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More engine assembly

Over the past several days I got the intake manifold installed and the bolts torqued. I took a look at the valve covers. Originally I’d planned to scrap them and buy new, but more recently I’d been contemplating either stripping them of the overspray and polishing them up, or just painting them to match the engine. On close inspection, though, I confirmed my initial plan. There’s a bunch of residual RTV that suggests to me that they’re not straight, and one of them has a split where someone had over-torqued a bolt. They’re junk; I’ll keep them on as dust covers for the valve train until I pick up a new set. I really want to buy new chrome covers, but I’m going to keep talking myself out of it. Eventually, some day, someone will have a set of nice finned aluminum valve covers for sale at a price I like and I’ll scoop them up. Or not.

The carburetor is done and in place, though not attached – no studs yet. I cleaned up the air cleaner lid. Once the car is back together and I have the engine back in, I’ll measure the hood clearance and put the tallest air filter I can fit on it.

I got the thermostat housing cleaned up, painted, and installed with a new 195 degree thermostat. Today I got the distributor installed and ran a vacuum line to it. I also installed the little 90 degree elbow from the water pump to the thermostat housing, it just needs clamps. I also installed the pipe plugs in the unused intake manifold holes – a couple of 3/8 NPT plugs front and back. I left one open for the water temperature sender, and a 1/2 NPT for the heater hose.

Finally, I installed the power steering pump bracket and pump, mostly to get them out of the way of other stuff. I’m getting the garage cleaned up enough that I’ve got a little room to work, so it’s getting closer to the time when I’ll be able to get under the car and drop the transmission and driveshaft. I’ll rebuild the C4 – at 93K miles it’s probably about due. I’ll likely just replace the U-joints as well, unless they’re in really good shape.

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Carb and intake

I got the Summit carb cleaned up and rebuilt with new gaskets, seals, fuel valves, and so on. I also got the exhaust manifolds cleaned up, painted gray, and reinstalled. Engine isolators are bolted on, and I ordered a Weiand Street Warrior intake that’s ready to install as soon as I buy some RTV silicone for it. The distributor is rebuilt, re-curved, and ready to go. Now that I have a fresh engine almost ready to run, I suppose I should see about getting a sound car I can drop it into. Just need to pull the transmission and drag it over to the body shop and see how bad the news will be there.

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Carburetor score!

I’d been wanting to put a 4 barrel carb on the Mustang’s mostly stock 289. By “mostly stock” I mean I’ve put in a different cam and done some minor head porting – nothing fancy, but they should flow a little better than they did. It’s never going to be a race engine, for sure. So the prospect of dropping over $700 to put a 4V intake and carburetor on it was not terribly attractive to me, and I’d pretty much resolved to just put the old 2-barrel back on it.

A few days ago I saw the exact carburetor I was looking to buy listed on Facebook Marketplace, by a local seller. He said it needed rebuilding, as it had leaked gas everywhere one day and he just replaced it with a different carb. Since there’s not a lot that a rebuild kit won’t fix, I offered him half what he was asking and he took it. So, $75 later I have the carb in hand.

Teardown revealed the likely cause of his problem – the power valve was packed solid with some sort of white flaky crud that I thought at first was aluminum corrosion. If it was, it didn’t come from the carb – there’s no trace of pitting or corrosion anywhere in it. The rebuild kit comes with a new power valve as well as the two fuel valves that were also candidates for being the cause of his problem. For a total of just a bit under $150 I’ll end up with a fresh 4-barrel for the car. I splurged on a new intake for it. There was an intake listed locally also, but it was a no-name – probably some Chinese copy of an Edelbrock manifold that I’d already decided against. I ordered a Weiand Street Warrior. I’m sure I’ll end up needing the odd bit or two for the throttle and kickdown linkages, but I haven’t ordered anything yet. I’ll see what can be taken from the old 2100 2-barrel and reused.

I hadn’t torn down a carburetor for a car in many years, and I don’t recall ever having done a 4-barrel. Most – actually I think all – of the carb rebuilds I’e done were Ford Autolite 2100 2-barrels, which I had on an AMC and a Mustang. There have been no surprises here, and it’s cleaning up nicely while I wait for delivery of the parts order from Summit. With a little more cleaning I’ll be ready to put it back together with new guts.

This one is a Summit Racing manufactured version of a Holley 4010, which was largely based on an Autolite 4100 with some Holley-ish modifications. I like it because it’s got the 4100’s annular boosters and a few other features, but uses a lot of Holley parts – jets, floats, valves, and so on, so parts support is excellent. I think it will work well on the Mustang, despite maybe being a little oversized – 600 CFM rather than the 500 the engine actually needs. But it was readily available, inexpensive, and gives me a little headroom in case I decide later on to swap the heads and exhaust for something that flows better.

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My VA/Per blend, Round Two

After finishing up what I had labeled as simply “Batch 6”, the VA/Per blend I tried earlier, I decided to make some more. This batch is a small run of 16 grams, slightly altered with a 50/50 mix of Samsun and Izmir for the Turkish portion. After 3 days under fairly high pressure in the noodle press, it was like a dark, solid little puck of tobacco. I let it sit in a jar for a day before slicing off a small chunk to try out. It’s good, and I know from experience it will get substantially better with some additional age.

At this point I plan to make a larger batch with the same mix. the largest plug I’ve made in the noodle press was 100 grams, and it was a challenge to get it out of the press. I’ll probably limit future plugs to 50 to 65 grams.

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Modifying a good blend

I’ve been smoking a good bit of my “Towers of Antioch” blend, and overall I’m pretty happy with it. It does, from time to time, display a rough edge here and there. It’s not a big deal, but I’d love to figure out exactly what’s causing it and maybe smooth it out a bit. I’ve also been tring out some of my very early stuff – like the pressed plug straight VA from late ’23, and my first Cavendish attempt. Both have a pretty bold component to them that can get a little harsh if you’re not careful. So, I decided to see what would happen if I tried some ToA without it. In its place I simply substituted the lemon VA that I bought from Whole Leaf. I mixed up a small test batch, enough for half a dozen pipes maybe, and pressed it for 24 hours in the noodle press. Not a long press, just enough to smooth it and blend the flavors a little better.

The result is… less interesting. It’s not bad, but it reminds me of the difference between two commercial English/Balkan blends I tried last year. One was the Sutliff Sobranie match, the other was – I don’t really remember what, I just remember it was tinned and enjoyed a lot of good reviews. Anyway, while it had VA, Oriental, and Latakia, it was notably less complex than the Sutliff and bordered on uninteresting by comparison.

So, back to the drawing board. I do have a 100 gram plug of ToA sitting in the jar that I haven’t sliced up yet. I’m still working my way through the other 50-60 grams that I sliced and rubbed out. I’m wondering whether letting the plug age in its semi-compressed form will make a substantial difference. I’ll just leave it in the jar until all the rest is gone, and maybe even longer than that. I do have probably half a pound or more of various commercial pipe tobaccos sitting in jars on my shelf. Orlik Golden Sliced, some Sutliff Sobranie match, some Ennerdale and Bob’s Chocolate Flake, My Mixture 965, little remnants of several others. There’s even some 1-Q there, along with an ounce or two of Haunted Bookshop and Bayou Morning – neither of which I like, so they’ll probably just stay there indefinitely.

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The end of “the little package from China”?

For a number of years now, the US has been awash with dirt-cheap goods imported from China. Not imported by stores or manufacturers, but directly imported by millions of ordinary consumers. People place orders via web sites like Temu, eBay, AliExpress, Alibaba and many more. These web sites are stuffed with every conceivable product, mostly sold at prices that are far lower than one would reasonably expect to pay for products manufactured in a developed nation. The items are shipped directly from China and arrive in your mailbox, days or weeks later, with no taxes or duties owed. No sales tax, no import tax, nothing. Sure, in some states – like mine – you’re supposed to file a form with your state at the end of the year and pay the sales tax on things you bought, but half the people don’t know it and the other half, I suspect, largely ignores it. Are you going to keep a ledger of everything you bought online during the year, then voluntarily pay more the following April? I thought so.

So, how is it that I can order dozens or hundreds of low-dollar items from China and get them in my mailbox for next to nothing? Or even larger or more expensive things, hundreds of dollars at a time, with no fees or import taxes? It’s called the “de minimis value”, a dollar value below which no import duty is collected. The de minimis value was $200 in 1994; it’s $800 as of today. That’s per person, per day. So, I can legally import $292,000 worth of foreign goods per year, without paying a penny in taxes or import duty. Double that if half the packages are addressed to my wife; multiply it by some unknown large number if the shipper falsifies the value on the customs declaration form and, for example, says that the made in China $20 “USA” hoodie and sweat pants I just bought cost, say, $1. Wink, wink.

Many countries have de minimis values for goods imported from the US. China’s is $7. Yes, that’s $7.00. Canada’s is $20. Some countries have no de minimis value, collecting 20% or more on all shipments from the US regardless of value. Want to send your friend in England or Australia a sweet new sweater – sorry, jumper? They’re going to have to pay up to get it.

The de minimis value serves a couple of purposes. It lets Customs focus more attention on larger, higher value shipments. And yes, it does stimulate international trade. Unfortunately, when the US effectively eliminates import duties on most goods shipped directly to consumers, and foreign companies enjoy large subsidies from their governments to make shipping dirt cheap and outgoing Customs enforcement effectively nonexistent, the results are sadly predictable – a flood of foreign produced goods into the US with little oversight, no revenue, and no enforcement of any consumer safety, trademark, copyright, or intellectual property regulations. This can and does also have an impact on some US industries and many US companies, who are now competing with Chinese companies with much lower operating costs. You can browse Alibaba or Temu and find countless ripped-off trademark goods, produced and sold illegally. It’s difficult to argue that shutting off the flow of these things will have anything but a positive effect for American businesses and consumers.

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Autumn Evening, revisited

OK, maybe not as bad as I originally thought. My first bowl of this overly topped, heavily scented maple confection of a pipe tobacco left me wondering why the hell I had ever bought an ounce of it. Made by Cornell & Diehl, I’d read glowing reviews of this stuff for a couple of years and decided to see what the hubbub was all about.

The pouch note can only be described as overpowering, artificial maple syrup. Like falling into a vat of Log Cabin or something, and accidentally inhaling half a gallon of it. I’m mystified as to why you’d call this “Autumn Evening” and not something like “Pancake Breakfast”. This stuff is comically over-the-top maple scented.

My first bowl was nothing short of terrible. Ashy, no maple note. I gave up and wrote off the jar until for some reason I decided to give it another try tonight. I let a couple pinches dry for a bit, but had to move the tin lid I use for drying away from me; the aroma was overpowering. I’m not exaggerating here. I almost tossed it, but decided that since it wasn’t overly moist I’d load it up and try it again. I filled the bowl of an estate Everyman billiard pipe and lit it up. This time around I decided to try a much slower pace and see if a lower temperature helps. Well, unsurprisingly it does.

Still no real in-your-face maple flavor, which is good. I can’t speak to the room note; I was alone in the garage at the time. It produced thick, luxurious clouds of smoke, so I suspect there’s some PG or glycerin there, but it wasn’t enough to produce any goop in the pipe, so that’s nice. And maybe it was just high sugar content from the topping, I don’t know.

Keeping the pace slow and the temperature lower helped a lot. It was not an unpleasant smoke, not outstanding but nice enough. I’m accustomed to English and VA/Pers and it’s been a while since I smoked an aromatic blend, but it wasn’t bad. The burn rate was pretty brisk, needing fairly frequent tamping and a couple of relights. At one point it started to taste a little ashy, and I was a bit surprised to find that was because I’d hit the bottom of the bowl. Just for fun, I let it sit for a while, then re-lit the dottle and took a few slow puffs. There was a slight sizzle, nothing harsh, and no notable moisture left in the bottom of the bowl. Honestly, for an aromatic I’m impressed that it’s not too moist or goopy. I’ve heard that about C&D.

So, I take back most of what I said about this stuff the first time around, at least about the smoking of it. It’s still overwhelmingly, cloyingly maple scented before lighting. Once lit, it smokes fine if you don’t overheat it. So, will I buy more? Probably not. Will I finish what I have? Eventually, probably, sure. I’ve got several aromatics left… some 1-Q, Ennerdale, Bob’s Chocolate Flake, maybe something else I can’t remember. I figure at my present rate of consumption of aromatics that will last me a few years. I don’t hate aromatics, but I have to be in the right mood for them, or I’ll smoke them around people who might not enjoy the smoke from a heavy dose of Latakia or Perique. The person who doesn’t love the smell of a bowl of 1-Q is a rare person indeed. Probably true for this stuff too. I’ll try it at our next evening around a fire pit or something.

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More blending, and planting

Over the past couple of weeks I’ve been trying out a few more tobacco blends. My daily go-to blend has become Towers of Antioch, a relatively Latakia-forward (37.5%) English blend that becomes quite wonderful after a few days in a press. Wonderful enough that I no longer lament the passing of Sutliff’s Sobranie match mixture… this is easily as good, and I can make all I want at a lot lower cost. I’m trying one now with 1/16th less Latakia and 1/16th more Oriental in it, named Damascus Sun. Too soon to tell if this one will be a winner; I only pressed it for a couple of days, and it will need to age for a week or two at least before it matures enough to really evaluate. So far it’s not bad, a little milder than ToA.

I also planted some veggies and tobacco varieties in starter seed trays, and those are sprouting. The corn and cucumbers are leading the charge, with green onions and cherry tomatoes trying to catch up. The spinach is lagging, with only one cell out of six having sprouted so far. I have faith that some more will come up, even if I need to poke a few more seeds in. Of the half dozen varieties of tobacco I planted, five are starting to come up, so I’ll be thinning those out in a week or two. I’m looking forward to getting the veggie planters and new landscaping done so we can transplant once the weather improves some.

I’m trying some new varieties of “pipe weed” this year, including a Burley, some Perique, and a Maryland that’s usually used for cigars, but is also used on some pipe blends.

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A new Virginia/Perique blend

One of my go-to pipe tobacco blends is called Escudo Navy Deluxe. It’s a blend of Virginia and Perique, a specially fermented tobacco that originates in St. James Parish in Louisiana. Perique can be quite… pungent. If you ever sniff a jar of pipe tobacco and think, “horse barn” – not in a bad way, but you’ll know it if you encounter it – that’s Perique.

Escudo has a great reputation, and for good reason. Not only is it quite delicious if you like VA/Per blends, the little coin slices are cool. Escudo is made by tightly rolling or twisting the different tobaccos together into a rope with the darker variety in the middle. It’s then aged and sliced thinly before being packaged. The little coins are easy to rub out to loose tobacco, or some people just fold or roll and stuff them into their pipe.

As Escudo is a little pricey, I figure if I’m blending my own tobacco I may as well try to make something either close, or at least something I like as well. So, I was a little excited to find a blend on the FTT forum that is billed as an “Escudo match” or substitute. I mixed up some a few days ago, spritzed it very lightly with bourbon – because why not? – and pressed it for three days in my noodle press. I took it out early this afternoon and sliced off a bit to sample. I rubbed out the slice and got a near perfect collection of chunks and ribbons, which I let dry for a while.

As I smoke it now, I’m pretty happy with it. I did make a modification to the recipe; in place of the Red Virginia tobacco called out in the recipe I used my own mixed VA leaf from the 2023 crop. It’s a mix of bright, red, and darker leaves, and they aren’t really properly flue cured. They were kilned and aged for a year and a half, but probably have lower sugar content than “real” flue cured red leaf. I’m sure the flavor is a little different.

One thing that surprises me is that I haven’t needed to relight this stuff yet. it’s burning perfectly, and the flavor is really good. As good as Escudo? Probably not. Good enough that I’ll mix and press another larger plug? Oh, yeah. And I remind myself that it will only get better with age. A year or two in a jar will make this stuff sublime.

Score.

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The ’25 maple syrup season ends

I pulled the spiles (taps) from the maple trees today after emptying the bags one last time. When the day’s boiling was done I combined all of the syrup I’d made in a large pan. Then I checked and corrected the sugar content using my maple syrup hydrometer to make sure it was right on the money (it was), heated it up, and filtered it. Once that was finished I poured it into 12 ounce bottles, brought them up to a bit over 180, and capped them all.

I ended up with about 100 ounces of syrup. I thought I’d hit the one gallon mark, but I guess either the markings on the 1 qt Ball jars are off, or I lost more than I thought to finishing and filtering. I filled up 8 bottles and added the last cup or so to the partial bottle we have in teh fridge from the 2023 season, since I didn’t tap the trees last year.

In hindsight, I probably let the taps go a day or two longer than I should have. The syrup is darker than before, and has a stronger flavor. It’s not bad, not “off”, but I’m not as fond of it as I was the last batch. Next year I’ll pull them at the first signs of buds on the trees. We went from 0 to full buds in about a day or so, and I wasn’t paying close enough attention — or maybe I just thought I could squeak one more day of sap in.

The Orlon filter is draining upside-down on top of the filter holder now, and it looks a bit like an albino Sorting Hat. I saw an idea for a filter holder that I may use next year if I don’t come up with something better. I need something to hold it higher so it isn’t sitting in the syrup as it tries to empty.

I believe I’m getting right at a 40:1 ratio of sap to syrup, or very close to it. Next year I’m definitely tapping that second red maple; once it finally started producing, the one in teh back yard did pretty well, and I don’t know for sure but I think the sugar content of the red maple tree was higher than that of the silver maples. I can’t say exactly why I think that’s the case, but it’s just the impression I get. I may pick up a refractometer for next year, just so see what I’m dealing with. They are pretty cheap. I have one for antifreeze, may as well have one for sap, right?

Anyway, I’m pretty satisfied with the results this year. I got the trees tapped early enough to catch the beginning of the sap season. I tapped three trees instead of two. I found a slightly better solution for boiling – the stock pot has more surface area than the turkey fryer pot, so the water evaporates more quickly. We got more syrup than the last time, though I’d still like to hit at least a gallon next year if I can. It’s not that we use a lot of maaple syrup, I just like the challenge.