Since there's this new fangled Build Thread section, I figured I could contribute with my own build thread. I have another build thread going on another Turbo Dodge-based forum, but I wanted to put one here too for the GRM audience to see. 
The car is a 1987 Shelby Dodge CSX. It is car #115, sold at Norwood Dodge (now Central Dodge) in Norwood, MA. It made its rounds around New England, and eventually I ended up buying it as a rusty, abandoned project car with lots of extra parts for $100 right here on the GRM classifieds. Along its journey from the dealer to my house, it received a host of speed parts, including some sort of upgraded turbo, a CSX/Lancer Mopar Stage II ECU, 42lb/hr injectors, and some other odds and ends like intake and throttle body port work. It also had a paint job at some point, making it all black and adding some cheesy lettering instead of the cool stock graphics.
Also, along the way, it received some other "mods" that were not so great, like the 25 pounds of redundant stereo wiring I pulled out of the car, the cold air intake made of rusty dryer ducting that went right behind the lower front bumper hole that probably just sucked up water, and (my personal favorite) replacing the stock radiator with one that was too wide, and bolting the intercooler directly to the inside of the radiator. You guys know how turbos LOVE hot air, right?
Here are a few pics from right after I picked it up in 2010. Yes, I have the 4th wheel, it was in the trunk:
See the passenger's seat and how it's not bolted on? I'll show you guys why in a little while...
This is an engine bay shot from the former owner. Check out that intercooler and where its bolted!
Oh, and anyone wondering why I got this thing for $100... one word: RUST. There's definitely a good amount of rust on this thing. You will see soon...
Rust never sleeps, they say. Well, after looking at this car up close, it looks like rust had an ongoing rager since 1987 in this car. 
The rust on this car is located in a few spots. Most of it is in the front floors. The rockers are gone, and the spare tire well has a nice chunk missing. Let's start with those floors:
Passenger side as delivered:
That's nothing. Let's have a look at the driver's side:
Luckily, the frame rails are still somehow solid. I don't know how...
After a little clean-up with the vacuum:
Goes up pretty high:
Here's a nice spot behind the middle crossmember on the driver's side. Conveniently located above a compression fitting! Now I know I have to fix that too...:
Spare tire well:
Since discovering all that rust, I decided to just dive in and go crazy. I removed the hood, fenders, nose, and doors, and most of the interior so I can hack it up and fix the rusty stuff. Lets have a look at some more!
Here's what the passenger side outer rocker looked like. I have found and bought outer rocker patch panels for the car. Scored them cheap for $70 shipped for both sides!!! I have $170 into the car right now.
Here's the passenger side floor after some cutting and treating the inner frame rails with some POR15:
Driver's side:
The part of the inner rocker where the fender mounts on the passenger side (right under where the ECU goes):
Here's a shot of the passenger side floor now after Pseudosport welded in a floor patch (he has been a great help with all my projects over the years, thanks dude!!!
):
I am still learning how to weld, so having a friend who knows how has been essential.
I have also picked up some more scrap steel that my friend had left over from doing the same thing to his GLH. I should have enough to finish all the floor patches. Another friend informed me today that he has a bead roller too. That will help me make factory style creases in the driver's side patch for strength.
Another almost-classic brought back from the brink...Keep up the good work!!!
Some other random pics....
Here's a closeup of that intercooler nonsense.
I understand why now: the stock radiators for T2 Mopars are made of unobtanium. I found one with the intercooler in the boneyard a few months ago but it was rotted out. The one in here is most likely for a N/A Shadow or a T1 car. I'm probably going to run a big front mount anyway, so it's not a big deal.
Obligatory GRM sticker shot :
Driver's side frame... looks really scary but it's solid. I have no clue how this isn't disintegrated like the rest of the floor above it:
Another outside shot with the gimpy spare tire. I love the stock wheels on this car, except for the width. they are 15x6.5, and take a 205/50/15 stock. I'd like to get a 15x7 on the car at some point so I can stuff some more tire under there. I've seen these with bolt-on flares, and they look pretty cool. Could that be in the future? Who knows...
This car came with a TON of upgrades and spares that will save me a lot of money down the road. One of them is the exhaust system. It has a 2.5'' exhaust all the way back with an upgraded down pipe and a ugly but functional Magnaflow muffler. Even has a high-flow cat!
The stock seats are comfortable but are completely trashed, like a chest burster was gestating inside. My friend was trying to sell these Shelby Charger seats, and no one took them, so he called me up to come and snag them for free. One of them has a wonky recliner, so he gave me another Charger seat to take the parts from. Other than the recliner, there is one small tear in the vinyl on the driver's seat. Otherwise they are good to bolt in.
I actually did work to it tonight!!!!
I had Pseudosport over my place tonight, and we began to shape the large patch on the driver's floor. The reason I had stopped working on the car was that I was waiting on a friend to get his bead roller set up so I could make some structural creases in the floor pan so it wouldn't pop in and out like the cap on a pickle jar. I kinda got sickk of waiting for the friend with the bead roller (been 6 months and we've both been really busy) so we ended up coming up with another solution.
We took the rough patch and drew lines with a marker to estimate where the stock floor had its creases. We tried to match some of them to what's left of the floor.
Then, I took a big socket and threw it on an extension, and opened my bench vise up a little and pounded it along the traced lines with a hammer.
You get the idea... the creases match what's already there.
And here's the finished product. The Baroness approves!
I hope to work on the car more often. I want the car up and running by next spring.
That looks a lot like a super 60 intercooler check into that
Upgraded turbo, intercooler, PCM, and, injectors was what the super 60 package consisted of. More turbo Dodge projects make the world a better place keep it up!
The intercooler has a Shelby sticker on it. I'm pretty sure it's an original one stuck in the car when it left the Whittier factory. It's getting a front mount anyway. 
It does have an upgraded turbo (someone stuffed a GN wheel into it), upgraded 42lb. injectors, upgraded ECU, and some intake porting. I haven't popped the head off to see if anything internal was done to it yet. I'm waiting to get the body stuff done first before I mess with the motor.
Caleb
Reader
12/4/12 10:48 a.m.
I makes me happy that your saving this mostly unloved shelby,
Caleb wrote:
I makes me happy that your saving this mostly unloved shelby,
It's a cool car, and a real piece of history. Aside from all the Shelby hoopla, these cars were among the first serious turbocharged Sport Compacts, and without their success, you probably wouldn't have had DSM's, Turbo Hondas, WRX's and Evo's. Plus the buy-in for one of these is so cheap, you just can't say no.
It's a cheap, GRM-friendly way of getting me back behind the wheel of a turbocharged car, and I'm learning a lot in the process. What I learn will then be used on my 1979 Trans Am, which is next in my project car queue.
SilverFleet wrote:
The intercooler has a Shelby sticker on it. I'm pretty sure it's an original one stuck in the car when it left the Whittier factory. It's getting a front mount anyway.
It does have an upgraded turbo (someone stuffed a GN wheel into it), upgraded 42lb. injectors, upgraded ECU, and some intake porting. I haven't popped the head off to see if anything internal was done to it yet. I'm waiting to get the body stuff done first before I mess with the motor.
The Super60 intercooler was built for the PPG pace car and fine tuned on a land speed racing Lebaron, so it's useless on anything on the street, but it's also a drop-in replacement.
A front mount is a worthy upgrade. I put a Ford super duty intercooler in the nose of my 87 Sundance. I had to cut the sides out around the radiator to fit the tubes and use some 3.0L V6 intake hoses to make the bends.
BTW, don't lose that intercooler assembly, it's worth at least $250-500 in good shape and only fits the Shadow body style. Ask me how I know that :/
The solution is to not be a cheap-ass and have a shop recore the radiator properly (about $500 the last time i had one done) and to use distilled water and coolant. Obviously these being cheap cars, the owners didn't and well, here we are :). If it were a restoration job, you could use the rotted radiator you found to build a new one, but for this car? Use a off the shelf solution and put affront mount in the nose with some proper ducting and enjoy :)
BTW, the stock wheels are 15x6". Only the 87 Shelby Z got 6.5" wide wheels, until the 88/89 cars.
I've run 225/50's on 87 Shelby Z rims and with a set of 7" AR wheels. The tires rubbed the front quarter panels, so stick,with lower profile tires or flare the front edge of the quarters.
The rear tends to be offset by a quarter inch or more due to the panhard rod and the lowered suspension. Build an adjustable bar or build a better linkage solution (Mumford, Watts, etc)
Grab a later front K-,member and make sure the rack is solidly mounted. The racks like to come loose and wallow out the mounting holes in the K-frame, not fun when combined with torque steer. I had a half a turn of slop in mine before I fixed it.
If you were closer, I'd make you a deal on the set of 15x7's and 205/50 15 shaved Kumho R-comps and a set of Daytona leather sport seats (bolts in) for your Shelby seats.
Nice job using the vice. I was taught that fancy tools only allow you to make scrap faster if you don't know how to do mit by hand
I MISS MY TURBO MOPAR, AND THIS THREAD MAKES IT WORSE. I'm so glad you're restoring that little P-body. :D
As far as the intercooler goes, the stock radiator is long gone. So is the mount that holds the intercooler. There is a TII Lebaron locally at a junkyard with a complete TII radiator/intercooler setup, but the radiator is shot. Is that mount worth anything?
And yeah, I'd love those seats, but you are across the country. I'll keep my eyes peeled over here for those.
I did some more work to the car last night. I essentially prepped the surrounding area for the floor pan to be welded in.I hope to start getting it in there this weekend.
SilverFleet wrote:
As far as the intercooler goes, the stock radiator is long gone. So is the mount that holds the intercooler. There is a TII Lebaron locally at a junkyard with a complete TII radiator/intercooler setup, but the radiator is shot. Is that mount worth anything?
And yeah, I'd love those seats, but you are across the country. I'll keep my eyes peeled over here for those.
I did some more work to the car last night. I essentially prepped the surrounding area for the floor pan to be welded in.I hope to start getting it in there this weekend.
Yep, a good radiator shop could probably combine the intercooler mounting pieces with a stock Shadow radiator to get the proper body mounts, filler neck location and hose bibs. You'll likely want to diagram the differences (I can get you any measurements/pictures you might need off of my car) The radiator fan shroud is specific to the intercooled motors, but the fan itself is generic I believe (the Omni/Charger GLH-S is another matter altogether). The replacement radiator core will be a custom order either way, so expect the bill to be about $300-400.
The intercooler (Blackstone built I believe) itself isn't a bad piece and could be combined with a few others to create a front mount intercooler.
I used an intercooler from a Fuso diesel truck on mine. Nice and cheap at the local junkyard, though the plumbing necessitated removal of the A/C. But I'm a man, damn it. I don't need A/C.
See, I WANT A/C in the car. It's out of the car right now, so I'm going to keep it that way just to get it running.
The junkyard wanted $50 just for the crappy radiator core out of that Lebaron, so I passed it up. I was thinking of running what's there (probably a non-turbo Shadow radiator/fan) and doing a front-mount or getting a narrow Honda radiator and making a custom mount for that stock intercooler. I haven't decided yet.
This thing is going to be on a Challenge budget (mainly because I'm broke) so no fancy expensive radiators/intercoolers. If it ever does the Challenge, I want it to be in the Under $1K class.
Here is a pic of that sticker on the stock intercooler:
Sky_Render wrote:
SilverFleet wrote:
See, I WANT A/C in the car.
Pansy.
I kept the A/C in my Sundance with the Ferd 'cooler. Just ran the pipes over the top of the A/C compressor. Needed some work to ensure proper airflow through the cooler as it was mounted at an angle between the core support and the bumper, so some Home Depot-spec sheet metal ducts from the grill to the sides of the cooler would have taken care of that.
With the stock cooler, you could simply mount it in the lower opening of the air dam and tie-in your ducting with a splitter of some sort. Relocate the battery to the rear and run the cooler hoses out the side, next to the radiator and back. The length won't matter provided the bends are as few as possible and smooth, its all about the LFB in these cars anyway. :)
turboswede wrote:
Sky_Render wrote:
SilverFleet wrote:
See, I WANT A/C in the car.
Pansy.
I kept the A/C in my Sundance with the Ferd 'cooler. Just ran the pipes over the top of the A/C compressor. Needed some work to ensure proper airflow through the cooler as it was mounted at an angle between the core support and the bumper, so some Home Depot-spec sheet metal ducts from the grill to the sides of the cooler would have taken care of that.
With the stock cooler, you could simply mount it in the lower opening of the air dam and tie-in your ducting with a splitter of some sort. Relocate the battery to the rear and run the cooler hoses out the side, next to the radiator and back. The length won't matter provided the bends are as few as possible and smooth, its all about the LFB in these cars anyway. :)
Using the stock intercooler may be an option. I was just afraid that it wouldn't be enough for the boost/heat soak levels the car might see. I have an EGT gauge I can use in this car from my old WRX that should help to monitor this. It also has an AFR meter in the car already that it actually came with. I was definitely planning on a trunk-mounted battery, if anything just to clean up the gross engine bay. Weight transfer will be a bonus!
Add water/ethanol cooling to help. Moving it out of the engine bay will help a lot.
