You may have gotten a bad tank of gas. You may just need a tune up. A weak spark combined with warm (hot) weather will cause the problem. Backing off the timing can help a little.

 

Well it's not the C&L.... I took it out last night and made sure it was calibrated correctly for the stock injectors and it was fine....

Went out last week and bought a 65" HDTV... and that got delivered today.. I knew it was priority one to get it hooked up tonight since my wife called me at work and said "You're feeling sick and have to come home early right?"

So tomorrow night (HOPEFULLY) will be plugs and wires... am also going to stop at Discount and pick up some octane booster in case the bad tank o' gas theory holds true.

EDIT: Helmet came via UPS today as well.. lets hope I can get the car running to the point where I'll need it again

 

Plugs 5 thru 8 are fine... pulled them tonight and other than a tiny bit of oil on 7 and 8's threads, all are gapped correctly and look pretty damn good.

Tomorrow night will be the rest of them, but I suspect I'll find the same scenario there.

I've owned a mod motor since 96 and this is the first time I've ever pulled the plugs on one... who's frucking idea was it to put them 3/4 of the way into the engine block?!?!!? Bah.. I'm going back to a 302... least I know where most everything is there.

 

Did the remainder of the plugs tonight (1 thru 4). All looked pretty good but a couple were gapped at .60... put everything back to specs and put everything back together and took it out for an hour or so.

Up until the last 20 minutes I didn't hear the popping sound at all... once I got onto I4 and opened her up a couple times, I could hear it again.. but it sounds like it has "moved" in the power band and doesn't seem as pronounced.

Finally got it down to about a quarter tank... I'll take it out again tomorrow night and run it just about empty.. fill it up and then dump in some cleaner/octane boost and see what we see then.

 

I had planned on taking a look at a couple of them first to make a decision on plugs.. but after pulling them out, they look fine... can't see anything wrong with them what so ever. Ford says they'll last 100,000 miles (yeah right...).. but with only 35,000 on them.. unless I saw something nasty, I figured I'd leave them in there.

 

Dammit... meant to post it and completely forgot...

The final fix turned out to be cleaning the sensor wires on the MAF sending unit. I took a q-tip dunked in alchol and swabbed (CAREFULLY!!) the wires. They were just slightly dirty, but that seemed to have done the trick.

A fellow Cobra owner on the SCMC mailing list suggested it to someone else that was having a similar problem. Seems that if you have an air filter that needs to be cleaned and oiled occasionally (like a K&N), excess oil can be forced out of the filter and through the induction system and possibly coating those sensor wires. When I heard it I kind of doubted that that was the problem, but since I had just put a brand new K&N in, and since the process was so simple, I figured I'd give it a try.

The following day when I took it to work, it ran better than it has in a long time.