Dis-assembling the Ford 8BA flathead

I've created this page as a way to share my experience with tearing down and rebuilding a mysterious and wonderful motor. I say mysterious becasue the Flathead motor has all sorts of myths, mostly pertaining to problems with overheating, lack of power, too hard to find parts for, etc. As the owner of two Ford F-1 pickups, one running and one project truck, I will make an attempt to share my experience with rebuilding one of these motors with you and share both my experience and knowledge gained along the way.


In the image at the left, you can see the subject of my project. The motor is an 8BA motor which my Dad and I pulled out of my 49' Ford F-1 pickup. The pickup was originally home to a Flathead inline 6, but this engine was swapped in somewhere else along the way. The truck itself was customized I would guess sometime between the late sixties and possibly the mid to late seventies based on the interior choices and overall style of the truck. You can see the condition of the truck as I brought it home in the image at the right. I bought the truck from John Mohar at the Showcase of Motorcars in California, John's a great guy, you should check his place out. You can visit the website at http://www.showcaseofmotorcars.com/.

I'd like to say that no one has been injured in the course of this project, but the truth is I had to dispatch a family of field mice living in the motor which I discovered shortly after getting the truck home and had started to tear the motor down. You'll see some pictures of their nest in a later photo. Getting the motor out and on the engine stand was interesting, it took my Dad and I about an hour but all in all went pretty smoothly. Once on an engine stand everything becomes much easier to work on and the tear down process begins.

Before tearing into this kind of work, it pays to do some research, pick up some books on the subject, there are a great variety of books that you can source from Speedway motors that will really help you out and give you a lot of good tips. You can visit Speedway on the web at http://www.speedwaymotors.com/. You could always have someone build your motor for you, but expect to shell out quite a bit more money, estimates on building a good street flathead which makes a little over 200 HP is going to run you maybe $9,000 or more (this is assuming that you have no block and have to buy that as well). I have done some early estimates on my own expected build cost, and I'm trying to stay around $5,000 or less, I'll keep a cost tally as the project progresses. Before we show a couple more teardown photos, a few words of advice from me, be patient, take your time, stay organized. There should be a method to your madness as you start to disassemble your motor, make a plan of what to keep and what to scrap, (a hint, my recommendation is to toss most of your hardware especially items like head bolts, in most cases these babies have seen 60 years or more of service and are done besides you can get much better quality new parts such as those offered by ARP). Before I go on, on a sepearate note, for you guys and gals, (yeah I know there are a couple of chicks out there who are in to this stuff and I say they kick ass) if you want to do a restoration and use OE style parts, be much more selective about what you keep and toss. You can still buy new OE style head bolts kits and other items from sources such as Long Motor Corporation, you can visit them on the web at http://www.lmctruck.com/, I've purchased more than a few items from them and their staff has been very friendly and helpful if I've ever had questions.

OK, a few more photos, here's a good photo showing the motor from a side view, you can see the intake and exhaust valves above each cylinder, this is the signature of the motor. In contrast to a more modern overhead valve design, the flathead has the valve train in the block and the cylinder heads simply form the roof of the combustion chamber. At right, you will see a picture of the block where the disassembly process has already begun. The heads and the entire intake manifold assembly have been removed as have the water pumps, distributor and timing cover, and crank pulley. The fiber cam gear has also been removed. **Important, unless you're going for an exact restoration, you should think twice about reusing the original fiber timing gear, new cast aluminum gears can be purchased and that is what I will be using on this build, don't just toss the gear though, make sure you count the number of teeth on the gear first! I will save the crank pulley in my parts stash, but I will not be reusing it on this build either, instead I will be using a new narrow belt harmonic balancer from Speedway. I'll be adding more information shortly, but in the meantime I have included a couple of pictures of some built flatheads as they are a thing of beauty, one of the motors was built I believe by H&H Flatheads in addition to the one shown in my page header, in Southern California, they know there shit and are one of the best sources of information on such motors, of course they will also build you a kickass flathead from scratch if you want them to, I recommend checking out there website at http://www.flatheads-forever.com/. I've talked to these guys at Goodguys events and they're pretty cool guys, they have an extensive line of parts and there catalog has prices shown up front for all the various machine work they will perform in building your motor, also if you want Navarro Racing equipment or a S.C.oT. blower, they are the people to see.