+1 standard 5.0 blocks are a dime a dozen

 

The robust solution would have been to find another block in the same (good) condition as my original, rebore it, and go from there. But finding good used blocks around here takes some digging and I was on a tight schedule, so I had a local machinist bore and sleeve the bad cylinder.

It all came down to opportunity cost, which, at the time, was very expensive.

 

Hmm, glad you got it back together. I followed your paint thread very closely, and your pain saved me quite a bit when I did the repaint on my 7.

Almost time for some warm air now...

 

So I weighed the car yesterday. With me and a backpack in the passenger compartment, it was 1450 pounds on the front axle and 1500 over the rear (this with a nearly full tank of fuel). I estimate my weight to be 200ish pounds including the backpack.

So she appears to weigh 2750 pounds with 49/51 f/r weight distribution.

I haven't forgot about getting numbers and a video of the beast in action.

 

hell yeah dude.. I'm glad to see your still enjoying your tinkering.. me I've just gone mad.. you should see my hobby shop I'm filling with cars/parts

 

You got pretty much the exact numbers I got on my '86 5.0 RX7, except mine came in at 2720 lbs total.

 

Wow- what a great thread---

You did a really nice job putting that baby in there with professional creativity....

I have a supercharged aluminum head, intake, lopey cam EFI 5.0 setup that has already been dyno tuned with sct software by the guys that wrote the book, literally, for sct. Rob and Don LaSota. I am having a heck of a time selling the mustang so I am going to take the drivetrain and put it into a FC...

I am debating whether I want to do it your way or grannys way and refab the front crossmember for radiator clearance of my blower/accessories... I can weld decently but I dont know if I trust my skills to 435 hp and 1 g cornering at the motor mounts... I guess I could tack weld it and have it professionally finished...

Have you had any issues with your cantilever tranny mount?

Do the valvecovers/intake manifold rub the firewall at all?

Do you have 6" of clearance on your oil pan at stock suspension height or full suspension travel?

As far as your clutch pedal effort- thats about normal with a king cobra clutch- stiff as hell- at least compared to a lot of cars- you get used to it though- its nothing in your design just part of the shi@#% design- I will tell you however that a maximum motorsports universal cable (non adjustable), a firewall adjuster, and their aluminum quadrant with more leverage made it a LOT better- still I am looking forward to a hydraulic setup...

I am sorry to hear about your engine failure- but heck at least you were enjoying it when it happened- it would be worse if you were idling at a grocery store...

Hard to tell if you have already rebuilt it or not but just in case...

FWIW I would recommend the blown short stroke setup- I LOVE it the blower more than makes up for the low torque of the low displacement and it revs incredibly fast-and the more you rev it the more power it makes with a centrifugal until you get out of the efficiency range of the blower which with stock pulleys is beyond hte short blocks limit usually... I would ditch the cam though as it hurts boost and kills mileage/driveability- put a 93 cobra cam or stock 5.0 ho cam in... that is what I am doing after I get it sucessfully into an FC and blow it up- 1.7 rockers and more boost wil lmore than make up for a cam... I know you already invested in 1.6 rollers- so did I - btw are yours noisy? which brand did you go with? my trickflows like others have reported are like a "sewing machine on crack".

Also not sure if you know this or not but a 351 windsor block has a taller deck height than your 302 windsor and your AFR heads and intake will not work with it... Headers are different too if I remember correctly

 

Hi,

Thanks! It's been quite a good time since it's been drivable.

Wire feed is pretty easy. If you practice on scrap steel you can get to the point of laying acceptably strong beads. My welds are pretty amateur and they have shown no signs of cracking during a few thousand miles of punishment (granted this engine only has an estimated 300-350 bhp)

It looked great the last time I had the engine out. That was with a couple thousand miles of thrashing on it. I think the weak point in the design is the bolt-through points on the chassis, and they look fine, too.

No, but a bolt that I used to plug a mysterious exhaust passage on the back of the AFR heads tends to smack the firewall at times. If I ever have the heads off again, I'll get a real flush allen head plug for the holes. I still don't know that they're for (egr possibly).

It's 6" with tokico blue shocks and eibach progressive rate springs, with the pads removed from the top off the strut to lower the car more. So I have a fairly low FC compared to stock. To date I have not scraped the oil pan on anything (speed bumps, driveways, rocks, etc.)

That sounds great. I think it's the friction from the kink in the cable where it goes around the brake booster that makes it worse than it should be. But it's good to give the legs a workout.

Lol, that's a perfect analogy. It is definitely like a giant sewing machine. I think my rockers were crane 1.73's but it's been a while since I checked. The sound gets drowned out by the glorioius SBF intake roar. I do have the engine rebuilt and running again, and some form of centrifugal supercharger will be the most likely power adder down the road. All I could ask for is a little more top end after 4k rpm, and the blower should handle that with a few psi.


Hmm. Yeah I discarded the idea of a 351W after I saw how hard they are to find with a roller cam. It is surely a taller engine though and I agree: the tfs intake would hit the hood.

I love the car! It's like crack every time I get done with a back road bash session.

 

Thanks for your reply-

Those holes in the back of your afr heads are for the air passages from the smog pump system. My trickflow heads had them too- I believe it was 5/8" coarse thread.

enjoy

 

Great thread. Sounds just like what I want my FC swap to turn out like. Too bad the pics are not still up. I would really like to see the crossmember and firewall mods. I would prefer to set my engine back and low instead of the typical granny's mount location. Anyone have the pics saved? I tried PMing 88IntegraLS but haven't heard back.

 

Cool project.

 

Hi guys,

Yes my university web hosting account expired, since I graduated. Update on the car:

Running great! I got about 60 miles of back road action with it yesterday in Alabama's rural highways. Yes, Alabama. I got a job at an aerospace manufacturer about four months ago and they moved me, my cars, and all my stuff here free of cost so I could help keep the composites plant running. Fab experience is priceless in a real manufacturing environment. Educrat engineers can't get **** done; ex-farmboy hacks are the complete opposite.

So, the car is still its usual self, a ground pounding howling 5.0 powered FC, smoking tires in first and second gear just rolling on the throttle, leaping off the line like a bright yellow jungle animal taking out a gazelle.

I don't yet have any web hosting here but I'll describe the cross member. It is just a 1.5" square piece of steel tubing with 1/4" thick steel pads welded to its ends, at an angle matching the angle of the existing K member where the stock rotary mount hard points were. Two rubber mount brackets for the 5.0 are then triangulated up from the ends of this bar to locate the new engine. Once this was made and bolted to the motor, it was all dropped in the car and test fit to determine how to make the tranny mount and how far to hammer back the firewall. It's actually pretty simple. Just get your core motor, hang it in the engine bay, see what you need to fab and / or hammer out of the way, and then build.

Anyhow, the car is totally fun. It's bailed out my Probe GT twice now when I crashed it into a tree one day, and just recently when it wouldn't start one morning because the distributor died. The 5.0 has been trouble free. The oil pan has yet to scrape pavement, after about 10k miles of back road bashing.

Anyone contemplating the V8 swap: DO IT! The finished product is a different animal and fun in a different way. And it is totally superior, by the way.

 

Here are some build pics of the subframe, firewall, and tranny mount. I have thrashed this car for about a year and the tranny mount is holding up.

 

Modded oil pan, engine sitting in bay, and fuel line routing through the wheel well:

 

Modded TII driveshaft, motor build pics and location of T5 shift lever after install:

 

Motor installed with stock intake, oil pan ground clearance, exhaust fabrication:

 

Some pics of the final product. I'm still doing redneck experiments with insulation, aluminum foil, and cardboard.

The car is fast.

 

Awsome build. I love how far back you have the engine sitting give lots of room for future additions(turbos).

 

Thank you for reposting the pictures. They will be used as inspiration for sure.

 

The nice thing about living in rural Alabama is there are no smog rules. I'm about to reinstall the hot cam and redo the exhaust. A little overlap and some longtubes should bump up the top end a little.

 

very nice setup im doing the sameswap in my fc how bad was the wiring and other small stuff?

 

The small stuff and wiring took months! The fun part was getting the motor to fit. The work was getting it to run.

 

Update:

Motor is still running great! I took a senior engineer for a ride in it the other day and he said it pulled like a viper he test drove. I'm pretty impressed with the small block ford at this point. It sounds great and has a very usable power band. I'm still using the E303 cam with a pretty restrictive exhaust (stock main cats). I'm not sure what I'm going to do to it next. It needs gauges and other items of civility more than anything else.

The sleeved block has not shown any signs of trouble. And it gets 93 octane at all times.

 

Hey man i just finished reading this whole thread from the beginning lol. I'm in the process of swaping in a 351w and was wondering if the same modifications that you have done for the 302 would work for the 351 ie the firewall smashing and the oil pan mod? How hard was it to cut out the ***** of oil pan and weld ing that new piece? How much work is involved with mounting the engine down and behind the rack as you did compared to the granny's mounting method?

 

Another question, I'm lining up my motor in the same place as you right now and i realised that this placement wont allow for the steering rack lines on the backside. Did you have to depower your steering rack? If not how did you get around this?

Edit: I noticed that your rack is different than mine. Which rack are you using?