ROBYN BRADBURY
WODONGA, VIC
FOR Robyn Bradbury, it was the build process of her husband Terry’s immaculate XM Futura (SM, Sep ’18) that slowly lured her into the car scene. Through choosing paint colours and assisting with the creation of a bespoke ride, she was hooked! And while backing up a Top 60 Elite build like Terry’s XM isn’t easy, he and Robyn have knocked it out of the park with Robyn’s custom US Falcon, a 1960 two-door sedan.
The Aussie XK and XL Falcons closely resemble these first-gen Yankee Falcs. How are they different?
In America it’s known as a 1960 two-door sedan. There are a lot of little differences; the tail-lights are larger and the grille is different to the Aussie versions. I wanted to keep it American, so it’s stayed left-hand drive, with the brake lights flashing as indicators. The car had ANNE226 Californian plates, so the ANNE60 Australian plates are a tribute to that.
When did you get the car?
We had just come back from Summernats 31 with Terry’s XM, and he was picking something up in Albury when he saw the two-door on a hoist – the owner had dropped it off at a business to get it ready to sell. Terry knew that’s exactly what I was after – we love our early-60s Fords.
What condition was it in?
It was straight, but the colour was a dirty green with a green interior. We stripped it down with help from our 12- and 10-year-old grandsons and had planned a closed-door respray. But that escalated to stripping the ’60 back to bare metal! There was almost no rust – only a small amount in the rear quarter panel.
Love the colour!
It’s a custom mix. I knew the blue that I wanted, but it took about two weeks of Terry bringing home colour samples to get the right one. The interior was always going to be red, which goes with the red rims and white walls. The blue with red interior looks great parked beside Terry’s red XM at shows.
What’s the driveline?
It had a 144ci with a two-speed, which was really slow, especially around the hills. So now it has the rebuilt 170ci from Terry’s XM. Terry also added a shortened BA Falcon ute diff and four-wheel disc brakes. It stops and steers really well. At first, I was really worried about it being left-hand drive, but now I love driving it.
And you’ve nabbed a couple of trophies.
I won second in the Best American Car class at the 2019 Early Ford Nationals in Nagambie – that was fantastic; I didn’t expect it! Then we went to the Battle Of The Borders show and I won runner-up for Victoria and Judges’ Choice.
What’s next?
Terry has put in a hidden Vintage Air system, so now we can drive the car to Canberra, or the Barossa – anywhere. Also, there’s a 302ci Windsor and a three-speed auto that is almost ready to go in, so hopefully that will be running in the ’60 before Christmas.
Anyone to thank?
Terry; Danny and Donny from Top Coat Automotive Painting; John and the boys at Universal Upholstery; Matt from Lukin Auto Electrical; Pearlcraft.
THE CAR HAD ‘ANNE226’ CALIFORNIAN PLATES, SO THE ‘ANNE60’ AUSTRALIAN PLATES ARE A TRIBUTE TO THAT
SO, YOU’VE been driving a boiler. You’ve checked for obvious external and internal coolant leaks and discovered damn nothing. No blown gaskets; no head or block cracks; no split cylinder walls; no gunk in the radiator tubes. Where do you go from here?
Maybe this might have something to do with that stove-hot 380 you dropped in a while ago. You see, internal combustion engines are heat engines. They have to be, or they don’t work. There’s a fire lit in the fuel/air mix in every cylinder, which creates a massive expansion to force against pistons, rotors or whatever. That’s where the power comes from. Problem is, those fires create heat, which has to be moved somewhere else or stuff will melt. And the larger the fires, as in bigger or modified engines, the more heat that has to be radiated away.
Okay. Fit a larger radiator, then. That’s fine, if you’ve got the room. But there are radiators, and there are radiators.
They call them that because they radiate, or transfer, heat from their tubes and fins into air passing through. You can go wider or deeper with a core, although most folks with space problems prefer to go thicker, which doesn’t always pan out.
I worked on a Ford Galaxie once, pushed along by a big-block V8, and it had a nasty habit of overheating during long runs. We looked at the two rows of tubes in the radiator core and decided to swap that for a same-physical-size three-row unit. And all we did was make the problem worse.
So we had a head-scratch and a think, then woke up to the fact that the three rows of tubes in this new radiator were actually smaller in their internal size than the tworow rad we took out. Ran a capacity flow test on both, and, as far as we could judge with our primitive gear, we got a good flow through the two-row and less than half that through the new one. So we compromised: Fitted an eight-blade fan with the original two-row inside a new shroud on the back of the radiator. That made sure we got to pull more air through the core, which cured the problem.
Another good way to get the engine temp down, instead of fitting power-hungry, crankshaft-driven fans, is to look at the radiator support panel, which centre-mounts the radiator. This often has large gaps where the incoming air will prefer to dodge through rather than fight against the resistance of a closely finned radiator core. Blocking these detours off – for example, by making a shroud to fit closely around the front of the core so that the air must go through those tubes and fins – can make a huge difference to an overheating engine.
And if you’ve still got problems, and your pockets are deep, go for a full alloy radiator. Aluminium is better at transferring heat than the brass tubes and copper fins of your typical unit installed when your machine was factory built, and this will solve most problems.
But before you do that, check out the operation of your cooling system thermostat. What? You took that out and threw it away? Silly man! A thermostat has two jobs. The main one is to circulate coolant only in the internal passages in the block when the engine is cold, in order to get it up to operating temperature faster. The other is to slow down the coolant flow by acting as a resistance, so it has more time to absorb heat and get rid of it. Bin the thermostat without checking that it’s working and you’re asking for trouble.
Engine-driven fans and popular electric
IF YOUR POCKETS ARE DEEP, GO FOR A FULL ALLOY RADIATOR, WHICH IS BETTER AT TRANSFERRING HEAT THAN THE BRASS TUBES AND COPPER FINS OF YOUR TYPICAL FACTORY UNIT
fans mostly stop working when vehicles exceed 60km/h, although they do work well in stop-start traffic. If you are running an auto transmission, that probably came with a heat exchange unit plumbed into the bottom tank of your radiator. Give that the flick and fit a more efficient oil-to-air cooler. Simple, cheap and that’s less heat for the normal radiator to get rid of.
Then, to save horsepower and ensure a constant, slow-moving flow of coolant through the block and heads, grab an electrically driven water pump. That gets rid of the usually inefficient crank-driven pumps, which at high rpm tend to cavitate. That means a ball of coolant gets trapped by the spinning pump vanes and the normal flowthrough coolant doesn’t go anywhere. The bonus of an electrically driven water pump is that a regular flow of slow-moving coolant traps more heat to push this into the radiator and so to the atmosphere.
High-pressure radiator caps are worth fitting. The higher the pounds per inch that these high-pressure release caps will maintain in a system, the higher the engine operating temp will be before it boils. And often overlooked in a cap is a simple little valve that is there to allow air into the radiator after the engine cools down, instead of the vacuum collapsing the hoses. If you look at the underside of a cap, in the centre of the depression is a small, spring-loaded, rubber-seat valve. A quick way to check if this is okay and not allowing coolant loss if it isn’t sealing is to have a suck and a blow on the outer rubber bit.