My first Y Block was a '58 Ford Custom 300 4 door sedan. My dad bought it for me when I was in college in 1963. My uncle had bought it new and it was well cared for. Bone stock 292 2 barrel Fordomatic. Had a '53 Ford Flathead before that. First night I had it i blew off a 59 ElCamino, 283 stick, 63 Ford Galaxie, 352 2barrel, 4 speed, and a '59 Pontiac 389 2 barrel automatic. A friend of the guy with the Galaxie finaly beat me with a '57 Pontiac 347 4 barrel automatic by less than a car length. Never particularly liked the looks of the '58 but it always ran better than it should have. By the time I traded it off on the '57 T Bird that I still have I had added dual exhausts, a four barrel AFB and intake off of a '57 Mercury, exhaust cutouts,  a 3 speed full syncro 3 speed out of a '63 Ford with a Hurst shifter, Sprint tach from my local Ford dealer, and a 3.89 rearend out of a '57 Ford Station Wagon. Had a ball with that car untill I traded it for the T Bird. Kept the 3.89 rear end and eventually ran it in the T Bird for many years. The T Bird is another much longer story. A good friend of mine had a '57 Ford Fairlaine 2 door sedan with a 312 that also was a runner when  he didn't break it. Good times.

When I was a kid, 58 Fords weren't that common.  Guys always wanted the hoods for their 57s because of the scoop in the middle.  One day a new kid came by our house with a white and orange 58 Ford hardtop.  I didn't think the 58 was as pretty as the '57, but it was different and interesting.  This car sounded much different than ours.  As was the custom at the time, he laid down a patch of rubber in front of my house. Wow, what a torque monster. Smoke was poring out of the rear fender wells.   He popped the hood and I saw my first FE motor.  At that moment, we knew there was a new Ford kid on the block.  After that my buddy bought a '61 Galaxie with a 401 HP 390 and a 4 speed. He would let my 292 get ahead of him and pass me like I was tied to a stump. The future had come and I switched to FE motors.   I love Y blocks because they were my first hot rod engine.

Back in about '62 I was driving a '56 two door post with a +.060 312, a somewhat clone of a 260 horse dual quad engine.  It had 4.55 gears in a wagon Dana rear and a T-85 OD.  It was my daily driver, and it got 22 MPG twice on trips to and from Rockford Illinois from Selma Indiana.  On one trip home from Rockford, on a divided 4 lane in northern Indiana, a '56 Buick Century pulled beside me, kept accelerating and decelerating, trying to goad me into a race.  He pulled in front of me, and I stayed right behind him.  We got over 100mph on my speedometer (actual speed???), and he seemed to quit gaining speed, so I pulled out and PASSED him.  I had not been using full throttle to stay behind him.  Anyway, he turned off at the next intersection.  Boy did I used to be STUPID!  But maybe I still am.

John - "The Hoosier Hurricane"

John.  I'm trying to imagine what your '56 sounded like at anything close to 100 mph in overdrive with 4.55 gears in the rear end!  BUZZZZZZZ? 


NoShortcuts
a.k.a. Charlie Brown
near Syracuse, New York

A high school friend bought a 55 sedan that was supposed to be an old police car. Very plain jane 4 door but with a 4barrell V8. No power anything and radio delete and 3 speed column shift with overdrive. It ran like stink and beat pretty well all comers. Of course there were a few modified cars about that were extra fast for the time but the regular street cars had very little chance. He loved to put down all the scrubs he could find. Over time it developed a roll in the idle that made it sound really tough. We kept up the street racing and winning for a number of weeks but the idle finally seemed too out of whack. One weekend we gathered at his house with a guy that had at least done a real tune up once. Tune up didn't cure it so he pulled the valve covers. The cause of the miss became obvious when we spotted one missing and one bent pushrod. I swear that old Ford was burning up the locals on 7 cylinders! A trip to the junk yard for some pushrods and all was back to normal. All we noticed was the nice quiet little rumble in the exhaust and I swear the car got faster. May have been suffering bent pushrods when he bought it.




Y's guys rule!
Looking for McCullouch VS57 brackets and parts. Also looking for 28 Chrysler series 72 parts. And early Hemi parts.

MoonShadow, 292 w/McCulloch, 28 Chrysler Roadster, 354 Hemi)
Manchester, New Hampshire

Only being born in 65  made my younger years of fast cars around the Smokey and the Bandit age.   However,  1st ride in a  y powered  vehicle,  1956 Ford tandem axle truck tractor pulling a lowboy with an excavator on it.    332   5speed with a 3 speed auxiliary.   The operator dug all the basements in my neighborhood.   He put my bike up on the trailer and drove me home.   You could hear that truck long before he went by school in the warm weather with the windows open.      So  loading heavy and yanking it down the road's always been more my bag.    !st y block owned,   1964 F250 4X4 with a 292 and  T98 4 speed.  My brother bought it for $1 and restored it.  Then I bought it from him.   Sold it to buy a semi when I moved.    My current y block,   my 60 F350.   I'll have had it 10yrs in March 2019.   

When we were young and stupid we did all kinds of things that could have easily killed us. The fact that we are all here is pure luck.  On Saturdays we would gather at one of our houses and work on cars.  My house had a large oak tree that we used to pull engines.  My father somehow tolerated this.  At least he knew where we were. Sometimes we would swap engines around just for fun. We weren't rich.  We all worked jobs and you could buy a good running engine for $50 bucks back then. We mostly drove '55 to '57 Fords as they were plentiful and cheap.

My buddy that bought the '61 Galaxie with the HiPo 390 was a union electrician.  In the sixties construction workers made more money than most anyone I knew.   On Saturday, we decided we should put a 3.0 gear in his Galaxie and find out how fast it would go flat out.  Keep in mind we were running bias ply tires with lots of miles on them.  That night after the gear swap we rode out west of town to Highway 27 where you could run for miles without any traffic. He opened his dumps and off we went.  His car had a T-10 and I can still remember the sound of that engine as we went through the gears.  We easily got up to 100 with pedal left.  He held the pedal to the floor for at least 10 minutes.  I don't know how fast we went because I was too scarred to look at the speedometer.  If anything had happened we would have gone out in a blaze of glory.  Later in life I built cars that ran much faster, but none scared me more than that night.

Hello  In my high school years (early 60s) brand X guys were buying fueler cams and stuffing them into stock 265s and 283s But Y-bocks guys, we went to local Ford dealer and bought "special"  cams (think they were under 20 dollars) and stuffed them in stock 272,292 with same results. I had a .60 over 292, 5/8 domed Jahns pistons, g-heads mallory dist. tube headers, "special cam" in a two door 55 that was perfect. After probably 10 light duty trans I got hold of a tin top 4 speed. Put a dana 44 with gears from a stude pickup 4.88 and build some thunder bolt lift bars. Back then Standard oil had pump gas over 100 octane it was pink. Could out run most all with same cubic inchs, until high HP 409 396 427 413 became available. It was a fun time, still stuck there.  Bill  Oregon

In Florida we bought Sunoco 260 100 octane gas.  Loved the smell of that stuff. 

I think the Sunoco highest octane was 102 or 105 something like that. Had a friend with a BSA motorcycle that was running it. Mechanic told him not too as it was too much octane. I don't know exactly what happened but it only took a couple weeks for the BSA engine to let go. 

Y's guys rule!
Looking for McCullouch VS57 brackets and parts. Also looking for 28 Chrysler series 72 parts. And early Hemi parts.

MoonShadow, 292 w/McCulloch, 28 Chrysler Roadster, 354 Hemi)
Manchester, New Hampshire