Care and feeding of the Ford Crossflow?

In reply to TurnerX19 :

A choke on a race car's Weber's?  Can't honestly say I've ever seen such a thing. DCOR's if I remember right?  

frenchyd said:

In reply to TurnerX19 :

A choke on a race car's Weber's?  Can't honestly say I've ever seen such a thing. DCOR's if I remember right?  

DCOE.

I think I see where it went pear-shaped. I didn't distinguish so well at the beginning, and there was some back and forth about race car applications, but my inquiries are about a street car - a seven.

In reply to frenchyd :

Reply to both Frenchy and Mike, Side draft Webers, DCOE, regardless of application do not have a "choke" in the American sense of an extra butterfly outboard of the jets. The choke cable that no one should ever use is attached to a lever which opens a fuel passage to provide enrichment. It is always over rich, and unmanageable, usually causing wet spark plugs. Like Don49 said, clean the plugs and try again before you get upset at the seller. The throttle pumps are your friends here.

In reply to TurnerX19 :

That got me closest yet!

All of the plugs came out wet and smelling of gas. To a varying extent, they all showed signs of running rich. From what I can tell from researching spark plug selection, the NGK BP7ES is the go-to plug, but this car has the hotter BP6ES, which makes me think there's an effort to manage fouling. There doesn't appear to be an appreciable amount of wear. 

I cleaned off the deposits with a wire brush, hit them with some cleaner, and once they were dry, reinstalled.

I disconnected the battery tender, made sure the choke knob was in the full off position, turned the key to RUN, gave three pumps of the gas pedal (which seems to be a middle ground count) and hit the starter. It fired right off immediately, and maybe ran for a 1-Mississippi, 2-Mississippi, then died. I managed to nearly repeat this twice, and then it got worse. After maybe five tries, it the starter wasn't spinning so fast. 

The plugs were wet again when they came out.

I hooked up the tender again. I'm going to dry off the plugs, check their gap, then put them back. I'm also going to shop around for a new battery.

Stale fuel will produce this symptom as well. Any idea when the fuel in the tank was installed? Does this have a mechanical fuel pump or electric?

I had a wonderful time trying to start my '81 RX-7 with fresh fuel in the fuel tank but stale fuel in the LINES.  Fortunately it was dead simple to pop the lid on the Dell'Orto carb and sop up the mess of ugly reddish brown liquid (no longer fuel) and flush the fuel line out until it was nice clean gasoline in the carb.

The kicker was that it would not even want to run on starting fluid sprayed into the air horns.  It would kick a little, but it was like the old gas would actively prevent combustion.

This was a car that sat from '09ish to '19.  And I replaced the fuel tank because it was so full of varnish that new fuel would pull crud off the sides and quickly render it useless as a motor fuel.  But there was still old junk in the fuel line.

In reply to Pete. (l33t FS) :

Crossflow won't be that finicky! Also I bet this car didn't even exist that long ago, it is a Birkin, not a Lotus.

I don't know the age of the fuel. I know it's done about 1100 miles in the past three years. It has a mechanical fuel pump.

If the fuel is as much as 3 years old I would flush out the lines and get fresh fuel.

An example of what old fuel  can cause:

I had some 93 octane fuel that I salvaged from my  old race car that I parted out.

It was from the summer of 2018 so it was at least 2 1/2 years old.

I drained the fuel tank and got around 5 gal. of fuel.

I used this fuel to run my lawn mower  last summer and my snow blower (Which is a 2 cycle engine) this winter.

The mower ran OK on it but the blower lost power and even stalled  a few times while clearing snow this past winter.

After over treating it with a fuel detergent additive it ran better but not as well  as when I use fresh fuel.

Eliminate as many variables as you can, one of them being old fuel.

I've reviewed all of the paperwork for documents that show the odometer reading and a date, and the car has covered about 135 miles since late November 2020. I don't know the exact range of this car, but I would guess that should be about one tank.

I know that this doesn't fully preclude stale gas, but I'm thinking it's less likely.

I would start with four fresh plugs; I've experienced plugs that once fouled will then foul even easier, even with a good cleaning.

Do you know that the float needles are seating; this is tough to spot with a mechanical pump but not impossible.

In reply to Tom1200 :

Thanks for the suggestion.

I'm not sure how to check the float needle seating.

In reply to Mike (Forum Supporter) :

With an electric pump it's pretty easy................there's gas pouring out the of the carb.

If you know the float bowls to be full you could disconnect the fuel line and see if it runs fine until it drains the float bowls. If it does run fine hook the line back up and if the flooding/fouling returns then the needles likely aren't seating. They either have bits of crud in them or they're coated with fuel sludge and need cleaning.

If it's run since five months ago, we can probably rule out stale fuel!

Okay, that did it. It ran! New NGK plugs, new, larger battery. About twenty degrees warmer than prior attempts too.

Four pumps of gas, crank, half start and die.

Three pumps of gas, half start and die.

Zero pumps, start, settle into idle over about ten seconds. 

I let it idle for a while, then shut it down. I can't tell if it dieseled or if I was touching the gas.

I ditched my shoes, and started it up with no pedal input, and it started fine.

I turned it around and repositioned it in my garage, and shut it down.

Turned it back to run, and the electric fan came on. Quick hit of the starter, and it almost immediately came to life.

I'm hoping future cold starts are less than three tries, but I'm guessing I'll change the number of pre-start pumps of the throttle over time, and the car had a bunch of attempts and sitting. This seems pretty good based on what I've seen others talk about around the internet.

I owe all of you a ton of internet points. Thank you all so much for the advice and wisdom. I read it as a fueling issue at first. I've had an embarassingly small amount of time to mess with it, and without your help, it would not have run today.

Aside from turning it around, I haven't actually driven the car - there are a handful of reasons I don't want to try that at this hour - but it runs!!