I'm not 100% convinced it's in top notch shape currently. I only have 1 four hour ride in it to get it home. Once the weather warmed up I pulled the trans, rebuilt the clutch, reaurfaced the flywheel, replaced the starter ring gear and have driven it a total of about 2 miles since all of the work has been done. I found there was never a new wire run to the hei distributor, so I ran one, it was getting 9V and now 12 volts. I set the timing, replaced the springs and weights in the distributor, pulled the useless exhaust off, exhaust manifolds were upgraded to a set of block huggers headers, new plugs and wires gapped to .045. All that was done at the same time and I've driven it roughly 2 miles since I did all of that. I've yet to replace the exhaust past the headers. All of those things made it a completely different truck to drive. Just the other day I was under the hood and noticed that I have a bad gasket on the carb allowing gas to spray just a little onto the intake manifold. Hence the reason for getting a different non governed 650 carb. I can pull the carb off of my wife's truck just to see what kind of difference it would make. Her truck has a 366TD in it but it's an apples to oranges comparison and I honestly don't know what size carb she has on hers. All I know for sure is it's an edelbrock for now. I could just rebuild mine but what's the fun in that.
I plan to do a leak down test on it when I have time to just to see what kind of shape it's in. It pulls it's own weight quite well in the lower rpms, the higher rpms it does it too but not nearly as happily as riding the torque of the engine down low. Since this is my first medium duty I don't know exactly what to expect with it loaded down with the weight I plan on hauling or how much I'll be able to tell the load is back there. What I've read a lot of is that they usually don't change a lot between empty or loaded as far as getting up to speed.
Currently it also needs tires and it's still on the stock 20" rims with tires that make me cringe and wonder how I made the 4 hour ride home so the last thing I want to do is load it up and take it for a spin. 22.5" rims and tires are in the works. Since they're easy to come by I figured I'd look for personal experience and opinions on how it should react to that kind of weight with a different gear set.
