I get several responses when i tell people i bought a pinto.  People my age(18) and younger usually say "a what?"(I find it funny that a previously very notorious car is now unknown to many people).  The others come from people older than me and both responses begin with a laugh followed by either "Why?" or "I loved my pinto!".  No matter what its always a conversation starter.

Several months ago I began looking for an older car to restore as a project and drive to college(I just finished my freshman year at Iowa State University).  After alot of window shopping mustangs and bidding on a few other older cars i found a 78 pinto hatchback for sale only a few hours away.  My dad had driven a pinto in school and so had both my uncles so i thought it would be cool to continue the "tradition".  I called the owner of the pinto and found out that it had spent its entire life in Texas( no rust ) until a year ago when him and his mechanic bought it to make an autocross car.  The mechanic replaced the carb with a 350cfm Holley 7448, replaced the entire exhaust with a speedflow header, magnaflow muffler, and all new pipe.  They also installed a brand new radiator, water pump, and hose. The car was being sold with 4 new never driven on tires.  The car had only 62,000 miles on it.  I thought it looked like they had a great start on their project and asked the owner why they where selling it, he replied that his mechanic had died (oops).  Anyways after making an offer and and waiting several days for a response, I got the car for only $850. The car had to be trailered because they had removed the gas tank and had not yet tuned the new carb(they hadn't ran it at all since installing all the new parts!)

Me and my grandpa made the 4 hour each way trip together to go pick up my first car.  when we arrived the car was in a little worse shape than i had noticed in the pictures, there were quite a few dents and each dent and scratch had been painted over with a different shade of green. The car was still really solid and even looked good underneath.  we brought it back home and it sat for a month and a half while i finished the school year.

I've finally started the project this last month.  So far I have fixed the timing belt(was two teeth off), tuned the carburetor, and done alot of messing with the ignition timing.  I have also installed a temporary 1.5 gallon gas tank attacked to the spare tire with bungee cords so i can drive to test my tuning.  The car is definitley burning alot of oil (I think the county would pay me to fog for mosquitoes lol) but I dont think it is bad rings because of the low mileage and i have 180psi of compression in all 4 cylinders. I think the oil is probly originating from worn valve seals. If the car is 34 years old and has 62k on it then im assuming it sat for a long time and with out oil those little rubber seals probly cracked to dust. I ordered new seals and a valvecover gasket, should be here on tuesday. Despite the smoke, the engine runs good and has pretty decent power(for a 4banger).  My only problem now is that if i give it much throttle when under load, i'm hearing some very definite spark knock or pinging.  The pinging occurs regardless of my ignition timing and even with the vacuum advance disconnected. I took it on a drive last night and kept retarding the timing by a gnat's butt at a time, after running my small tank nearly empty and accomplishing no change at all, i went home. I got out the timing light to see where i was at and my timing was set for 1 degree after TDC  I've been reading and reading and I cant find anything that tells me a good answer. I thought it might be too hot of plugs but i checked and they are new clean plugs of the appropriate heat range and had the right gap on all of them.  The other cause for knock i read about was bad gas, I'm running 87 octane and that should be fine to run in a 78, but it got me wondering and i think i have a theory.

OK so this is just a theory and I want u guys to tell me if i'm crazy but i think i might know why i have spark knock. All that reading about octane got me wondering what the octane of engine oil is, i looked it up and its somewhere between 40 and 50. This makes me think that if i'm burning a significant amount of oil, it could be drastically decreasing the octane of the gas in my cylinders causing preignition.  what do u guys think? I'm just a kid playing with his first car, i could use some experienced input.

As soon as i know i can make the engine run perfect,the engine will be pulled, the car is being stripped, body work done, painted and undercoated, new interior. I'll post pics in a bit.

thanks for your input in advance

Thanks for the reply. Here are some pics.


My first car








Notice the homemade grill that they put on for racing, the original is in the back seat


They also put on brand new hatch struts but idk what that has to do with racing


the car had factory A/C but they cut out everything in front of the firewall


interior needs work






luckily i have a better sound system to put in


need to find a gas tank or this gauge will never see the F

thats my car, i'll try to get engine pics cuz that holley carb, edelbrock intake, and edelbrock aircleaner( shiny) look kinda cool on the little 2.3

ya, its funny the way some people react to telling them you have a pinto.  I've never had any experience with pintos(or any carburated car for that matter) but from what I've heard from other people who owned them and from my time spent on this car, I think i'm gonna like it.  I know for sure that i'm gonna like its gas mileage alot better than the mustangs i was looking at and the riviera i bid on(that thing couldnt have gotten much over 12, huge boattail two door with a 465 wildcat).  whether or not I like the car enough to keep it in the long run i'm gonna have fun fixing it up and i'm already learning more than i ever have about cars. heres some more pics i took.


here's the original engine in my pinto with 62k miles. The previous owners added a header, edelbrock intake manifold, holley 350cfm carb, and a shiny new edelbrock aircleaner.






does anybody know why they would have cut up these vents? holes were cut and pieces were reattached with screws.


here's my current gas tank, doesnt last very long


i'm hoping this literature and fordpinto.com will help me through my project.

Awesome car! My first car was my 78 Sedan (I still have it) in similar shape when I started driving it (has been family owned since new). I used the same Haynes manual to work on mine, and still do with some things, I have a lot of that manual memorized, lol.

My haynes manual did the same thing, I just cut the binding and three hole punched the pages to put them in a binder.

Hey That's a factory am/fm 8 track in there!  Cool. 

UPS has destroyed more than a few things I've bought & sold over the years. You would think gaskets would survive since they are flexible but leave it to them to destroy em.....

Best I can offer at this time is 40 plus shipping. Mine came with a AM radio,  but it died, and I want to put a 8 track in as a replacement, as I have about 50 tapes for it.

Sent from my Transformer TF101 using Tapatalk 2

i got a lot done today but definitely not what i had planned.  I went out to the garage to take my valve cover off and replace the valve seals but when i got the cover off, i found something unexpected.  The cam lobes for the #3 cylinder were scored and worn and the #4 cylinder lobes were worn so far that their lift had been significantly decreased.  I don't know if this happened while i was running it to set the timing and tune the carb or if it was this way when i bought if.  My best guess would be clogged oil holes causing insufficient lubrication of the back half of the cam but idk.  nomatter what caused it, i now have a completely shot cam, rocker arms and lifters, not to mention metal shavings floating around in my oil causeing all kinds of havoc. I'm considering this engine in need of a complete teardown.

Luckily my great uncle has the drivetrain for an early 80's ranger.  The engine was rebuilt 30,000 miles before if was taken out of the truck and has been in a well kept, weather proof machine shed quite a few years. The transmission is a TK5 with nearly identical gearing to my four speed but with the addition of overdrive. I know other people have made the swap to TK5 so I'm gonna buy both it and the engine.

Since i would like to have this car rustproof and drivable by the time I go back to college(late august), I decided that i cant keep messing with engines and waiting for parts right now. I need to start working on the bodywork and repainting. I know it sounds weird that i need to stop working on the engine to make it drivable but my original plan was to make sure that everything mechanical worked then gut the car to do bodywork and repaint.  But i have spent two months playing with the engine and waiting for parts and other than learning alot about my engine, i havent really accomplished much. Since I also refuse to drive this car regularly until it has been painted and undercoated I decided i will start working in that direction and figure out the engine details later. Hopefully the ranger engine is go to go and i can keep my engine to build up as a spare or replacement.

Since I decided to work towards bodywork and painting, i started emptying the engine compartment. I got quite a bit done for that not being the plan for today. I've labeled and disconnected every wire under the hood. the entire wiring harness is hanging over my fender right now. I removed the battery, radiator and shroud, horn, choke cable, all vacum lines, and all coolant hoses.  I found a surprisingly large number of wires going nowhere, I'm assuming they were part of the a/c and emissions stuff that was eliminated for racing. I'm gonna finish pulling everything i can from under the hood on saturday and hopefully find a cherry picker to pull the engine before the weekend is over. then i'll drop the transmission and start on gutting the interior.

a couple quick questions to finish of with:

What do you guys think caused the cam to grind the back four lobes(the front four were shiny and smooth, good as new)?

Are there any major differences between the 78 pinto engine and the early 80's(I think 83) ranger engine and how will these affect installing it?

Thanks for any help guys and i dont think i said this before but my name is Dan

My spare engine wiped out #4 lobes as well.

my header actually touches the body/frame of my car. its right before the four pipes meet the collector, they make a bend and just barely touch the metal of the car. when the car is running and the engine vibrates it rattles against the metal and causes vibration in the whole car. I'm planning on just denting the metal there a little since its not visible but it seems weird to me that a header made for the car doesn't really fit.

Look your motor & trans mounts over well. Might be the problem.

Engine is ready to pull


the front cam lobes look pretty good


farther back they are showing some wear


the very far back lobes are worn down to about half their original height
(if you look at right edge of the lobe on the right you can see how tall the lobe used to be)

Hi,  No idea how deep your pockets are or not deep, however, with your cam you might be able to give it new life with a fresh grind.  Saving you some money (maybe).

check it out,   http://www.coltcams.com/html/camshaft/index.cfm   send them a email.  had my 2.8 shaft ground along with the lifters saving me some coin as to buying a HP cam.

cheers

alot has happened since the last time i was on here.  I went to pick up the ranger engine and 5-speed and my uncle said it ran great 15 years ago when he took it out of a rusted out truck but it probly needs new gaskets and seals. got it home, put it on the engine stand and went to start taking things apart when i noticed that the valve cover sticker was still intact. i was curious how similiar it was to mine so i started reading. first i notice it says that it was for an automatic transmission.. . but the 5-speed came from the same truck hmmm... I keep reading and i notice that the bottom of the sticker says something about meeting the regulations for a new 1978 model, apperently this was not originally a ranger engine.  sure enough i take off the valve cover and find a flat tappet cam but that wasn't even the biggest disappointment . the entire cam and all its bearings were coated in thick red corrosion (I may or may not have swore and/or kicked something). Being hopeful that the rest of the engine might be good, i drained the oil. the first thing to come out the plug was about 2 tablespoons of bright green antifreeze  followed by several globs of sludge.  dropped the oilpan and from underneath everything looked good. took off the head next to check the cylinders and found the #2 cylinder completely coated in rust except for a 1/2 in gap above the piston(my uncle said he had gotten the crank to turn a little). I'm considering this engine basically junk.
Atleast the 5-speed looks promising, its almost exactly the same length as my 4-speed that i took out of my car. the brackets are close enough to be able to adapt and the shift is only a few inches forward. I will have to figure out how to make it's hydraulic clutch work with my cable pedal but i think i can engineer something.
i took the engine from my car apart today to see how much damage was done my the cam grinding itself off. The oil was black(probly from the seafoam) but didnt have any noticable metal flakes in it. I dropped the pan and found the same thing, no metal shavings.  the engine looked good from underneath.  i took the head off and all four cylinders looked great,no scoring at all and 90% of the cross-hatching is still visible.(no wonder it showed 180psi of compression in each cylinder cold).
I'd say this engine might have some more life left in it if i can work out my cam issues.
I went over to the workbench to look at the head, i turned the cam and all the valves were moving so that wasnt what took out the lobes. then i watched the hydraulic lifters as i turned the cam and found a stuck lifter for every worn lobe.  I think I'll see if i can find a roller cam and a set of lifters, clean my engine out, put it back together and see how it runs. I'm hoping it'll run even stronger once all four cylinders are getting air.


the engine from my pinto on the right and the "ranger" engine from my uncle
(you can kinda see the rust covering the cam shaft in this picture)


the original 4-speed from my pinto on top and the new ranger 5-speed below


its pretty much empty

i could be wrong but I think that those side body strips are just glued on with a small clip or 2 in a place.    one word of caution, be careful how much you are pulling apart on the car. time has a funny way of sneaking up on you and your project might turn out to not be ready for a school driver.  one other word of advice,  zip bag and write everything down what is in the bags. time plays with memory.  my project is over 2 years ago now and it is in the final body stages with many parts misplaced from a major move.

cheers