Slow 68 mustang - Big Girl Pearl or "Yellow Fury"

Nice job on the Delphi connectors, having the right tools for Metripack and Weatherpack connectors certainly makes the job alot easier. Here are a few things that I added when wiring my 1st gen conversion in case you're interested.
Some terminal covers for the positive cabling, I didn't like the live wires being exposed.
Have a cover for the junction panel that I'm going to cover up.
https://www.summitracing.com/search/...terminal-boots
Attachment 202980

Cheapo plastic electrical box with cover for the relays.
Attachment 202981

Handy plastic clips for attaching wire loom with zip ties.
Attachment 202982

Quote:

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Originally Posted by slazisme

Nice job on the Delphi connectors, having the right tools for Metripack and Weatherpack connectors certainly makes the job alot easier. Here are a few things that I added when wiring my 1st gen conversion in case you're interested.
Some terminal covers for the positive cabling, I didn't like the live wires being exposed.
Have a cover for the junction panel that I'm going to cover up.
https://www.summitracing.com/search/...terminal-boots
Attachment 202980

Cheapo plastic electrical box with cover for the relays.
Attachment 202981

Handy plastic clips for attaching wire loom with zip ties.
Attachment 202982

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Thanks! I will go in and clean a lot of things up once I get it running. I tend to leave everything easily accessible for a short while to make any troubleshooting a bit easier.
I will certainly borrow from those ideas, though!

The last order of connectors arrived along with my break-in oil and some other pieces. I got the harness in and powered up the ecu and flashed it without issue. I also picked up some zip tie clips that should help me keep all of this wiring in place. I pulled the trigger on stainless pre-bent lines from Classic Tube. I called with the specifics of my build last Thursday and they'll arrive tomorrow. I also spent some time touching up the black on my gas cap. I'll likely do the same to the emblems later. Today was spent running to local auto parts places looking for hoses. I bent up some wire hangers to follow the general route I'd need. I was able to find everything I needed. Picture dump incoming!


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On the brake side of things. I switched my prop valve to the passenger side of my MC. I couldn't use the pre-bent front line because it interfered with the valve cover. So I ran a nicopp line under the MC to the other side.


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I also picked up an ACP thermostat housing. It seems well built.


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On the hose side of things. I was going to use a 69 Bronco upper hose but it was a bit short and I didn't like the look of it stretched.


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The 2nd option turned out a bit better. It's the lower hose from a (01-07) Toyota Sequoia with a 4.7L. The length and bends were close. I had to cut the center and turn the hose about 90* to make everything line up. I've ordered some aluminum tubing from Speedway to tie the two pieces back together.


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The lower was a bit easier. It's from a 94-04 V6 Mustang.


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Lots of excellent progress!

Andrew

Has it really been 3 weeks? Updates!

Over the past few weeks, I've made some progress. The stainless pre-bent lines from classic tube arrived. I spoke to them a few times prior to ordering and was always told that they couldn't promise the lines would be perfect, given my custom application. They were close to perfect in all of the areas that were still stock. But I had to get creative when it came to the Wilwood attachments. I also had to run out to Speedway Motors and pick up some line fittings. No big deal. I used that chance to swing by a buddy's place and pick up his Tefba filter that will live in my system for a short while. Got the brake lines bled and clutch lines ran and bled. I also reinstalled my fuel cap. I had decided a long time ago to weld up the holes and redrill them since a previous owner had used drywall screws to make an attempt to replace missing hardware.....I sorted out my throttle linkage, ordered, picked up, and installed my driveshaft. Beaned myself in the face during that process....good times. Now I'm getting close to cranking it....soon...ish. Over the Thanksgiving holiday, I'll likely lay out the exhaust and get an idea of what I'm missing needing and work with my Chevelle buddy to get the ball rolling. Bring on the photodump!


Coolant lines sorted and filter installed. I'll clamp everything when I'm ready to put water in.


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Looks pretty good for pre-bent stainless.

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Okay....this will need some work.

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Getting better...

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The brake pedal sat -way- high...around 8" from the floor.

The factory manual says 7 to 6 inches. I had to trim the brake rod on the wilwood to give me enough adjustment.


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Time to bleed everything came and I made a mess because I was doing a lot of this solo.

I also might have -maybe- let the rears gravity bleed because I forgot to tighten a line.....


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Throttle pedal and stuff came in. I had to twist the rod a bit to get the pedal to sit the way I liked. The pic is before. I also may remove the clutch pedal and twist it back 'straight'.


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Safety wire passes tech, right?


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Getting ready to fill goobered-up holes and reinstalling the cap.


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Driveshaft in! I had it built locally by AZ Driveshaft. 3.5" DOM steel with 1350 solid ujoints on both ends using my Sonnax slip yoke. Ignore the ugly welds on the floors, please.


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Still haven't cut the hood. I haven't decided what route to take on that. Lots of debate happening.


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Kris,

You'll be ready to make noise in no time!!!

Andrew

I believe they sell a adjustable rod for the brake pedal to let you set the height - you addressed it pretty much the same way.

Interesting about your Tebfa filter. Seems pretty similar in concept to the Gano filter I run in my rad hose. Gano is clear, so easy to observe when it catches junk, but I'm sure either is a decent solution to keep the radiator tubes from clogging.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by chunger

I believe they sell a adjustable rod for the brake pedal to let you set the height - you addressed it pretty much the same way.

Interesting about your Tebfa filter. Seems pretty similar in concept to the Gano filter I run in my rad hose. Gano is clear, so easy to observe when it catches junk, but I'm sure either is a decent solution to keep the radiator tubes from clogging.

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This rod was adjustable. I had it adjusted as far in as it would go but it was still too long, so out came the hacksaw to shorten it to get it where i needed it. I thought it was kind of odd seeing as it was a mustang specific kit, but you know how things go with old cars and new parts.

And I'd heard about the Tefba filters from a bunch of the british car guys that used to come into an import shop that I worked at. I mainly added it to make sure that the engine didn't dump any of the crap that it may or may not have left in the block into my new clean radiator. I'll likely run it for a few oil changes and remove it once it remains clean.

The latest is waiting on a spot to get in to my buddy's shop to get the exhaust done. This leaves me with a slight dilemma. I haven't fully decided on what mufflers I want.

I have Black Widows that I purchased a couple of years ago. I had planned to run those with 2 additional resonators or small bullet mufflers to cut the volume down a bit more. But upon further review, there's no real room for additional -anything- it seems. So the current plan is to run the setup i have and decide later when it's on the road. The system will be 2.5" with a x-pipe and two BW venom 250s into tailpipes snaked through the panhard bar and exit below the valance.


Everything in it's approximate location.


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The summit bullet mufflers that I had looked at using are 20" long and 4" thick. There's no good place under the floor before the mufflers to put them. And not really room beside the fuel tank to run them either.


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Either way, I'll figure something out at some point. Meanwhile, here's what I'll be working with to try and get tailpipes over the axle and through the panhard....a whole pile of bends to cut up!


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I've been looking for other things to do while waiting on a chance to get my exhaust done. Installing the MMI strut tower brace and the cowl reinforcement has been something I've been putting off, so I decided to tackle that. I temporarily installed the distributor (still has the steel gear on it) to make sure that I could get it in and out easily with the brace in. Once I knew that I had enough room, I pulled the hood and got started.


Everything seems to fit well enough.

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The bolts line up well enough without the reinforcement in place.

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But less so with the reinforcement.

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So, upon getting grief from a friend for trying to take the lazy route, I dropped the idea of installing the brace without the reinforcement and welded up the factory holes to make my own so i could get everything to line up better.


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Much better.


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And here we are. Brace installed, reinforcement welded in and squirted black. I even adjusted the hood when i reinstalled it.


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It's been a few weeks and I've been slacking on giving updates. Not a lot has happened, really. But here's the latest.

I needed to make some adjustments to the oil pan and Z-Ray crossmember to open up some space. Again, my engine is sitting lower and back and to the right. This caused a bit of interference and needed to be addressed. I dimpled the pan where the steering bumped it and cut the crossmember and re-welded it lower and clocked back a little.
I made a template to give me the rough outline of what I'd need to end up with. Below are a few pics of the process. I need to get a pic of the finished crossmember.

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I -finally- was able to squeeze into a spot at my friend's shop to get my exhaust done. He loaned me his truck and trailer and off it goes!

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Once we got to looking at clearances and whatnot, the plan of an X-pipe with tailpipes out the back to the valance and additional bullet mufflers along with the black widows to tone things down a bit seemed to become a bit more complicated. My JBA headers hang -real- low and the panhard bar left very little room for 2.5" tailpipes. After much debate, side exit exhaust was decided upon 'for now' so i could get this turd on the road. I may revisit headers at a later date along with other changes.

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The bullet mufflers were added, in theory, to help tone things down a bit. I may or may not run at a local autocross track that has a 96db sound check and thought it best to try to address that early.

One last thing we did while the car was still there was discuss the hood clearance issues. I've ordered a Performer RPM intake to replace the Victor Jr. to help with the hood clearance but that still didn't give me the room I wanted for the air cleaner. I had already purchased a 69 Mach 1 scoop from ebay, so I gave the all-clear and Mike opened up the hood. Before anyone flips out, it was a repop hood with a dent in the center of the cutout. No big loss. The RPM will provide enough room to run a drop-base cleaner and turn signal hood if I choose to later.

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One thing that I wanted to address prior to starting up the car (which hopefully will be soon-ish) was to protect the fuel line from heat since the side exhaust was now a thing. I have plenty of space between the line and the tip but since you can't be too careful, I wrapped a long section with DEI's fuel line sleeve and capped that off with their Cool Tape.

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To wrap this up, I had already decided to take down some more of the divider wall in the garage at home. There is still about 4' of it that I would like to remove. Oh, and I finally took the protective film off of the fuel tank.

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The new intake should arrive this week so I'll likely work on getting that swapped out. I've completed a few other things in the background that needed to be checked off. I think it's time to write my short list on the white board and start striking those items off to get ready to fire this pile up!

Awesome progress! I bet that exhaust is going to sound good!

Andrew

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Originally Posted by andrewb70

Awesome progress! I bet that exhaust is going to sound good!

Andrew

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I'm hoping to find out in the next couple of weeks!

Adding pics of the changes made to the crossmember that I bought from ZRay on the VMF.

Front of jack pad was removed before I had decided to cut the cross bar and drop and turn it back. Now that I know everything clears, I can pull it back off, move the pad, clean up the welds, and then scuff and repaint it.


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Kris,

It would be good for me to be logged in on first start. That way you can be looking for fluid leaks while I keep the engine happy.

Andrew

Speaking of leaks.....I found one small one behind the water pump and another larger one...um...here.

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Tools were thrown as well as more than a few obscenities. Oh well, Tore the water pump back off to try and address the leak behind it.

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To switch focus, I decided to mount the scoop to get an idea how it would look. I will be using it but decided to jazz it up temporarily to try something out.

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I'll eventually paint a single stripe down the hood to mimic the 68 CJ stripe. In the meantime, I'm waiting on parts and other stuff to make my block less like a sieve and more like an engine.

Getting close and looking great.

Where to start....

I pulled the front cover off to address a leak at the water pump while I was replacing the blown out freeze plug. I ordered a pressure tester and rechecked everything once it was back together. No leaks! Moving on to the next thing.

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I tried to take the car out after fixing the blown out freeze plug only to have it pop, spit, and shut down 3/4 mile from the house. With nobody available to assist, I was lucky enough to catch a wrecker in the same parking lot (he was on a grocery run) and he hooked it up and took it home for me for $50. I gave the man $75 to show my thanks and then set about to figure out wtf was going on with my junk. The plugs were super fouled and the exhaust pipe was incredibly sooty, so I can guess that it was running way too rich. I tried to pick up 8 fresh plugs from autozone but realized when i got back home that i got shorted one. The plugs didn't help and the car still wanted to backfire and pop and spit and there was fuel sitting in the bottom of the intake. I took a break from the non-running issues and started replacing the door seals.

All of that was over the last few weekends.
This weekend: My junk runs again!
I found that the screw that holds the 2 piece adjustable rotor had backed out some and the rotor was able to move which allowed the timing to jump wildly. After this being the 4th time I've had to do something with, or because of, the distributor, I ordered a replacement. I went with a simpler setup and got an MSD/Holley sniper hyperspark distributor. It's got a cast gear, so I didn't need to change it out. I bought the pigtail that allows it to plug directly into my existing wiring. It has a clear cap that makes setting the reference angle super easy. It doesn't have dual sync but I don't see myself trying out a sequential efi setup anytime soon. I'm over trying to make the pro-billet one work for me. I'll sell it for half of what they go for and make someone else very happy.
Anyway, while i had it all down, I decided to recheck the preload and went from 1/2 to 3/4 turn to address some of the noise from the valvetrain a little. The builder told me he went 1/2 and I spoke to Howard's Cams and they said this setup liked things a little heavier and suggested 3/4 turn. After that, I stabbed the distributor, set the timing, and took it out for a drive. No issues! Now to keep doing all of the -other- stuff I've been meaning to do. Like put some miles on it, finish replacing seals, maybe do AC before summer gets here, get the alignment set correctly, paint the stripe on the hood, etc, etc, etc.

I had to have this sticker.....

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The reference angle 'cap' that came with the distributor.

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Here are two short clips. Both are from several weekends ago. One is the car at idle and the other was its first trip out of the driveway and down to the gas station.

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https://1drv.ms/v/s!AqtB6p6Cle2f0l-Uxa1nkbtCqVX9?e=UQlfbX

Sorry, if I missed it, what was the old disty setup?

Car sounds really good!

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Originally Posted by chunger

Sorry, if I missed it, what was the old disty setup?

Car sounds really good!

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Thanks! I'm not 100% satisfied with it and may change it all up in the future. The 'old' dist is https://www.holley.com/products/igni...ync/parts/2362 I may have put....10 miles? on it.

Offtaa. That's not cheap. I'm hearing more and more about the decling quality of Holley FI products. Between this disty and the sniper, it seems that they need to get a line on their QC process. This was one of the reasons I went with Edelbrock for FI on my stroker. Hats off to you sir - you definitely have patience working through these issues.