Sorry for the long hiatus. My folks were pretty sick during the winter and I have been busy trying to get a second job. My father and I just got to messing with the 292 again. I set up the cylinder head on an old piece of angle iron. I clamped the cylinder head to the iron and I was about to call it a day; then my father came downstairs to see what all the noise was about. That was about 4 PM last Sunday. The no.1 primary tube was hitting the intake tube and placing the front header at a strange angle.....even though it would still bolt up. We also found out that the bolt holes on both the header flanges were off by at least half an inch. On the front header we pinched the primary with a large pipe clamp to clear the intake. That set the header at the correct angle and solved a lot of bolt problems. The bottom of the rear header flange was hitting the back of the intake and throwing off the rest of the bolts. At first we were going to cut the bar off, but my father filed it down by hand about 1/16" and it solved the mounting problem. We realized that we might have to make a cardboard cutout of the header(s) flange and see if it matches the cylinder head ports. My father wasn't too encouraged by the quality of the Pacesetter headers. We're also going to see if we can hook up some sort of water jacket or sumtin to heat the intake (base of the carb) during the winter. The old exhaust flange had an exhaust passage leading up through a valve to the base of the carb. It would be open during warm-up and close when the engine got warm. My father thinks that he might just deal with the truck having to warm-up a little longer on cold days. We're fortunate to have have the spare parts to rig all of this up because I couldn't see figuring all of this out with the engine in the truck. When it was all said and done, it was 11 PM. We started putting the accessories on the 292 the next morning to see how everything was going to fit. The front header just barely cleared the smog pump bracket by 1/32". We took everything off and cut the smog bracket to fit. We ended up taking quite a bit out of the bracket so my father took some scrap 14" piping and made a 1/4 cut. Then he placed it so the radius of the cut was facing out toward the driver's side fender (or where it would be). The smog pump won't adjust all the way down with the piece in the way, but it's only like 1/16". Hopefully after it's welded to the bracket, we will have restored most of the strength lost by cutting it. If we messed it up, we have two other smog brackets to play with. This method prevents us from having to get a longer pulley belt. I scrounged around the garage this morning and found a better angle iron to mount the cylinder head and I am currently setting that up to bolt up the cylinder head. I have to start looking for a place that will strip my headers down so I can either paint them or have them ceramic coated. I'll probably contact Eastwood and get some brush-on high temp paint.
