Not mine and I know nothing about it.
Is the January 1967 common to find on GTE’s? Seems really early.
Date of 7A5 would be a February/March of 1967 built Mustang or Cougar.
Actually could be much further out for a distributor according to the concours Mustang data. Depending on the build date some components can be as far as 6 months prior.
Were the production dates on the distributors limited like the carburetors?
I don’t know the answer to that, since I’m not sure if this is unique to the GT-E. If it is I would say yes they would have been. Mustangtek lists other applications, but they are unreliable. For example, ‘68 427 Fairlane that was never produced.
Common 390 Fairlane, Mustang distributor, there were a lot of them.
Even though they came on the 390 GT engine they are still hard to find and don’t come up often. There’s been three come up for sale recently but all had early dates like this one the last two had dates as early as 6H. This one did not make my search list because they used a zero instead of an oh in the title, but it’s a little pricey for that early of a date, I bought the last two for under 300 each. They always sell for pretty good money as this one will.
I have one of these distributors I purchased off eBay a few years ago. Mine has a Nov 22, '66 date. When I looked up the part number in my Lincoln Mercury master parts manual, I recall this part number was used only on the 1967 390 FE’s sold in California in addition to the GT-E 427. That would explain the rarity of them vs other 390 distributors.
Would someone please weigh in on this? Thanks.
Interesting. I looked this up in the Mercury Master Parts Catalog, and found out that what you say is almost correct. The only two states that required Thermactor smog in 1968 were Arizona and California, so both of those needed this distributor in 1967. The C70F 12127-F is the only distributor listed for 1967 390-4V with Thermactor and automatic transmission.
The distributor C70F 12127-F is also listed as being correct for 1969 390-4V with IMCO smog system and automatic transmission.
Also interesting is that for 1968 427 it lists C70F 12127-F as being used “before 2/6/68”. It has a listing for “C8UF 12127-G” for 427 “After 2/6/68”.
I suspect this is a typo in the MPC. I’ve never seen any Ford distributor with a C8UF prefix. It could be that they intended on using a different distributor, but for whatever reason, I don’t think they actually ever did based on the number of February 1968 original GT-E’s that I have encountered. All have had the C70F 12127-F so far.
I just looked on eBay and found that C8UF 12127-G apparently is a good number for a '68 289 distributor.
My 67 6.5 liter with thermactor and automatic transmission has its C7OF-F and a date of 7D10 most parts were about 3 weeks before its build date.
Thanks for clearing that up Royce.
I would think there were a decent amount of these distributors made with mid '66 to mid '67 date codes for the '67 Fairlanes/Mustangs sold in AZ and CA. I expect that’s what I have.
But I would bet the ones with late '67 date codes are really scarce because for '68 model year, they were only produced for the W-code GT-E… right?
And I would think one with an early '68 date code would be really rare.
The ones Royce mentioned about usage on some '69 390 engines is interesting as well. There you would expect late '68 to early '69 dates.
It is not listed as being applicable to Fairlanes or Cyclones or Comets or Torinos. Only Mustang / Cougar.
Doesn’t the O in C7OF mean that it was originally designed for Fairlane?
The C70F-F distributor was part of the new for 1968 428 CJ package when equipped with an automatic transmission. We discuss the distributor regularly on the 428 Registry. An interesting fact has been that they seem to phase out during the 17 week of production in favor of the C80F-D which was originally intended for the standard transmission. They just installed the early C5 single port vacuum.
The “O” does represent the midsize fairlane/comet line. CJ Manifolds etc do as well having original engineering roots in that car line.
Were they built in batches? My distributor has a date code the day AFTER the car was built. 