Reply to "Washer in carb"

You have just acquired a winter project. The washer has an excellent chance of destroying your engine if started with the thing loose inside there. Unless you are luckier than the law allows, upon starting it will wind up on edge between the head and piston and the piston will crack, also potentially cracking a ring. This will score the block's cylinder wall, requiring a bore job & new pistons, rings etc. If your block has already been bored 030, the block will need replacing as 351Cs cannot reliably take over 0.030 (and some cannot accept even that much!) It may also jam under a valve, bending it and maybe breaking the head off the valve, causing even more internal damage. Stock valves are welded two-piece and don't take bending well. To fix: remove the air cleaner, the carb and the intake manifold and then use a magnet on a rod to search around in the intake ports. If it's not there, it found one of the open intake valves and is now inside a cylinder- and there's no way of knowing which one, so pull both heads to retrieve it. Next time, use integral (capture) washers on the stud nut. Personally, I would take this opportunity to do a valve job on my engine as the whole top end will be apart.