Aod troubles

I drove it again today. the trans seems fine, the whirring noise went away. I noticed the exauhst is definitely louder, and there's a slight ticking noise. Maybe I cracked my flexplate. I'll drop the trans pan tomorrow to see if there's any partical build up

 

If you go over there to help him blow some of his smoke into that engine, that should make you happy as well

The only Ford you could urgently use for parts is this one:

http://www.hotrod.com/articles/1930-ford-sedan-with-potent-pontiac-v-8-and-60s-style-wows-show-vibe/

 

So I put the wagon on stands and put a stethoscope to the bell housing. The trans is fine! The cats are clogged up, the heat must have caused them to break apart, but to confirm my theory I'm getting a second person to test it out.
Still, the engine acts as if the exauhst has decent flow when it's in neutral/park..

 

A vacuum gauge, hooked to manifold vacuum, will tell you if the cats are really plugged. An engine should have 18-22" of vacuum; a plugged cat on one side will make the needle waver slightly, somewhat like a bad valve; both cats plugged will reduce the overall vacuum from a couple to several inches. Revving the engine will cause the vacuum to bottom out then immediately recover. If you want or need to keep the cats, new generic replacements and bolt-in hardware are at Amazon; otherwise, just pipe both sides. But ensure you pound on the muffler, to see if some of the monolith made its way into the muffler.

 

Don't you mean pounding on the cats?

 

Would any vacuum port do? I did tap on the suspected cat and did hear something inside. Since my inspection isn't due till September, I'll just pipe them and enjoy a psuedo-sounding hotrod for a little while

 

It would be best to tap the vacuum from the manifold, if there is a port available. The other option would be from the carburetor. But then, the port whose vacuum isn't affected by throttle valve position. You would see an irregular vacuum reading, if connected to the wrong port. A wrong port would be, for example, the one connected to the distributor.
The only thing wrong with dumping the cats for straight pipes would be that the addiction to straight pipes will overcome the motivation to replace them with cats again

 

You can tee in to the fuel pressure regulator line at the regulator. And have a piece of vacuum hose long enough to put the gauge on the cowl so you can read it while driving.

 

It's fuel injected, I'll look for any ports from the intake and exhaust manifolds and see what happens. Idk, the 5-0 around here tend to keep an eye on loud cars. Thankfully they're more biased towards imports

 

I'll try it out, at this point I'm just going to take outthe piping that connects to the cats and look into them. See if any candy bars fall out

 

Yours doesen't look like a typical loud car and it won't even be that loud at cruising speeds. If you floor it in front of Boss Hog, then maybe he might miss a bite on his donut. Maybe not. If it's keeping you up at night, then a straight through resonator couldn't hurt, instead of the pipe

 

I'm just going to pipe it, might as well have some cheap fun

 

How many cats did the late 80s crown vics come with? I see the two downstream cats but could there be another pair hooked right at the end of the exauhst mani.

PS I took the car to a local shop to get it checked out, they said it was misfiring so bad they couldn't tell what was going on (probably just passing it off) lol. Might as well do a tune up while I have the pipes off

 

There should only be two converters. One in each down pipe coming off of the manifolds.

 

We had a Saab catch fire, because the cat got glowing, due to raw fuel getting in, at the dealership I worked at. It turned out to be a defective Lambda Sonde sensor. Unlike with non-catalyzed vehicles, where you could see black smoke belching out of the pipe of a rich-running engine, the cat burns off all of the wasted fuel to the point where you'll see nothing but plenty of water vapor