On today's edition of Tony's Ford's and Mustangs we're gonna give the Maverick here
a little bit of love. This car came with an extensive service record, 12 years worth of
them but most of them looked as if they were things that needed to be done, like a fuel pump,
the alternator was replaced. Regular tune-up maintenance kind of things, that most car folks
are gonna do. they seem to be neglected on this car. I've already changed the oil on it, I also degreased
the engine compartment because, you know why not? I hate to work on a dirty engine if I don't have to.
The first thing we're going to do is work on the distributor cap and I'm going to show you here and
if you look in there there's a one listed there right here, and you'll see a lot of folks on the
internet just pull all the plug wires. I don't like to do that. I'm going to take them one at a time. Your
your coil is always going to go here, and if you take one wire off at a time you start on the one,
it's going to be a lot easier for you. You don't have to worry about figuring out your firing order.
You can just pull a wire pop it on go to the next, one go to the next one, go to the next
one, go to the next one, go to the next one, and you're done. All right so this is always going
to be my coil wire. So I'm going to pop that off that's an easy one to remember and that always
the center one always goes right back to the coil, and then I'm going to look for my number one and
pop this cap loose two tabs hold that on, you can stay out of the way here that would be appreciated,
hold this back by the fuel line, rotors coming off
and seen better days I think. See the contact there's pretty corroded.
Drop my new rotor in,
and this cap you can also see the cap is all the contact points in the cap are pretty well messed
up. I'm going to pull that wire that's one and I'm gonna go right to one and now that one's good.
Take the two plug off
it's actually six, one over here
three
go to three
four
a little cable management
six
that sounds tight and snug
this sucks right here,
why they put this right by the fuel line is beyond me. That's on
coil goes back in job done. Now if you watched my video driving this thing home when I first
checked out the car, the front reservoir of the master cylinder was low, and I was concerned that
there may be a leak in the system because it's a sealed system but if you look at the
place where the rubber seal would mount to the master cylinder it's kind of corroded
there. So what I'm going to do next is I'm going to drain this fluid out of here
I am going to clean up that surface, clean up the gasket, and then reinstall it and I think
I'm going to be okay. So now that surface is pretty well clean and it should mate well to the gasket
okay so our master cylinder that was not really leaking was more seeping. That's squared away
now so I shouldn't get any more seep out of the top of that. I think next I'm going to do
what is referred to in a lot of places the internet is the Italian tune
up, and I've got a bottle of Seafoam half of that I put in the tank the other half is going right
down that carburetor and I want to do this prior to changing the plugs. Because I you're going to
burn things off with Seafoam you might foul the plugs out, so I'd end up changing them again anyway.
so
Yeah she's already smoothed out a good bit. let me show you. Here you can see what's
coming out of this tailpipe. That's just carbon. Carbon deposits, stuff that's on the valves
and I know you couldn't see behind the car but there was plenty of smoke coming out. Okay so
now it's time to do the spark plugs the engines cool down a little bit. I pull one plug wire at a
time. I'm not gonna pull all the wires because I'm gonna get the firing order out of out of order so
the easiest way to just make it simple. Pull one plug, gap your new plug, put the plug back in put
the plug wire back on, go to the next plug. That way your firing order always stays as it should. If you
change your plugs prior to doing the italian tune up this is what you'd end up with so that's why
I decided to, and these plugs I just pulled one of these when I got back, it didn't look like that.
But that Seafoam will blow out any kind of carbon that's in there so it's best to do it before your
plug change so you don't end up with this. So this is why I like working on a straight six. It's a
breeze. Everything is right in line plenty of room to get in here no issues with that the plugs are
coming right out. I would imagine they're all gonna be covered with soot because of the Seafoam.
Yeah, yeah they're all covered with soot because of the Seafoam, and this oil that's on here
this is from decreasing the engine. So some of it just came down on the top of the plug but
they shouldn't look like this and they didn't look like this prior to dumping the Seafoam in there
but that's going to clean up all the valves and that's going to run right down on the plugs. The
one thing with plugs is you always want to hand start your plugs. Don't try to get in there with
your socket right away and wrench down that leads to cross threading and if there's one place you
don't want to cross thread it's your spark plug holes. So this is not what you want your air filter
to look like. If you can't see light through it or really like anything through it if it's like a
you know Jordy from Star Trek eyepiece, toss it. Stereo's cranking.
See this this is a Ford part and you can buy just this knob but this whole crank was four bucks at
Rock Auto. It's not O.E. but it's got a handle on it it will turn. The other thing is you notice up here
not really sure what this kind of fix was. There's supposed to be a lock nut on the back of this,
somebody trying to engineer this with a zip tie. Which yeah that's not going to work at all. Started
focusing on this piece here which was loose. There's a piece in the back that goes on this
and it was missing. So I kind of fabricated my own it's still it's there it's not perfect but
it'll work until I get the right part in, Also my door panel there's supposed to be a piece of
it's usually wax paper that's held in here with with this gummy stuff here
and it's just missing. So if that piece is missing what that means the water can go down past
and get into the door card and we don't want that. So I just fabbed one up out of
plastic. Okay is this perfect? Absolutely not. Will it protect the rain from coming in against the fiber
door card? Sure it will. Yeah that'll work. So here's my finished product. I don't think I did too bad. So
the door cards back in place, it's now relatively waterproof, this thing is not rattling around
anymore. I got a feeling that one over there isn't waterproof either. This is next and this is, it's a
block of wood, 2x4 in there and some common screws not something you see every day in a reservoir.
These cars didn't come with these and I'm thinking there might be some overheating issues, but I think
that can be fixed with a flush kit. So I'm going to flush it, also this heater hose is from 1977
and it's probably due to be swapped out. Right now I am draining the radiator and I have a little
trick here that I use, you'll see people just open a petcock, Actually put a piece of heater hose on
the petcock when I loosen it that way I don't get a big mess all over the place. The coolant will then
just drain down into my drain bucket. Something else I want to do today. This paint job I've got a
kind of a plan for it. I'm going to bring up everything from this line, this contour line
up. I'm going to buff all that up from here up. Below this is where my body work is just,
the past owner did it himself and you know I give him credit for trying but,
you need to block these things. There's supposed to be a seam here this is a lower valance
and they just filled the seam in and if you look down the side of the car everything
from from this line down is is pretty weak. So I need to block that out, and I've got some plans
for it. So I'll let you see there once we get going. I think the car is going to look sharp.
That's not perfect but it's coming around, it's coming back up
that's really all I want to do here. This is not an abrasive, it's just a cleaner wax.
I want to get some wax on this, you go over here this is this hasn't been waxed in years. I want
to get a smooth feel to the paint here. I think I can work with this paint. It really could use a wet
sand but then we're getting into a whole different territory if i go to try to wet sand this paint,
and let's face it this is a six cylinder Maverick. It's not a high dollar car.
So I'm not going to spend a whole lot of time into it, but I want it to look a little bit
better when I'm driving it around. Okay so this will be the first start since the tune-up. This
thing used to start really hard. It used to buck there was missing, let's see how she does now.
That's pretty encouraging, pretty happy with that, started & kicked right over.
All that was left was to test the work I completed. I did flush the radiator and wanted to test the
cooling system so I idled the car for 30 minutes. It didn't overheat, it didn't puke out any coolant so
I think I'm good there. It was time to test drive the car to see if any of the work I had done
made a difference in the car's drivability. I'm happy to report the car is running as well as
a 98 horsepower 256 cubic inch straight six can. I still can barely get a chirp out of the rear
tires but the car hums along and shifts well and it rides as well as any 77 Maverick. So there's
your Maverick update. The car's running as well as can be expected. Yeah it's 98 horsepower it
250 six so I'm not gonna you know be burning down the streets but just kind of cruise along comfortably
and reliably and that's really what I was looking for in this car. I've got some plans for this thing,
they're cosmetic, it's going to involve bodywork, it's going to involve you know blocking, but I
think the results are going to yield a pretty decent payoff. I think cosmetically this car can
look pretty sharp. If you'd like to see the video where I picked this thing up and drove it 126
miles home I'm going to put a link it's going to be over here to that, also if you could subscribe
you could do that over here and that'd be awesome. Thanks for watching, until next time, we'll see ya.