Well after 10 months of it being down, I finally got to drive the Fox yesterday. It felt incredible.
Friday night we were determined to fire her up to see where we were at and get an idea of how much more work had to be done. When we first primed the fuel lines, the #1 injector sprayed gas everywhere. Luckily it was the only injector that we can get to without removing the upper intake. So we loosened up the fuel rail got the injector out, checked to see if it was cracked or anything, it all checked out fine. We replaced the O-ring with one of the stock injectors and were all set. She fired right up with open headers it almost shook the entire garage to the ground. We shut it off after a couple of seconds and put it away for the night.
On Saturday afternoon, I finished installing my autometer gauges, water, oil and volts to make sure we knew what was going on when we were running it. I gave up looking for the proper relay I needed to get my mkviii fan installed so instead of dealing with all the electrical stuff we decided to go ahead and reinstall the fan and clutch. The mishimoto radiator went in with the stock fan shroud bolted up just like stock. It all looks very nice. After all that was installed we started filling up the system with coolant… to find that the thermostat housing was leaking coolant. That had to be cleaned up and reinstalled. O/r H-pipe was installed and bolted up to the bassani cat-back. We finished up all that work at around 8 at night, we ran the car to get all the coolant bubbles out it ran for about 20 min and it never got over 180 degrees standing still in the garage. The car idled fine but it was running really rough. We were wondering if the cam was really that crazy. We checked the sparkplug wires and found that cylinder #7 was loose. After that it was still shacking really badly. Timing was set to 15* but it didn’t help the shacking. We thought that the ecu had to be reset so that it could relearn itself bc we were running out of gas and had to shut it off. So we disconnected the battery and let it rest.
Sunday morning, we picked up more gas and got it running again. It fired right up and we decided we wanted to take it for a test drive. Once on the street the car had no power and was missing pretty very bad. We pulled over to check the distributor and wires again… they were all fine. Back in the garage we took the wires off and plugs to check them. None of the plugs were broken or cracked but 5, 6, and 8 were covered in gas. We hooked up a compression tester to cylinder 5 first it read 0. Next Cylinder 6… 0, cylinder 7… 170psi and cylinder 8… 0. We were amazed. We thought that it was running so rich that the cylinder got washed out. So we got oil and squirted it in each hurt cylinder and still had no results.
We took the upper intake and the valve cover off thinking a rocker might have fallen off or broken something. They all looked perfect, but had to be readjusted. I’m guessing that we adjusted them incorrectly and so tight that it wasn’t allowing the valves to close all of the way. We readjusted them and checked the compression again and bingo 170psi compression in each cylinder. After putting it all back together it fired right up and ran and revved smoothly.
On the Street it felt like a brand new car. It pulls a lot harder then the previous stock headed bolt on set up I had. It revs very fast and sounds incredible. The first initial pull set me and friend back and surprised both of us with just a little bit of tire slip. We weren’t expecting that big of an improvement. The car pulls really hard and just screams at higher rpms. Today I’m planning on getting the fenders, hood, and front bumper cover back on to really start enjoying it. Pictures and videos are on their way.