ITS Ford Mustang(s) Build - Stripper Stang Part II

[Ron Earp]

I've done a bit more work on the ITS Mustang build. Jeff and I went to the Mustang breaker man that is semi-local and picked up the entire running gear of the Mustang - engine, tranny, rear axle, front suspension, sway bars, computer, brakes, uprights, and hubs. The plan is to build each of these sub-assemblies up so that when it comes time to assemble the car it'll go smoothly.

I've got the engine on a stand now (pictures are from hoist) and have learned a few interesting things about this little motor. Based on what I've seen so far it should prove to be a decent performer. One refreshing change for "modern" automobiles is that they appear to have "real" oil pans that are designed to keep oil around the pickup. This engine has a very deep rear sump pan that incorporates some thought toward oil flow and containment. Vastly different from what Ford was putting on run-of-the-mill engines from the 70s/80s.





The engine itself is pretty small but the front dress adds a lot of length to it. The top of the engine looks like a mess but around 30% of that is the EGR plumbing and routing - EGR feeds, bypass, controller, connectors, and then wiring for the controller valve. The rest is pretty simple - fuel injection harness, coil pack, cam sensor, crankshaft sensor, then TPS, MAF harness, starter, and oil pressure/water temp senders. Interestingly enough the fuel injectors insert directly into the head. The injectors are closer to the valve than they are on the fuel injected 302/5L motors and, while not having an architecture similar to this engine, they have a very similar upper and lower intake design for the 86-95 years.

And, its got headers from the factory! Man, this thing is already optimized and no more power is to be had. We better run it back through the process and give it a weight break. Yeah. Headers. The inside of that collector is a joke with each of the three pipes coming into a triangular pie shaped merge. It is if someone cut the circle into thirds and each pipe gets a wedge shaped third to come into, no merge, just empties into space. The design of the 99-04 header is different and looks less impressive, more of a log with pipes going into it, but I suspect neither flow very well at all. There are some off the shelf V6 headers from the usual Ford suspects like Hooker, JBA, etc. but they frankly all look like crap and have large primaries, literally no merge collectors, and are not the correct lengths of anything according to PipeMax and Burns. Custom headers will be needed to extract maximum power.