The Ford 427 SOHC: Through The Eyes of Legendary Engine Builder Ed Pink (His LAST Engine Build)

back in the day if you didn't run one of my engines you didn't win my mind says I can do all this stuff but my body says you you can't but those are some of the things we had to do to make the engine live this is Ed Pink's personal garage okay not in the race shot this is you can sit here and just look at pictures all day because there's literally history hanging on the walls incredible yeah I wasn't expecting this it's very similar that your uh interior decorating taste is the same yeah well the biggest thing I got going on is you guys here today so we can talk about the 427 single red Cam Ford engine so you were the first guy to really start using that engine in Drag Racing what about what year was that 1966. I wasn't the first okay Connie Coletta was the first all right and uh Pete Robinson was one of the first but the biggest reason that Ford was excited about having me they were looking for somebody that was in the engine business they could build these engines and sell them to other people and that was a big thing I had going with board the thing is this the engine was originally designed and built for NASCAR but I have a feeling somebody didn't read the rule book close enough because the rule book for NASCAR said no very damned they hear they had this engine and they didn't know what to do with it and then they decided Well let's give it to drag racing and that's how it came to drag racing but the thing that Ford saw is they weren't getting it in other people's cars Lou beanie came around and wanted to run a Ford engine in his Dragster and we went back to Ford Ford was very excited about it because number one they got ubani Ford agency going to be running the engine and pink engine builder is going to be built in the engine so there's a good chance that he'll be able to sell the engine to other people and that's what's excited for it because you were already doing engines for Lou at the time we were doing 392 Chryslers for you 392 Chryslers okay yeah yeah and then the 426 Chrysler came along and the camera came along only downside to the camera is there was a very labor-intensive engine to work on and you know these guys are pulling the engines apart between rounds and with that would be really hard to do because of the chain and setting the cams we're on a 392 Chrysler you can take the heads off take the Pistons out put new pistons in heads and all that and you know you don't you don't touch your hand oh still working well well I help people yeah right Ed's the quarterback of this whole video and he thought to better understand the 427 single overhead cam Ford that we needed to know some of the back story on the Chrysler and the hemis to understand the importance of the camera when drag racing first started the Chrysler Hemi was the engine already okay there are a few guys who run small block Chevys with superchargers and there's a couple guys that ran big block Chevys when the 426 came out it took a little work to get it really to be better than a 392. it should have been better than the 392 to start with because it started out at 426 inches but there were some things about it that would come different than the 392 and one of the things which I showed ahead the 392 had a small combustion chamber the 426 had a huge combustion chain so consequently one of the major things that that we came across was the fact that the amount of sparkly did you run with the 392 versus the 426 or night and day 392 if I'm not mistaken the cc's in the combustion chamber of the head was like a hundred and on the 426 it was 175 a lot more yeah so consequently spark plug from the Piston is a long ways away it ended up the 426 took a lot more sparkly some guys like Garlits what he did he just started cranking sparkly dead until it quit running good with me being in the engine business I had to take more of a scientific approach to it rather than just throw a sparkly to them because I'm dealing with customers that they're paying for their stuff they want to have somebody doing things that knows what they're doing rather than just close their eyes and going for it we ended up with the 426 running 75 degree sparkling 75 degrees this is barely halfway [Laughter] that's what you had to have because of this decide back in the day if you didn't run one of my engines you didn't win and I'm going to tell you didn't qualify thing was you had a John Butera car in a dead pink engine and you were killer that might be the opening line of this video if you didn't have one of my engines you didn't win yeah we had that about two years you go to a big drag meat and there'd be like uh 16 say 16 money cards and 10 or 12 of them would be a Butera car and it had pink engine when you heard one of ours fire up you knew right away whose it was because I kept the sparkling thing pretty quiet yeah yeah yeah that much more CC's the Piston guys that had to done just like a nightmare then for them to fit me that'd be just a massive Dome and but remember also we were running low compression so you know imagine hey there were about six and a half seven to one okay all right so then all right it was almost a flat top piston so making that move from Chrysler to Ford was actually a huge step for you yeah it was a huge step luckily I I did have a little bit of 426 experience not much most of them was all 392 experience in the 427 is a Hemi yeah it is a Hemi okay yeah so what happened the first time you tried to run this with Nitro the first time we tried to run it with Nitro it ran okay and uh the biggest thing that I noticed over the Chrysler engine is when we ran it one side complete side of the spark plugs looked like they hadn't done anything and the other side were just about burned out I tried all kinds of things to try to fix it I tried changing the fuel system I tried changing the ignition system and nothing nothing would fix it nothing changed it it was always the same I got to looking at the chain thing I had to right cover off the engine had to change oil on it looking at it and then turning the engine over dawned on me that there's a chance that the chain is going through stretch because the fact when the engine was designed by Ford it wasn't designed for a Supercharger I'm sure there are many times at the end of the 9000 RPM by the time I get to the end of the quarter mile especially on a good run so it saw RPM that the engine didn't initially see it saw the Boost going into the combustion chamber that the engine never saw the RPM was running and the blower and so forth you're you're running the valve springs they're probably 240 250 pounds in the seat and 600 700 pounds open and that's all putting load on the Chain I got to the point where all the things that I had thought it might be didn't face it at all and I decided that what was going on was the chain was going through stretch even though I had special chains made chromoly change chromoly pins and so forth which helped it and made the change last longer but it did not correct the offset between the two of them and finally I decided that to fix it I needed to make an offset between them and the big thing was how much offset that I want to put in to start with but I realized that I needed to put more than what I thought it would take I didn't I didn't want to just mess around with a little bit because a little bit may show you nothing and then all of a sudden you say well I'm not going that direction so anyway I decided that seven degrees was a good spot to start and uh I put the drive cam this drive side and split overlap and the trailing cam I put it at seven degrees Advance low and behold that fixes now that simple change fixed it and then from then on it was just a matter of getting the uh once I figured out that and got that part correct then it was just a matter of getting the rest of the tune up on the engine right and then from then on it ran really good my practice was the first engine to run in the sixes and it was at Bristol Tennessee and uh with that cam split you could pull a spark plugs out of the engine and land there and you couldn't tell what side they came from did it idle funny Once you changed the other side no because it wouldn't not be stretching it idle no if they stretch it out or maybe it's a half a degree now the engine uh actually sounded more powerful yeah no it uh I mean these things you know when you're running eighty percent 85 percent nitro with uh probably 20 pounds of boost going into them when they're sitting Island they sound good yeah I mean it hits the throttle I mean they they want to jump up off the ground once it leaves the starting line and you listen to it going down is when you can tell the difference plus one other thing one of the first times we ran the engine one of the in the meats we ran we ran a night race before I changed the cans and you can see it as it's going down the racetrack the side of the engine that didn't look like it was running had to blame up the exhaust pipe this side and the other side real short see the difference yeah that was another quote if you've never seen a Nitro car run at night you miss something in your life that's should you should do when Port did the block they use the same block that they do in Fe and the only change they did is they didn't board the lifter border and they they they were not born out so you didn't have a problem there were some guys that ran the camera engine and they use an Epi block and to do that you've got so many oil passes that you got to plug oh you can't get oil to the lifters because there are no lifters just open hole so you yeah so you got to plug all those you got to plug some of the main oil galleys where it goes no cam in there either right so there's yeah there's tons of leaks you would have to plug and if you get one of them wrong yeah everything does yeah quickly so what the camera has is uh you got the crankshaft and the and the gear on the on the crank and then there's a uh a stub shaft that's about that long it goes in number one and number two Cam Bearing it has a main oil Galley runs a full length of the block and then over each Cam Bearing there's a hole drilled that goes down to the cam bearing then the hole goes this way so it goes to the main bearing so when you get to number four you have to have a way to get the oil that's squirting in there to the uh cylinder head the rocker arms and we took a grooving tool and put a little Groove from the main Galley to it who's supposed to be connected there's a connection then we put the cam bearing in so that way we seal it off behind the camera yeah yeah no it's perfect that makes total sense yeah but those are some of the things we had to do to make the engine move so with that intermediate shaft in there what kept it from what kept it from moving back and forth yeah I was wondering that too does it have a retainer plate or something let me again wow no that's the intermediate shaft and that's the chain that goes around intermediate shaft like a normal timing chain yeah yeah where did this come from this one forward and what I did is I had the the actual catalog and then I made copy of it so it was shot in the engine department and it gets grease on it or whatever I'm not destroying the catalog someone didn't read the NASCAR rulebook right because you always see these guys who are in the comments videos like oh the France family hates Ford you know they're always against Ford they let the Hemi run and then they ban the the 427 because they hate Ford it's not they may have hate him I don't know about this but you know in the rule book it said no overhead cam you can't argue with that no no that's amazing right there I mean this this is incredible history there can't be that many of The Originals of these things floating around anymore yeah I'll show you the original well you have it of course you do you ain't made copies of it oh I didn't know if he still he made those copies this is b-roll for later 100 yeah your extra video is just Page by Page yeah turning through oh my God look at this thing what yeah there you go and see it's got Coletta running the camera who did they give these to oh [Applause] anybody was doing it so this is explains exactly what Billy was talking about on the camshaft how because of the way that it rotates on this side the intake did a gobble yeah because there was one of these engines out at Speedy Bill's Museum right so if you haven't watched that video yeah you should go watch the video of us at Speedy Bill's Museum in Nebraska It's amazing And we saw one of these engines sitting there and Billy was saying that the camshaft on One bank is different than the camshaft on the other bank and the reason for that is the intake valve is on this side on that bank so it's on the inside well okay it's on to the we'll say it's to the right of the center line of the camshaft and the exhaust is to the left of the center line of the camshaft but on the other bank it's flipped the intake is on the left hand side of the center line and the others are right and because of that directional rotation that same that slack motion rotation the timing is the difference so there's a left hand Cam and a right hand Cam and then as he discovered because the link the timing chain you had to just set the offset of them so yeah it wasn't just like okay well this four cylinder is the same as that four cylinders and just no like not even close now you see why I suggested doing it the way we're doing it because if you come here and putting the engine together you need to miss all this you wouldn't have been you have missed all of the reason why stuff is done the way where now we're taking the complete engine and going through it how we got there and why if you made it this far in the video you would love all the other history videos we posted including the other ones with Ed make sure you hit that subscribe button down there so that way when we post a new video when you open YouTube it will recommend it to you it doesn't cost anything it's just basically like a follow button and sometimes that's not even enough so if you click a little bell too it will give you a notification we I knew we were going to do this and it's like this is your last engine and I talked a couple guys I knew that had built them they're like oh yeah this is like big time these are these are not for the novice you know I call you I'm like this is over my head I'm not your guide to help you put this together get get your right guys get it together then we can come talk about it when it's done because I don't want to be the person putting it together and having messing up your last Stitch thank you you know and you know the old saying an engine's an engine you know but there's different idiosyncrasies that each engine has did you after fall in line with to do and this one has more than the average engine would have yeah here you go so this thing says is capable of producing over 600 horsepower on gasoline how much power are you making on Nitro on one of these things uh back in the day probably 2000 Maybe 2500. but you know what they're making just four times more they're making eleven thousand yeah 11 000 horsepower but but it's it's completely gone from when I did it it's night and day it'd be cooler if they were still using a factory made blocks and stuff for that okay they would explode they couldn't make it one pass we when we when we did them uh we use Factory blocks because there wasn't any aluminum block made at the time and we ran the porn Fe block and it was good for about as hard as we run them it was good for about seven or eight passes down a quarter mile and you throw the block away when when we that's why One race weekend like if you made it to eliminations that like qualifying and eliminations that was about it you could go through two two race weekends okay that's about it and maybe okay I know that when uh when they when we won the winter National or the Spring Nationals of Bristol uh on the way there on the way there they stopped off at some drag strip and they had a weekend where they raced so they ran four runs there and but at least two qualified so they've been six runs for elimination runs in two qualifying runs then they come to Bristol and we made four qualifying runs and for elimination rooms so that's eight 16 runs for the two races and when they brought the car back and they brought me the engine the crankshaft was in the oil pan he could not have made another run that was the limit that of course we ran it hard yeah you know I mean we ran it hard that was the limit of the block at that point yeah yeah I mean we had to as I remember when we had to take the pan off we had the horn Jack underneath the pan and once we got everything unbolted we turned the floor jack and it came down and half the crankshaft was in the pan the Ingenuity of like doing them that you had at the time I think that makes the era so cool because you know that's like an incentive to have a favorite manufacturer like picking Ford Chevy Chrysler whoever like nowadays you don't have that like because the plot comes from somebody else it's got aluminum blocked aluminum cylinder heads aftermarket now I don't know if this block is strong enough don't if you have a nitro engine but a supercharger on it it run Nitro back in the day uh I don't know if it's strong enough or what we do on get on gasoline that's plenty strong but also one thing that end that's a 800 pound engine it's a heavy engine that's a nose weight yeah I had a hollow exhaust valve yeah that's what they ran totally Hollow or filled with something and there were sodium okay yeah liquid sodium filled 1966. it's like Merlin stuff I think they had filled valves in those were those Pistons back in the day were they 26 18 alloy Pistons way back then yeah there was two kinds of material available I don't remember the other material but it was one that uh you would you you would do a street Engine with it because it didn't grow much you could run real tight clearance where with the 26 18 you have to run more clearance because it piss and grow so much you see that thing you know what that is it is that the tensioner no what is that there's a tensioner there oh this is the tensioners over here okay I think fuel pump Drive there in the city eccentric he goes okay yeah so you're right the force is over here are completely different than over there because of that fuel pump eccentric yeah yeah because some of the guys that built these engines in later years they put the Magneto up here and you that's a bad deal because that's the one that goes back right yeah you got to run it off of here run the mag off in front of the club yeah because that's this is real timing that can apply to you yes yes yeah this is kind of amazing I don't know how you can remember all this I I'm amazing that I remember it yeah that I wasn't even born yet when this is going on right there were a lot of interesting comments on the the shop video of people that were impressed with your recollection and sharpness for your age and one of the ones that I thought was the most funny is that it may be smelling nitromethane was a preventative measure to cure Alzheimer's or something plenty of methanol you're good all the things they say are bad for you you've been like around them forever well he's so intelligent and he never stopped brain and working so yeah the thing is this I've got friends of mine that they get to 6570 they retire and they sit and watch TV all day long that's a good way to go dead brain dead I think people go brain dead doing that far younger than 65. right look at most of the people running around well I think you're just like you said because it's a good way to go dead right it's like when you stop engaging just things go away quickly should we go over the engine and we can yeah tell us about it now we're like super hooked on this thing…