LarsD's build thread

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I forget which tranny your running but I have a 3550. I've never bothered to look at the cable as many times as I've been under her.

Mine was pretty cracked up on the bottom. I'm running a TKO600 in it.

I meant at the track, what does it run?

Dunno yet. Only had it together for a couple of weeks. Been working a lot. I want to get the torque boxes welded up, and replace the LCA's before I track it. That has been on hold cause I have been saving up money to pay off my Cobra.
 
Mine was pretty cracked up on the bottom. I'm running a TKO600 in it.



Dunno yet. Only had it together for a couple of weeks. Been working a lot. I want to get the torque boxes welded up, and replace the LCA's before I track it. That has been on hold cause I have been saving up money to pay off my Cobra.

Just do a couple light baseline runs. Wont hurt and it'll be nice to rag on it :D
 
Got more goodies.

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Need to get some torque box plates before I install them. MM had a deal of the day on them, so I scooped em' up.
 

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Haven't updated in a while. The car died on me and had to be wrecker'd home in late December, which was the fourth time in two months it did it to me, though I was always able to get it home before. Then after letting it sit for a few weeks I bought a Rich Porter technologies distributor (that was new). Within the first five minutes of operation one of the bushings seized on the shaft and started grinding away at the housing showering the inside of my engine with aluminum shavings. After cleaning up the engine as best I could and changing the oil I started looking for a new "reliable" distributor. This in itself is quite an adventure. I ended up buying a distributor made by a company called "Performance Distributors". It's a pretty nice looking piece:

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Took some measurements, and it it looked like the oil pump drive under the gear is just a hair longer then the factory distributor. I went ahead and stabbed it and fired the car up. I set the timing to 10 degrees advanced like the old one was (spout out of course). Oddly though it was idling at 700ish rpm opposed to the 1K rpm that it ran at 10 degrees with the old distributor. I reset the throttle stop so it idles at 1K again (any lower and it normally tries to foul the plugs, though it didn't smell rich this time at 700rpm). The random roughness is still there, car starts easy and pulls hard like it always has. One other thing of note, when looking at the inside of the old distributor cap, the burn marks are very low on the electrodes (right at the tip), where as on the new one the arc marks are right in the center of the terminal. Not sure if that is better or not (I would think so), but it was something I noticed.

So as of right now this is where the car sits. Potentially fixed, but I haven't been able to get any seat time with the car to see if it is going to leave me stranded again. That is unless of course I want to try driving it to work in heavy traffic and construction. Hoping to get a little time off and spare cash so I can drive it to a tuner who is about 100 miles away. I figure if it can make the trip to there and back without dying on me, it's fixed. Plus he can tweak the tune for me and I can get some chassis dyno numbers.
 
Long time no update. Car has been sitting a lot, I haven't been driving it because of that old random dying problem. I *think* I finally have that sorted. Looks like it was a combination of underdrive pulleys (yeah I still had them installed, wtf was I thinking), and an old booty 3g alternator. Put a new redtop in it again, new alt, my factory pulleys, and all of a sudden the volt gauge isn't acting all goofy anymore.

Decided to finally try and install the 31 spline Moser axles and Ford 31 spline T-Lok that I bought a year ago. The car skates around like it is on ice at anything above 1/3rd throttle until I hit about the middle of 3rd. I want to put something bigger then the 245-45-17's that are on the car. However since I am still running ranger axles and drums, I figure with any decent traction I am going to twist them right off at the splines. Ran into some problems though (of course!).

Got to the point where I needed to torque the ring gear down to the new diff on the bench. Just like I figured my tiny vice wasn't big enough to hold it.

Some aluminum, wood, and my press made a decent makeshift vice.

Next one of my factory shims decided it wanted to self identify as Pac-man.

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Yeah, the big round thing, the one on the right isn't supposed to look like that. Fortunately I'm not a complete retard and had bought a FMS gear installation kit, so I had shims that I could stack to match the one that puked all over itself. Contact pattern looked pretty much the same, so I called it good.

Next thing was the Moser axles hit the cross pin of the factory Ford 31 spline T-lok. Gonna call Moser tomorrow and find out if it is OK for me to hit these with a bench grinder to make them fit. I remember this happened to the Roadkill guys when they were working on the Crusher Camaro. That wasn't C-clip axles though.

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I suppose if I went with C clip eliminators it could solve my problem, but I just put new bearings into the housing, so that would be kind of a waste.
 
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Dang, man. Haven't seen you in a while. Glad to see you getting it together.

Yeah, been lurking a bit lately. I found a local rally cross track, bought another Subaru and race that mostly now. I still like to take the old Fox out and make some noise on occasion. Want to go back to the strip, but I want to get this stuff done first.
 
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So according to Moser I should be able to grind the ends of the axles a bit to make room for the cross pin. We'll see if I can make them fit.

Go lightly and keep it cool. Get a bucket of water and dip it every 30 seconds or so. That'll keep the temper in your metal. If it starts turning blue, that's bad.
 
I had to do the same with my 10 Factory (motive) axles. Apparently it's fairly common. I used a flat file, iirc, it took about 15 minutes per axle.

Joe