Daily beater '74 F100

[1972Mach1]

Here's my daily beater/sometime race truck/tow vehicle '74 F100. My goal for the truck is to be competitive at autocross, leave the factory bench seat and interior stock, and to do it with the front I-beams still intact, as everyone is doing Crown Vic swaps, and I like to be difficult hahaha.....Plus it's got to fire up every morning and get me to work no matter the weather, which here in Montana means -20 to 110 above, in snow (I put snow tires on), rain, shine, basically whatever may come, it has to function like a truck still.

I got this about 4 years ago as a $1500 beater from a friend of mine that knew I've been looking for one. It had a weak sack 360 and about every old school farmer accessory at the time (chrome roll bar, visor, slider rear window, CB, etc.) First thing I did after pulling all the nastiness off it was get some 18x8.5 and 18x10 Ridler 645s for it with some 235/55 and 265/60 tires, as anything decent looking in the 5x5.5" bolt pattern is difficult to find, especially reasonably priced. I then dropped it 3.5" front and about 4.5" out back by doing a coil cut, half flip on the hangers, and Crown Suspension shackles on the stock leaves. Then I pulled the 360 out and stroked it with a 390 crank and rods, ported the stock heads, and did a poor man's "rebuild" on it (rebearing, re-ring). I drove/raced/flogged it like that for 3 years and 50,000 miles until earlier this year when on my way to an autocross in Helena, MT it started smoking and missing. I turned around, limped it home, and compression tested it with 2 cylinders at 0, and 4 under 80 psi, so out the engine came again....after tear down, I had 6 cylinders with broken compression rings, and one totally lunched hyper piston, and the block was now toast along with a couple chambers on the heads.

At this point, I decided to make it a little bit more competitive as I race it in the SSM class in autocross, and there's some pretty stout machinery there. I started making phone calls to suspension companies, cylinder head companies, etc. ADDCO got back to me and cut me a really sweet deal on both front and rear sway-bars, and got them to me weeks before they came off national backorder. Also got a hold of Promaxx Performance, and got a set of aluminum heads from them for less than what rebuilding my stock heads was going to cost me. I found another FE block and had it bored .030 over and put in some Speed Pro hypereutectic pistons and moly rings. I got a hold of Scotty Johnston at Re-In-Carnation performance and had him build me a custom hydraulic cam, and got a custom Holley 3310 built for it from DEADMANSCURVE off a Buick forum I'm on. It's got 1 3/4" primary Hooker headers, and an Edelbrock Performer RPM I port matched to the heads, along with a windage tray. Pretty basic, reliable, pump gas build with roughly 400 hp and 500ish ft-lbs.

So for now I've still got my cut front springs on the stock beams (sets the camber at about 6 degrees negative, doesn't wear out the tires too bad, and drives straight), KYB Gas-Adjust shocks on all four corners, a Competiton Engineering panhard bar, and ADDCO front and rear sway bars. I've also got polyurethane bushings in just about everything you can on it. Currently still running stock discs/drums, but that's going to change in the near future. I've also got a take off set of Goodyear F1 Asymmetrics I'm going to be getting a set of lighter wheels and haul those to the track and swap on when racing. So far, so good, as I'm usually competitive with things like stock WRXs, Chevy SSs, LT-1 powered Camaros, 5.0s, etc....Pretty happy with it, but it'll be getting better as things progress along.