I want to preface this post with the fact that I am looking for answers and recently understand there has been a lot of people ripped off by those whom are trying to make a dollar and dont care about the impact to our hobby. I own a 69 SCJ and a few 69 CJ cars, and know very little about the 70's, I have perfect feedback on auction sites and am always seeking information.
A few years ago I bought a bunch of parts from an 80+ yr old from his 70 mach 1 that was wrapped around a tree in Parma Idaho in 1973, it was a 4spd scj car and it included a distributor, manifolds, and bellhousing, among other things. That was the first time I had seen any 70 scj parts, especially the 4 spd distributor.
Fast forward to 6 months ago, my father and I were going thru a large amount of Ford inventory that we had stored in a family farm shop. My family farmed 5000 acres for 4 generations in eastern idaho and during the 60's thru late 80's we owned over 35 Fords alone, mostly pickups and trucks running FE's from the 352, 391's, and my father had a 428 installed in his 71 F250 once he melted a piston in the 390. The Ford dealer in Pocatello was always selling him performance parts for his 428 as he pulled heavy implements and had 5.09 and 5.10s in it and needed as much power as he could. He finally grew tired of throwing money at the FE, tore it out in 1988 and installed a 460 in it. The farm land was sold in 1989 and the shop sat ever since with all of the inventory in the bins, as my grandfather used the shop only for servicing his lawn mower and wood projects.
My father and I brought boxes of NOS parts back to my house and I am starting to go thru them now. There were several reman distributors with the Ford reman tags (RM31) on them, mostly c7 and c8 truck units. However there was a dual point dual vac advance unit that looked very familiar, so I looked the numbers up and it was just like the 70 scj unit I sold a few yrs ago, except this one is NOS. It has c9 part numbers on the internals but have motorcraft labels rather than autolite, and the hole isnt in the same spot as the other one I had. I emailed Tim O'Conner and he replied that the hole was indeed wrong, the screws holding the vac advance were not black oxide, and it had motorcraft parts which were not available until 72. He then told me about someone peddling fakes along with boss parts and thouht I bought it from him.
If you are still reading this novel, thats what I disagree with....not that someone may be trying to mislead others (happens often and it happened to me when I first bought my scj and knew little about the car - and its not fun), however I never bought this from someone online, it did come from Ford and has been in our inventory since at least 1987. I have it for sale in the parts area here and on a few other sites, but dont want the reputation of selling fake stuff, nor do I want to sell something that isnt correct. However, the only thing I can determine is that it is one put out by Ford after their production run in 70. There was a Ford tag on it which I am traveling to east idaho today to search for (I live in Boise, 230 miles away). I have a link to photobucket in the listing that has full sized photos, and you can easily see the numbers have not been ground off, restamped, etc. Its the real deal. It is not a restored unit, its brand new...including the factory grease and the gear is spotless (Tim thought the gear was painted, its not, but he had smaller pics that I sent him).
Again, my apologies for the long post...I am new here but have been on the FE forum for over 10 yrs, and I am an honest person...I just wanted to provide all of the details in hopes of finding an answer to this. Did Ford have different suppliers which had the hole wrong? Were the replacement parts issued with the hole in the wrong spot, and is that why there are many of them cropping up now? I dont know, but I do know this has not seen light of day for nearly 25 yrs...way before the person selling 'fakes' has been around, the internet, and our local Ford dealer didnt buy it from him. When I return I will post pics of the inventory we have....and hope to go thru the hundreds of Ford boxes soon, which range from NOS 1955-1973 Ford pickup door handles, clutch levers, and other 'wear' items we needed to have on our farm.
Heath
