What's this update share in common with a sack of pea gravel?

They're both full of a crapload of little useful stuff that's set to spill all over the place and make a mess without giving any notice.

So let's get this show on the road!  Here's some developments, odds, and ends in no particular order:

⚡Getting the Gremlin's exhaust routing figured out to accommodate the true dual exhaust side pipes just became a lot easier for me after paying attention to the plumbing under Eagle during some exhaust leak patching excursions.  See, as luck would have it, the presence of the t-case on Eagle demands the routing of the exhaust from the driver's side (where the 258 exhaust manifold resides), across the body (between oil pan sump and inspection cover), to passenger side, where it makes a 90° bend before meeting the cat.  For rigidity, the cat incorporates a bracket in its front collector flange that acts as a hanger and bolts to the transmission skid plate (or thereabouts. Memory is slightly fuzzy on the exact fastening point).

Though the hanger design won't be directly useful, Eagle's exhaust does provide me with a ton of useful reference data for the placement and radius of bends for routing exhaust to the passenger side.  Enough so that, when the stock plumbing is taken into account with the placement of the collectors for the header-style manifolds, I should be able to verify whether it's feasible to get these segments mandrel bent at a muffler shop that has templates for each vehicle.

I'm gonna wander to a shop today or tomorrow to see if I can't get a ballpark estimate of what the cost would be for sections from each, from collector to cat.  I reckon that a little bit of grinding/bandsaw, hammering, and some strategic placement of flex couplers, I should get sorted out at a fraction of the price I'd pay for it to be done up at a custom shop.  There's also the serviceability aspect of basing the plumbing off well-documented (please god, let that assumption be correct) templates that are widely available, versus a custom job that will require measurement, tracking, and manual bending to fab replacement segments for.

⚡⚡ Eagle's TC bolts were checked and tightened a bit.  My half-assed method to check for whether or not a bolt was loose was to get a wrench on it and turn while grabbing the flexplate with my other hand.  If the bolt head turned, it was loose and I cranked down on it until the engine crank & flexplate turned.  If the plate turned, I kept turning the wrench until the next bolt was accessible. 

While admittedly far from correct, it was a good enough method to allow me to find that two bolts opposite from one another were about 1/4 turn out.  That strikes me as plenty of slack to produce the knock at the volume I was hearing it at.  As you may have guessed from the tense used in my  previous sentence, I've yet to hear the sound return since making that adjustment.

The groan at takeoff, however, persists.  I heard it yesterday during a rare moment of my having the windows rolled up and my stereo silent, and suspicions relating to the hub are starting to return.  It's tough to say, though, as it's nowhere near as pronounced as it had been.  It could well just be TC shudder (though I doubt it, since it doesn't happen at higher speeds/RPM).  Next step will be to pull the CV axle stub I've been using since they broke a few months back and see if the splines are stripping out.  If so, that would explain the sound, feel, and diminishing intensity of the groan.  I'd prefer that I catch that before the inside of the hub wallers out, though.

⚡⚡⚡ The F150 that we've been tending to is up, running, and rolling along.  There were a couple slight complications, but I have to say that it was a pleasure to work on.  We may have a little more work coming in from that particular truck, since there were a few things noticed that really deserve some attention, but as far as the idle issues it was having, it was partly from the carb and mostly from a deteriorated manifold gasket that had been causing a nasty manifold vac leak.

The YF's metering rod and jet were found to be pretty messed up during the rebuild efforts.  A channel had been worn into the jet passage, either through the rod being bent during handling at some time in the distant past, or due to a setup error when the metering rod was last installed (maybe both).  Searching online for a replacement jet was no problem, however the metering rods are flatly unobtainable as replacement components.

By grace or curse, I've discovered I have a talent for finding things that are normally in the zone of impossible to source.  Unfortunately, this talent doesn't really extend to things I have a direct need for.  This makes me a pretty handy go-to guy for folks in need of weird shit and obscure parts, so I went to the closest yard to see if I could find any YFs to pull or pull single components from. 

My first attempt netted squat.  There was a total of 5 carburetors (domestic, of course.  Didn't bother looking at imports, though in hindsight it might have been worth checking.  I wouldn't be surprised if Carter supplied a carb or two for imports to employ in the American market.), 4 of them being quadrajets, and the other being a single-barrel Mopar. . . thing.  So I loaded up in the Eagle and took a 30 mile run to the next yard, where I found nothing again.

On the first pass, that is.  On my second run through, I decided to check under the hood of an '89 Ranger, and bam!  Found a picked-at YF that still had it's metering junk, and in perfect condition to boot!  After that, the rebuild was simple (after I remembered the bottom level screws thread in bottom-up, not top-down).

Getting the manifold gasket replaced actually turned out to be a much faster and easier affair than rebuilding and configuring the carb.  I was sincerely amazed.  Not a single broken fastener, no forever-scrubbing off of the mating surfaces, and not a single crack in the intake or exhaust.  It went how you always think of jobs going when you're quickly running through order-of-operations in your head when planning on doing something, and not the doomsday clusterfuck that a lot of tasks end up actually playing out as.

So that's about where we're at.  I'm having a little bit of a challenge with making some decisions with sourcing flexplate bolts for the Gremlin, but that's a different story.