Here it is...

 

This is it, my dyno sheet. Well, it's one of them. It's one with the highest horsepower number. That number is... 101. Yes. Just 101 horsepower. All this work, and 101 horsepower. Pretty shitty, but there's a silver lining. I'll get to that in a minute. First, I'm going to talk about my day at the dyno yesterday.

First, I get there. Get the car strapped down. Ask them to use the inductive pickup for RPM.

Blank stares. They've never done that. They always set the things to use roll speed. You drive the car in the test gear, hold the car at 2000 rpm, and the computer does some math and can infer the crank RPM from the wheel RPM. This works great with cars that have clutches. The crank is physically connected to the wheels.

Not so much with an automatic. Torque convertor slippage makes roll-speed derived readings inaccurate. I wanted accurate. So, I asked them to call Mustang and ask. Two hours later, we had a good answer, and the inductive pickup was working. So, we made a pull.

Negative horsepower and torque. Crap. Got good air/fuel numbers though, so we ran another part-throttle run. Again, negative torque, but good air/fuel. Amazingly, the air/fuel ratio is spot on at WOT and part throttle. I was quite happy.

So, we reset to use roll speed to get some better horsepower and torque numbers. The first pull yielded this sheet. 101 horsepower, 183 lb-ft of torque.

I added two degrees of timing, we pulled again. 98 horsepower. Subtracted four degrees, ran again, 96 horsepower. Mostly, power decreased due to the engine getting hot from the pulls. So, we packed it in for the day. Because of all the trouble, they didn't charge me full price, which was nice of them.

However, when I got home, I saw something amazing. On the second run, the run where I put two more degrees of timing in, the car picked up twenty three pound feet of torque. Secondly, the torque and horsepower are dropping off sharply above 3000 rpm. This points to two major problems: the engine wants more timing and the ignition is flaking out above 3000 rpm.

New HEI modules are $8. Fixing the timing is going to take a new vacuum advance module, and a few minutes with my dad's fancy timing light and my assortment of distributor springs and weights. I'll post the results as soon as I have them.

In other news, my speedometer gear showed up, and so did my carpet. The carpet is the wrong color, but screw it. It's still gray, it won't look too bad, I'm putting it in anyway.