Show / Strip car

Well, my project car will be coming off the road later this year. I'm going to build a car that I will show at parking lot shows, you know the ones, where you sit by your car in a lawn chair and lie about it. I'm also going to drag race it mainly at test and tunes. So right now I'll be doing the cheap stuff first, making the car as light as possible. Just about all the interior parts will be going into my wife's 1998 white V6 convertible Mustang. Her interior has seen better days and mine is in great shape. So since I'm taking off as much weight as I can I'll be reusing what I can in her car.

She will be needing some tires soon, so I'll give her my 17" wheels with the nearly new tires and buy the Summit wheels that I talked about in the post below. I'll start out with the Mickey Thompson ET Street slicks on the back while the car is street legal so I can work the kinks out of the setup as I go along. So I'll be working on the suspension first. I'll be using the springs that I talked in the post below along with the Lakwood 90/10 struts for the front and the Lakwood 50/50 for the rear.

As far as the engine I was leaning toward a PI head carb build using the Edelbrock intake manifold, but I just might end up using my SVO intake with some NPI ported heads from this company: http://www.modularheadshop.com. I'll update that as I get more info on those heads.

So that is it for now, just a quick update on what I'm going to do with the Mustang. Until then here is a nice photo of an SVO intake.

Econo Drag Springs

It has been awhile since I last updated my Project Blog. I have been laid off from work and have been looking for another job. So the funds are tight and I have not done anything to the Mustang in months. So this update I'm adding something cheap. Used Mustang springs. I went over to Prestige Mustang and got a set of springs. The fronts are from a Fox body 4 cylinder car and the rears are from a Fox body 8 cylinder car. This is an old Mustang drag racing trick. The front springs will lift on acceleration transferring weight to the rears. I know that this will hurt handling as the front end gets mushy from the softer springs, but this is a non-daily driver project strip / street car. I'm going for a muscle car look and ride something along the lines of this:
I also plan on going with wheels like the ones in the photo. Those are the Weld Prostars, I think I'm going to go with the Summit Stars from Summit Racing. The first step toward all of this is the springs, which I have now. The next step will be getting SN95 Strange adjustable struts and shocks along with some kind of upper and lower control arms and lastly the wheels and tires.

I'll be doing this as funds allow, so it might take longer than I'd like. The project is coming together well enough. Once all the above mods are done I'll have the supenstion done then I can work on the last two parts before I hit the track. The last two parts will be adding a 4:30 rear gear along with beefing up the rear end. Then the last phase will be the engine and for right now I'm thinking I'm going to go with just a PI head swap and some shorty headers. While I'm stashing away my funds for all this modding I'll be doing the cheap stuff like making the car lighter. I'll post more on that as I go. I'm excited that I have a direction to head toward.

Ford Racing Flywheel, Clutch and Driveshaft

Project Mustang has been idle for a couple of months because it was in need of a clutch. I knew when I got the car that the clutch was iffy and as the summer wore on so did the clutch. Summit Racing and Mustangs Unlimited to the rescue. I picked up the Ford racing nodular iron flywheel and Ford racing 'King Cobra' clutch at Mustangs Unlimited. The Ford racing aluminum driveshaft and Lakewood universal joints at Summit Racing. My trusty mechanics at #1 Decatur Pro installed the parts for me. Huge difference! The clutch engages right off the floor and grabs hard. My old clutch was worn out and I knew it was time to replace it when it would only engage at the very top of pedal travel. The clutch feel is a lot different and it will take some time getting use to this new setup. In fact I stalled the car a few times while getting use to the new pedal feel. When I bang second I get a nice chirp out of the rear tires and was happy to hear and feel that on the driver side rear. It seems the posi traction is working just fine! With all new parts and it being installed correctly, the drivetrain seems very tight and seems to spin up faster. Not a huge difference in the way the car accelerates, except it has a very solid feel to it. This was more of a maintainace mod and not much of a performance mod. Hopefully my next mod with be more in the performance vain, rear gears (4.30) for example. Stay tuned.

SVO Intake

I have been going over how I wanted to build my engine. I have so many options, 4.6 2 valve, 4.6 4 valve like the Cobra engines, 5.4 2 or 4 valve. I could go with turbos, roots blower or a Vortech blower. Well, I just picked up an SVO intake manifold so I'm going to be building a 4.6 2V. Ford came out with the SVO intake manifold along with the SVO 2 valve heads in 1998. The 4.6 2v heads and intake for the '96 through '98 were dogs. It's one of the reasons these model years are looked down upon. In 1999 Ford came out with the 2v PI heads, PI standing for performance improved. It took the power of the 4.6 2v up to 260 HP from 215 for the non-PI heads. The SVO parts were made to help the underpowered SN95 Mustangs. The intake manifold was not around long. Ford came out with the Bullitt intake for their 2001 Bullitt Mustang. The Bullitt intake is similar to the SVO, it just works with the PI heads. The SVO heads are still being made and they are the best flowing 2 valve heads you can put on a modular 4.6. So my plan now is to build a 2v SVO engine with no power adder, all N/A (naturally aspirated). With cams, long tube headers and the normal bolt ons I should see around 330 HP at the wheels. This intake is very hard to find because the Ford Factory Stock racers snapped them all up for their race cars. I got really lucky and did a Google search for them and found them up in Cartersville GA at a place called, Modular PowerHouse, or MPH. They are a great bunch of guys that love to hot rod Mustangs. I have a feeling that they will be seeing a lot of me!

SVO Intake photos

LED Gauge Cluster Light Mod

Click the photo for a larger view.... I found the LED gauge cluster mod at this link. The instructions are great and Trey did a fantastic job on this writeup. If you follow his instructions this mod is very easy. I first did this to my wife's 1998 v6 convertible. It took me longer because some of the parts are different than what is in his writeup. Today I did my GT and it only took two hours and I was taking my time. I also had to polish my gauge cluster so that took some extra time. You can get the bulbs here. Just do a search for WLED-R5. The cost is not so bad, $2.99 plus .95 cents for the cool white version. You need 7 bulbs, two for the HVAC cluster and 5 for the gauge cluster. My gauge cluster was a tad dim and when I found Trey's writeup over at my other hangout, sn95forums.com, I thought I'd give it a try. Wow, I love the way it looks now, brighter and a nice cool blue. The blue is from a film that Ford puts behind the gauge so the warm yellow old bulbs would make the gauge glow greenish. With the cool white it has a very nice blue glow that I like very much. I'm very happy I found Trey's writeup and if you do this mod please send him a message to thank him.

LED Gauge Cluster Light Mod part II

I'm back from my test drive after changing the spark plugs, wires and cleaning the MAF. I forgot to mention that I also replaced both four tower coil packs with the MSD four tower blaster coil packs. The sales copy says: "These new coils from MSD are designed to be bolt-in replacements for OEM coils but with a hotter spark that improves performance. They are designed with better materials and windings to help burn the fuel mixture more efficiently which results in a smoother idle and more mid range power." They were easy to bolt in, four bolts per coil pack, unplug the coil connector put wires back in the correct place and you are good to go. I did notice a much smoother idle and no stumbling in 5th gear with the cruise control on. After all this work the GT idles better, accelerates smoother and is smoother in cruise control at low RPMs. So I'm very happy with the results. I got the plugs and coil packs at Mustangs Unlimited and the Ford Racing 9mm plug wires at Summit Racing.

Spark Plugs & Wire

Since I have only had the car 6 weeks now, I thought it would be a good idea to change the plugs and wires. I did not want to go crazy yet and get some super expensive plug so I just ended up getting the Motorcraft Platinum plugs. I also installed new plug wires, the Ford Racing Blue 9mm wires. I'm glad I did this because when I took out the old plugs they looked in rough shape and there were two plugs that were different than the rest of the plugs that I took out. Six plugs were Splitfire and the number 3 and 4 cylinder had very bad looking Bosh Platinum plugs. I always like to start with the hardest plugs to reach first so that means the passenger side of the engine. I had to take off the K&N cold air induction tube and unplug two fuel injectors. I started with #4 it was Bosh, then #3 same thing Bosh. So the last person that changed the plugs did not do #4 or #3 because they are the hardest to change. All the rest of the plugs were the Splitfire. I'm heading out now to see how the thing runs. It fired up and idled nicely, now to see how it is on the road.

Cleaning the MAF

The GT had thrown some some error codes and the idle was a tad rough so I thought it was a good time to do some tune up items. I went to this link and followed the instructions on cleaning the MAF. Keeping the wires clean is important if your computer is going to get a correct reading on the amount of air that is coming into the intake. I have a K&N cold air induction and I had just cleaned and oiled the filter element. The info at the link above said that the oil from the filter can coat the wires and skew the signal reading. They looked clean, but I wanted to make sure. I just hit them with a blast of quick drying contact cleaner and let them air dry before I put the whole thing back together.