the exhaust was adjusted, cut, re-welded, assembled, and mounted. Rivnuts were driven into the core support to provide the final mounting holes for the intercooler. (These little beasts let you screw proper cap screws into sheet metal where you don’t have access to put a nut on the other side.) Typically, you’d use a sheet metal screw, but despite the domain name, there’s no joy in reaching for a recessed piece of wiring and raking your knuckles over the business ends of sunken drill screws.

Gingerly using a heat gun and a brake line tubing bender, the plastic hydraulic clutch line was straightened and rebent to fit a truck a decade older than the one it was made for, and all that remains is fabrication out of steel plate of a retainer bracket for the slave cylinder to try the clutch setup. The rear bumper was installed. The tail light wiring harness, mangled and butchered from a universal trailer harness and weather, was cleaned, resealed, reloomed and installed, while a trailer harness specific to a dentside Ford pickup that plugs into the existing 4-pin connectors rather than relying on those cheap plastic wire taps is in route from eTrailer.

In went the fluids – the notched oil pan fortuitously takes as its reduced capacity an even 2 gallons of oil. And in they stayed. The radiator was bracketed down, the electrical hooked up, and the starter bumped. All that was needed was to spin it over and make sure the oil pump could pump oil before hooking it to a fuel can and trying to fire it.

In retrospect, that presumptuous order of a trailer harness might have been what did me in. Even after pulling the injectors to remove compression resistance and dumping some 50 weight oil down the filter housing to prime the oil pump, the engine would not make any oil pressure while the starter spun it. Not one pound, not after a full minute of spinning it over.

After running headlong into the axiom that an internet search will return a number of different answers to a question that is a full 90% of the total number of answers and therefor will give the searcher no comfort or confidence in any of them, a strange calm descended. Plan B, culled from said searches and a desperate call to my favorite mechanic:

1. Pull the pan. The only piece of the engine that was messed with prior to installation was the pan and pickup tube. It’s a pretty easy operation, and the modification was done by a professional fabricator. Nonetheless, there’s as much chance that there is a pinhole in the pickup tube as there is of trouble elsewhere. Seal off the pickup end of the tube and fill it with liquid to test for leaks. You should have done this to begin with, just like you did the pan, Champ.
2. Pull the oil pump, inspect for damage and check for clearances. Pack it, or its replacement, with grease to create a vacuum. Reassemble.

After all, this is what you signed up for.