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11/2015
Longtime no update on this part of the website, a lot has happened, I got remarried, sold my house bought another and changed jobs, due to all of this the car was mothballed for 2014. The good news is I did manage to get it out a little in 2015 and I had plans to run the last "fast Friday" of the year at the Texas Motorplex but they cancelled the event due to rain that never came, good job Motorplex. Thoroughly bummed I have gone forward and have actually begun the install of the EFI parts something I could have started on over a month ago had I known I was not going to get another quarter mile pass at the beginning of November! Anyway onto the good stuff, I have been able to remove quite a bit of wiring from the car as well as sensors I had setup on the carb since it will now be incorporated with the EFI. Also based on how well my Trick Flow heads perform I figured I'd just make it all match and have purchased a Track heat intake manifold (which was posted in the pictures a while back) a 75mm throttle body, fuel rails, intake spacer, EGR delete all made by Trick Flow. I've also been happy with Aeromotive and went with their fuel fittings, regulator and I'll be adding a second fuel filter and changing the element in my original one.
I've been having a few clearance problems with the upper intake so there will be some adjustments in order to make things happy, it also looks like I'll have to run a small cap on the distributor in order to clear the fuel rails (something I had heard about previously). I hope to have things up and running by the start of the new year so that probably means April! lol! I've been taking pictures along the way and will get those up soon.
11/2016
Well I didn't intend on this getting updated once a year but here it is but luckily I have good things to report, The EFI install is complete and while initially I made good progress with the tuning I ended up in the end taking to a dyno and having it tuned by a professional. I mentioned last update that there were clearance issues with my fuel rails and distributor cap, I ended up adding some shims to the rail and it still touches but the distributor can be moved so it'll be fine. I ended up controlling the cooling fan with the engine computer which was very easy and works awesome. I had to have one of the breather tubes on the valve cover moved due to clearance issues it had with the upper intake and I cut a little more out of the hood which is still hidden by the scoop, all in all from the outside the car looks no different. The final tuning was done by PRT Performance in Lewisville, TX. Steve Kan the owner is a great guy and has Megasquirt tuning experience, the car has a loose converter in the automatic and the dyno was a Mustang dyno, the horsepower only read 350rwhp but the torque was 540 see video here, while I'm encouraged by the torque number the hp may not be a true representation, after all the car ran 10s with the carb and it feels faster now with the buttometer. These numbers are on 10psi of boost and 17° of timing on pump gas. I purchased and installed boost control solenoids to turn the boost up but have not turned www.aeromotiveinc.com/product/dual-phantomit up yet I'm thinking it may be best to upgrade the engine block and rods before really hammering on it, I built this engine 16 years ago! As far as track times I didn't get to the track with it yet and its getting to the time of year where the tracks will be closing so a track pass may have to wait until 2017.
5/2018
Long time no post, well there's a reason for that since going EFI and having to have it tuned the car had never really ran the way it should. Driveability with the EFI has been better and it doesn't gum up when sitting the way the carb did but I couldn't enjoy it knowing it wasn't running the way I knew it could. I had been tweaking the car here and there but I am no means an expert even with the understanding of how things work I have never had an adjustable computer before. I made a few trips to the track but never uploaded videos due to the poor performance, best was an 11.80@114 which was very disappointing. I made a few changes by adding a fiberglas bumper and cut out passages to help out feeding the intercooler. I also switched to a gm air intake temp sensor since the Ford sensor is mounted in the lower intake and reads far too hot most of the time. These two changes remained untested until May 4, 2018, Mike Sitar (hardcore gearhead and all around boosted Ford guru) was in town and offered to help out with the tune. I had reached out to Mike via email explaining my tuning woes and questioned my intake manifold choice to which he agreed I might have went with a bigger intake but said it should still be doing better than what it was doing. We agreed to meet at the Texas Motorplex so he could get a look at things and assess the situation, after confirming the basics were ok (I was questioning everything at this point) he made a few tweaks to the fuel table and had me make a pass. The car went 11.49@117 right away and things just got better and better from there. May in Texas had a lot of humidity in the air but he still got the tune down and we managed an 11.26@120 before turning the boost up to 15psi and the car set new bests in all areas, 1.52 60ft, 6.821@99.75 1/8 mile, and finally a 10.759@124.51 for the 1/4!
The plan now is to get some fresh plugs in the car and maybe find a way to lighten the car a little more but as for the tune I'll just leave it how it is, I have a feeling the times will be even better in October with the cool dry air we get here around that time of year.
1/2019
A new year and a new update, I visited a track I had never been too a few months ago, Tulsa raceway park, its been there a while but was a nice facility and the people running it were great. I seldom travel very far to run the car but with it late in the racing season and events happening at all of my usual 1/4 mile tracks I figured what the heck. I packed for an overnight stay and brought extra fuel and had some fun, until..... disaster struck! The car ran its best ever on the first pass a 10.73@124.98 then it ran a 10.82@124.xx and after that second run I noticed a fair amount of smoke coming from the exhaust (mostly on the right side but the X pipe allowed the left to show some as well). I wondered/hoped it was just vapor due to cool temps but it steadily got worse and worse. I made a third and final pass and it was really bellowing out of the back of the car. Still ran a 10.96@116 though! lol
Once I got home my suspicions were confirmed, I had lunched a turbo. I wasted no time in removing it and getting it patched up locally at Majestic turbo in Dallas, I kinda considered upgrading to bigger turbos but at this point I'd wait. This would be how this season would end.
Onto other news, I've decided to build a new engine in order to gain the added strength that is sorely needed for these 87-93 5.0 engines, I've ordered a Dart block and will be filling it with H beam rods and a forged crank. I figure I'm fairly close to pushing the limits of my stock block and this will give me a chance to finally upgrade the cam. I always enjoyed seeing how fast I could go with the stock 5.0 roller but I hope to only do this once so I'm gonna go ahead and step it up a bit, cam choice is still up in the air but I plan to do some consulting and see what works for other people. The ability to turn the boost up further will be an added bonus as well.
One last upgrade I've yet to mention is I will be ditching my fuel cell and installing a stock tank back in the car and I have acquired an Aeromotive dual phantom fuel pump setup, I'll run on one pump then have the second one turn on under a preset boost level, controlled of course by my Megasquirt ECU. I'll update the pics a little later so stay tuned.
7/2020
Wow what a year! The corona virus has darn near everything getting shutdown,cancelled or just plain sold. (RIP Northstar dragway, Hot Rod Drag Week, Hot Rod Power Tour etc) Its been a while since the last update so since I've got some time on my hands I'll see if I can get things up to date. I got the stock gas tank in the car with the dual phantom fuel pump setup, it works just as intended and I set it up to run on one pump then at 4 psi it turns on the second pump for good measure, its nice and quiet. The one major drawback to going back to the stock tank is I can no longer fit the passenger side tailpipe, therefore I removed the pipes and added turndowns straight off the muffler, it is louder but not too terrible, I may revisit this sometime if a solution presents itself.
I spent a ton of time ignoring the new engine build due to not wanting to file my piston rings, its a cruddy part of the build and I wasn't looking forward to it. After playing with the Chuckwagon for a good while I finally made myself get on the 363 build. I got the rings filed but I believe I have at least one (maybe more)I may have gotten to rough with, it looks like it has some light showing through it against the cylinder wall. I'll be taking the block to the machine shop this week for hot tanking and having the cam bearings installed, then hopefully things will begin to move forward with the build.
Another tidbit of downer news is the driver side header is warped. I attempted to fix it the same way I fixed the passenger side when it warped but I guess its worse this time as I wasn't successful in getting it to stay flat. I'm currently trying to see what I can do or have done to fix this problem because its gonna have to be ready to go when the new engine goes in.
8/2020
Hard to believe another update so soon, I figured enough things happened shortly after the last update that I'd follow up on a few of the scenarios from the last post. As far as the 363 build goes I was able to do a much better inspection of the rings and it appears the rings are alright after all, the "light" I thought I was seeing was merely a reflection in the bore being cast so the build can now move on. The machine shop still has the rotating assembly at this time, I ended up having more than just cam bearings installed and a cleaning, I had to have the holes in the block chamfered and I had the rotating assembly checked and balanced. Hopefully in a week or two the short block build can commence.
I'm still thinking a bit about the tailpipe situation and I may end up just running two pipes to the driver side of the car, there's plenty of room there and I prefer to keep the pipes tucked up underneath the body out of sight so it won't be two pipes sticking out in the open, we'll see how things go.
More good news, the driver side header is fixed! Huge thanks to JayFab performance in Frisco, Texas! I had heard about JayFab and then recently learned of his new location not too terribly far from me, so I took the header by for a quote and long story short it has a new flange with proper orientation and seals up better than ever! I hadn't realized just how bad (or how long) it had been leaking until I fired the car up after reinstalling the newly repaired header, its so quiet! This is part of what makes me want to explore the tailpipe addition again in order to make it even quieter yet. (I've gotten compliments before by people who say they love how quiet it is and I enjoy it too) JayFab does excellent work based on my experience and of all the nice work I saw while I was there, I'd recommend him to anyone and hope to revisit for more work to be done in the future.