Greg Reimer
Well Known Member
Worst mess like that that I ever saw was in my auto shop days at Pasadena City College in the early '70's. A college employee bought an immaculate 63 or so Thunderbird, 390 and all, around 45,000 original miles, but the engine smoked rather profusely when hot and it seemed to never have had its oil changed anytime recently. Those engines tended to produce lots of sludge due to the size and weight of the FE motor, and the fact it only ran about 160 degrees when fully warmed up, which this one probably never achieved. The valve cover gaskets were saturated and leaking, so the shop teacher said to pull the valve covers. When the bolts were removed and the covers broke loose, about a quart per side of pitch black oil spilled out on both sides of the engine all over the floor. Each cover must have weighed about 20 pounds because they were totally packed with sludge. You could barely find the rocker arm shafts, the whole valve trim was encased in sludge. Shop teacher said to remove the rocker arm shaft assemblies and place them in a bucket of stuff called Gunk. We almost couldn't see the pushrods, the tops of the heads and the intake manifold area was completely buried in it. We spent two four hour class sessions digging it out. A table spoon seemed to be the best tool for it, but some of the push rod holes were completely blocked except where the push rods went through. He said for us to pull the intake. Easier said than done on a clean FE let alone this dirty thing. We got the intake off, and it, the valve covers, and the lifter valley baffle spent a weekend and two more days in the hot tank. The entire lifter valley was full of hardened black sludge and it took two of us a couple more days of shop time to dig it out as best as we could. The smoke was caused by the fact that oil couldn't drain back from the top of the heads due to the return holes being blocked, so the intake valve guides were probably where most of the return oil went. We pulled the pan plug and black tar like oil slowly drained out. We scraped, solvent washed, scrubbed, and worked on it until we got the lifter valley almost clean as new. We went through a lot of solvent doing it. We took apart and practically rebuilt the rocker arm shaft assemblies, making sure the oil holes in the shaft that lubed the rockers were all open,so that and everything else in the realm of small parts sat in a bucket of Gunk for about a week. The other thing of note was the rancid smell all that sludge made. We poured about two quarts of clean stoddard solvent in the lifter valley with the pan plug out in order to rinse it the best we could, the shop instructor didn't want to get involved with it any deeper than we did because the semester wasn't long enough to finish it properly, so we painted the valve covers, made sure the oil return passages through the heads into the lifter valley were open, we installed the valley pan, which actually looked quite nice after a week in the gunk, the intake, the valve train, the valve covers with nice new Ford blue paint and new gaskets, we put fresh oil and a new filter on it,(the old filter almost defied all efforts to get it off),dropped in the distributor, and lit it off. After a few minutes of running the motor, it seemed warmed up, so the instructor and two students drove off in it and returned in a half hour or so, and since it ran pretty well, the T bird was considered OK for the owner to drive. We must have had a three gallon bucket of sludge to show for our efforts, and the black stuff on our hands was almost impossible to get off. It stained like printer's ink. In retrospect, we should have at least dropped the pan and replaced the oil pump, since those used to fail rather occasionally on those motors. All that work because the original owner never changed the oil!! At least we got a grade for it.
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