Heater valve trick

It's never as simple as it looks. Here's my example. Say you want to have a heater in your Cobra. Sure, just add a heater. Vintage Air have a kit for you ready. In the box, you will find everything you need to install it. I am sure you could install it properly following the instructions too. However, it may all go south right after. Small caveat is that Ford is not designing things with logical mind. Apparently, the coolant flow from one cylinder head to the second on the Ford V8 engine is routed via heater core. Wait what!? This would mean that in the summer heat you'd still have the "heat" on. That can't be right. Yeah, I don't fully understand the madness of that engineering decision. Actually, I did not give it much thought. All I know that it's not going to work for me well with the good old shut off valve that comes with Vintage Air. Luckily, it did not work for Ford too. Rumor has it, Ford Ranger the same issue and was equipped with one of these:

It's the heater by pass valve. Back in the day it was cable operated. Then it was blessed with vacuum actuator that is completely useless to me. But extra parts are never a bad thing. Let's get to install all this. Once again, a set back. The heater core has these AN-6 or -8 fittings soldered to the it. These mate with some 90* barbed hose adapters. Long story short, there's no room in the engine bay. The heater bits are literally a quarter of an inch away form the cylinder head. It may work but I am not conformable. If the engine vibrates enough it may come in contact and the hell will cut loose and ... you get the idea. Obviously, I can make it better by breaking it

After a trip to the local Home Depot and some pipe cutting and soldering - voila!

That shortened the pipes by an inch giving more than enough room for engine wiggling. Now back to that valve. Once again, it just does not work the way it is. The vacuum actuator is pushing to open while my cable needs to pull to open. Basically the direction of opening and closing needs to be inverted for the valve to work with Vintage Air knob. This time I went to the local hobby shop. These guys build air plane models of some sorts. But they are friends with anybody how "builds" in general. They gave me some parts that they use for actuating plane bits with radio control servos.  I found some piece of plastic in the garage and mocked up valve

I gave it a test run and it proved to be plausible. Out come my grinder and drill to produce this final result. 

I then installed this on the car with all the 4 hoses hooked up. Now, when the valve is "shut" all the flow is sent through bypassing the heater core. However, when the valve is in the "open" position the flow is sent completely via heater core. All the positions in between will divide the flow proportionally. Thus, the flow from one head to the second head is never compromised one bit. I have to agree that the spider looking setup does add to the already busy looking engine bay. Oh well..