Spent a lot of my childhood riding in my dad's 1968 F100 Ranger like this.
Ah, memories. Owned a '69 F100 for a few years. "Betsy", I called her. 360, 4 speed. Ex construction truck that got a Sherwin Williams tune-up prior to us buying it. Had a high ratio differential that threw the speedo off by around 25 MPH. Had to really ride the clutch to get started in 2nd gear. First time I ran it up to 65, I'm thinking to myself, "This seems pretty fast for the speed limit...".
Drove the hell outta it. Every stop sign meant Squeal Tires On Pavement. Speed limits were nothing more than a standard to be measured by: "Yeah, I drove into town 40 over today."
Started out w/ an Autolite 2BBL on it. Truck was misfiring one day & in my tender years I was convinced it needed a carb kit. Got the kit, a couple cups of gasoline, a handful of tools & proceeded to meticulously install my very first carb kit. On Mom's kitchen table... Hey, it was cold out & we had no heated shop!
Mounted the carb back on, same thing. Still missing. Dad comes home, I explain to him the lengths I have gone to diagnose & fix the problem & he smiles knowingly as only a father can. He smoked at the time & reached into his pocket for a matchbook, grabbed a flat screwdriver, pulled off the distributor cap, deftly adjusted the points using the matchbook (in about 20 seconds...), put the cap back on, had me hit the key, Betsy sat there purring away. Damn. I learned an important lesson that day: start w/ the simple stuff first, dummy.
Had trouble squealing the tires w/ that high of a rear end ratio. Fortunately, through an ignored slow differential gasket leak, I locked it up solid one afternoon. Later that night Midnight Auto Sales opened up & we surreptitiously helped ourselves to a diff from an abandoned '59(?) Ford pickup truck out in a field. Major score! A 3.70! Mere tires didn't stand a chance after that. Rid myself of the 16.5" rims & put on 15's 'cause 15" (cheap, used) rubber was more common at the auto wrecker.
Put a 4BBL intake on it from a 428 Mercury Marauder, topped it off w/ a Holley carb, threw on a set of headers & used Powertone "mufflers", helluva good.
Got my first ever ticket w/ that truck: a stunting ticket from doing side by side burnouts w/ a buddy in his '65 F100 and his BIL in a '70 F100 at the tail end of the town parade. The crowd loved it but who knew we needed a permit...
Outran the cops twice in the old girl. Not because of the "massive" horsepower, but because of the terrain: RCMP cruisers couldn't negotiate prairie trails/off road like Betsy could...
Only thing is, stock FE block rod bolts don't like revs. After a long high speed run towards home, often times the old bottom end rattlerattlerattle would come up. At that point, one had a choice: call chicken & turn it off, losing face but saving a pile of hard-earned cash (usually just rod bearings & a bottom end gasket kit) or carry on until the ultimate crash when a rod went through the block and call it a "win". Over the years I did both.
I dished out more abuse to that ol' truck than enough & she always came back, most of the time under her own power, sometimes at the end of a chain or a rope.
Apologies for the distraction...
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