Maui
Need I say more. First off let me say I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas. Well it’s been almost a month since my last update and I’m a bit overdue. Part of my excuse is that we were on vacation the first 2 weeks of December, in Maui, so you can’t hold that against me. We couldn’t have scheduled it any better. For those of you who live here in Denver you’ll know what I’m talking about, we had a bit of a cold snap on Dec 2. The same day we left and we missed it. Actually when we landed in Maui and turned on our phones the first message we got was the Winter Weather Advisory. Ok enough bragging about that. The other half of the excuse is that, as I just mentioned, it’s been a bit cold and it’s hard to work in the...
6-5-4-Is it the blue or red wire-2-
Ok well it isn’t that dramatic but it is very colorful. As mentioned in the last post I’ve finally gotten into the wiring. There’s really 2 main pieces here, first is the engine harness and second is the chassis harness. The engine harness came with the crate engine and connects to the ECU and all the parts on the engine. You might recall this pic from the last post showing the 3 connections to the ECU. You might notice in this pic that it’s relatively tidy. Well it was. And here is a pic of the chassis harness. This came with the car and provides for the main electrical connections of everything else in the car and it assumes certain basic things about the engine, some of which work with this particular engine and some of which have to...
More Miscellaneous and DOH!
The last couple of weekends have been about wrapping up a lot of little items with the goal being to get the engine bay panels out to the powder coater. Well I think I’ve got everything done that I need to. First on the list was to finish off the access panel on top of the driver side footbox. This panel is removable from the engine bay and provides access to the brake master cylinders. The normal way or the way the kit provides to attach it is self tapping sheet metal screws. Problem is I just don’t like the look of them. I’ve sorta had this theme going with everything that I’ve been mounting using Stainless Steel cap head screws. I like the look of them and it’s bringing a bit of consistency to the look of everything that’s...
Lots of Fabrication and Miscellaneous
I was out on vacation this week so I got a lot of time to spend on the car, not as much as I would have liked but still good progress. In addition to working on the car I also took care of some of our Christmas decorations. I’ll get to that a little bit later. After getting the engine set in place the first thing I took care of was creating some extra room on the drivers footbox where the head of the engine was hitting it. I cut a hole in the panel and the created a little pocket that I will rivet back in place creating the extra 1/2 inch I need to clear the head. Here’s the pocket I created to fill the hole. Here’s how it will mount in the hole. And here is the space it makes for the head clearance. It’s still tight but now the engine...
Hand me the shoehorn please…
Well the weekend finally arrived and as planned we got the engine installed. Destinée was off today so she was around to help me. Add in the great weather today and it was a perfect day to take this next major step. Our first step was to prep the engine bay by masking off all the areas where we might ding the powder coat. Destinée got to work on that part while I prepped the hoist for the engine. Here is the result. We are using a combination of regular blue painters tape and then we put another layer of exterior blue tape on it. The exterior tape is a plastic and it’s really tough. I found out when I installed the differential how tough it was. I banged the frame pretty good getting the diff in and expected to have some chips in the powder coat but the...
A Marriage
As promised and I’m sure as anticipated, at least by me, we started working on the engine this weekend in preparation to install it next week. Here are some pics of the engine with the plastic pulled off and it still sitting on it’s shipping pallet. In case you’re wondering, all the blue tape is sealing off all the openings to keep whatever miscellaneous junk might be floating around out of the engine. It’s a Ford Coyote 5.0 Liter all Aluminum Twin Overhead Cam V8. It produces 412 horsepower and 390 foot pounds of torque. This is the same engine that’s in the current 5.0 liter Mustang. The nice thing is that there are plenty of aftermarket upgrades that can get even more horsepower out of this engine without opening it up. For now...
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