Hopefully this is enough on topic (with 390s being a Mustang engine choice) as I'm only asking for a friend. He has a 63 Galaxie 500 with a Thunderbird 390 (Thunderbird is written on the valve covers). Is there any difference between this engine and a regular 390?

 

With Ford's affinity for sharing displacement among different engine families and using different family engines in a given car I can't be 100% without finding my Ford interchange book, but I am 99.9% sure that that engine will be a run of the mill FE 390.

 

I'm not at all sure how you'd even define what a "regular 390" was. For 1968 (the year that I happen to have a fairly detailed list of specs for), there were two different 2-bbl engines and three different 4-bbl engines, five different power ratings. Aside from the carburetion differences, there were at least two different camshafts and a couple different compression ratios.

For that year, the "T-bird 390" was 315 hp. The 390 as used in the Mustang, Fairlane, Cougar (and several other Mercury models) could have been either 325 or 335 hp.

Externally, I'd expect little difference.


Norm

 

Thanks guys! We really expected that it would be a "normal" 390 but you can never tell with Ford in the 60s!