Bluebird

In reply to Bent-Valve :

That engine was assembled probably 10-12yrs ago and, to the best of my research, was intended to be a blow-thru carb turbo setup. Whoever spec'd it was afraid of compression, and covering for potentially poor tuning.

I have a different plan

Snagged a few more recoup dollars tonight. And pulled some parts which have been claimed, but not yet picked up

I 4lug swapped the front of JAM so it can remain a roller. The mach1 calipers, 13" rotors, stainless lines, and Ckit springs are on the shelf ready to be installed onto Bluebird.

I am 100% sure this was not like that when I installed the shifter

You might be the first person in history to 4-lug swap an SN95, lol.

Hitting the recoup game this week, and JAM is zero'd out

I sold another $100 worth of interior plastics, dash, and steering column tonight. I gave him the RF fender on his way out the door. I am tired of looking at piles of Mustang everywhere.
To that end, I got a message asking for a back half cut of the body. I told the guy I wasn't interested unless he paid for the back half and took the whole shell, and quoted him a price slightly better than what I thought I would get from scrapping it out. He agreed, but needs it NOW, so I got busy pulling my engine/trans out of it.

That was last night. Today, I pulled the rear axle and gas tank, and some remaining wire harness that will get pillaged for connecters. I also got a call from the shell buyer(not that kind of shell buyer), asking if he would be able to retrieve the shell with a dolly.....crap! Guess I better put some rolling gear back under it

I know it looks like Mustang money but, as noted above, my recoup sheet is zero'd out without the revenue of the shell. Since the buyer asked for it to roll, I asked him to pay for the rolling gear and I would include the shell for the same price quoted earlier. He had no problem with that and since this rolling gear is originally from the Bluebird, I get $75 more recoup in the budget!

Almost got a T Bird Turbo. Wish I had. Very under rated cars that can hang with quite a lot now with some mods.  The 2.3 has an amazing aftermarket.  Please educate me, where did that straight 6 come from?  Sounds like a interesting combo you have brewing!  Best of luck to you!

Life has been full of family and friends and festivities the last few weeks! Thanksgiving in Wyoming; even got snowed in for a day. I attended a King of the Heap event at NCM last weekend, and I might be doing more KOTH stuff depending on how things develop. Then, PRI this weekend. I did get Bluebird moved into the shop again amidst all the craziness.

This is all the remains of JAM:

Instead of doing actual work on the car, I have been shopping for some different wheels because my Desmonds are very un-budget-friendly. I came across some cheap RAD which was delivered on Thursday.

I popped the cover off the 8.8 axle today. Very clean inside, and looks as though someone has recently rebuilt the Trac-lok. I will be swapping gears and bolting everything back together so it is ready to go in the car. It is time to start making progress!

Niiiiiiiiiiiice.

That little 200 should be fun with some boost, but a 4 valve swap is really damn cool. Because I own a 200 I like to see what people do with them but it will never sound as good as that v8

Made a trip to the hammer store for supplies and a couple new tools to help with working from the bottom

It has been a long time since I messed with Modular engines in a Fox/sn95 chassis, and just as long since I have felt the need for an engine support bar. I am relearning.

Rope lights will be attached to the runways on my lift. I love love being able to see what I am working on.

I also got a fresh battery in my phone this morning which makes me super happy too!

I am doing my best to fulfill this car's "new year, new you" resolution.

Kmember will come out next, then lots of cleaning and wire chasing.

Still cleaning

Clean enough for who it's for.

I routed the body harness to the outside of the d.side apron and double checked that it will still reach around front to the p.side headlight area. I won't get crazy with wire tucking, but may as well grab the freebies to clean-up under the hood.

I also made the first test fit of the sn95 k-member, and was immediately reminded of a couple interchange gotchas. I will address those, then clean and paint the new k-member.

Looking at the partially installed k-member from the side, the first notable fitment issue is a known Mustang vs. Thunderbird crossover. There is a ⅜" vertical difference between the upper and lower mounting pads. I had a tubular Mustang k-member in my white TC, and this offset is easily solved with a spacer between the upper pad and the frame channel.

The second issue has to do with this k-member being from a late sn95. When the k-member was redesigned for the Modular engines, the lower pads on the k-member grew in length. This causes an interference with the lower frame channel on the Fox Tbird chassis, and a hole pattern misalignment.

Since part of my fitment issue was a fore/aft alignment, I went ahead and test fit the drivetrain and k-member together in the car for a better overall view of where I was going to make adjustments. The engine and trans are on dollies, so I fit the k-member to the engine, raised the front of the car and rolled everything under. Once I set the car back on stands I swapped the hoist to the engine and, with a jack under the trans, lifted the drivetrain into place. The resulting picture looks like the engine went in from the top, but that is not the case.

This all went fairly smoothly, especially for a first go. My debate was if I used the lower pad mounting holes to reference the new k-member location, I could push the entire suspension and drivetrain forward in the car roughly ¾". While this is good for the front suspension geometry, I was concerned about what other interferences or misalignments this move might create.
As it turns out, with the k-member located in the upper frame mounting holes(standard?) the shifter lines up almost perfectly with the hole I already made for the old T5. If I pull the drivetrain forward the shifter will crash into the console and bezel.

The list of other interferences is thankfully short. The passenger side header is contacting the footwell and will require some massaging. The A/C fittings in the firewall clear the valvecover, but the water lines are gonna take some fixing

Anyhow, the suspension geometry fix can be gained thru simpler methods than trying to move the k-member forward so I dropped everything back out, cut the offending ¾" from the lower mounting pads and redrilled for the Tbird hole pattern.

Next on the list of tedium will be adapting the sn95 steering shaft to the Fox column.

I like it, you don't see the old, new, or any t-birds get much as far as modification builds go...aside from turbo-t-birds in fact I have seen almost none.

The 87 - 88 'Bird's are the first one's that had done anything for me since Ford changed directions in 58 and made 'em land yachts (wasn't born for that change, but mid 70's and 80's was a hard time to be a ford fan!)

The TurboCoupe look was awesome, and always wanted to hot rod one.

Didn't like the looks of the '92, but LOVED the thought of ford going back to supercharging; too bad they weren't as successful at it as 3800 Series II's.

Did have a friend in mid 90's put a 427 FE in a 92... while still paying payments!!! It was FAST, but even he said it was a huge mistake!

gumby said:

A long while back, I had a local guy contact me because "I build weird E36 M3" and should know someone to buy this engine he was selling. He had a list of details, but no receipts, and refused to open the motor up to verify any components. I tried to sell it to the only guy I knew who might be interested, but without being able to prove what exactly was or wasn't done, no deal was struck. Nearly a year goes by, and I get another call to come get it for whatever I think it is worth before it goes to scrap. So I picked up a forged piston 3.3L with no real plan about what to do with it.

Another loop in this tale is that the mystery guy who I thought might be interested, had in his possession a cylinder head which could fix the ugly that sits on top of all the beauty tucked inside this block. I recently presented him with a deal to acquire an Australian crossflow head.

I love how many Ford I6 guys are on this website.

Mr_Asa said:
I love how many Ford I6 guys are on this website.

Somewhat surprising, eh?

Ok, so these updates seem almost not worth posting, but I am still moving forward! I have lost count of how many times the engine has been lifted and lowered in the engine bay, but I have achieved clearance between the passenger side header and the firewall. This allowed the engine and kmember to be fully bolted in. No hoist!

Once that location was finalized, I moved onto the steering shaft. Again, these headers proved to be an issue. If long tubes didn't sound so good on this engine.......
Anyhow, I have the Maximum Motorsports steering shaft from JAM which I needed to match the three lobed sn95 rack input, but the top connection is also different than the Fox column. After some major chopping and splicing I was able to create one steering shaft from the leftovers which, with some minor shifting/spacing of the steering column itself, fits and clears the header(barely).

In reply to gumby :

Engine and steering successfully installed. Yeah, thats's an update worth posting! 

There's just something so right about a small, manual car with it's shock towers completely filled by ENGINE.

I've been kinda distracted, and also working an extra day for the last few weeks. I had my normal Friday off today, and got back into this mess.

Starting with two 5ft lengths of material, I massaged them slightly to begin forming subframe connectors

There isn't much offset needed, so these are simply cut thru three sides with the kerf pushed closed and welded. Next, I did a bit more metal origami to finish up the ends

With that done, I crawled under the car, did a couple more test fits and got the seat braces tacked on.  Fox cars have a tendency to crack the floor pans around the rear mounts of the front seats. These cross bars prevent that, and tie a large span of floor into the SFC at the same time.

Unfortunately, I didn't get much further than this as I realized the cord on my welder isn't going to reach far enough to get these installed. I also have more cleaning to do under the car and side plates to build before the install will be fully complete, but putting a longer cord on the welder is my job for tonight after supper. I knew this needed done, and I have cheated a couple jobs to get by, but it's time to pay the piper.

Today I generally just made lots of noise and a big mess

Exhaust goes here

Removing undercoat sucks

Cleared another hurdle today. That jackstand had been under the transmission for far too long

I had to catch up I had been missing this for a while!

Sweet Fabrication!  I like how neat it is! Keep going!

The drivetrain still needs to come back out at least once more to finalize a few bits and clean, clean, clean. Before I do that I wanted to check driveshaft length, but that meant I should really have the 8.8 axle installed rather than the 7.5

So I gutted the 8.8 and changed the 3.27 ratio out for some 4.10's.

Had to improvise a bit for the carrier bearings. I don't have a press and I am trying my best to practice social distancing which means not running to my buddy's shop....I could use a heavier truck on the lift, but if it's stupid and it works, is it still stupid?

I rarely have issues reusing junkyard gears, but new aftermarket gears can be a pain to set up. Not sure what tolerances Ford requires for factory gears vs the aftermarket vendors, but 98/100 will drop right in. This Motive gear set fought me. Good thing I got a deal on them...eventually I did get a decent pattern

Light on pics from there on out, but I reassembled the 8.8, pulled the 7.5 out of the car, swapped the brake lines and calipers over, and slid the 8.8 under the car. One less big part on the floor!

I grabbed the aluminum driveshaft from JAM, attempted to fit it, and was not shocked to find it is a couple inches too short 

The d/s in the center without a yoke is the original shaft from my white TurboCoupe. It uses the same 1330 u-joints as the aluminum FRPP shaft so swapping the 31T slip yoke was a simple fix and gained 2.5" of length.