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

[Ron Earp]

When I was over at WallyWorld on Friday I picked up pieces for another driver cooling system. We have DR COOL but we'll need another one for Jeff G's car or for mine if the weight of DR COOL is too much for the build.

$8 cooler with screw lid, $19 live well pump, and $20 of dry break connectors. I whipped part of the system up.

 

[Ron Earp]

Also worked on the rear tow strap and cutting a hole in the bumper cover.

And I spent time making the driver floor liner pan and bonding/riveting that piece in. The piece significantly improves the flatness of the floor should improve foot traction for the driver.

 

[Ron Earp]

And work kicked off again this morning at 830 sharp. We continued with the inside of Jeff G's car with the floor panel and I started cutting graphics for Jeff Young's car/trailer. I think I'm going to save some time and go ahead and cut some 2012 SARRC Champ graphics too.

Had a little break for some racquetball at 11am while Jeff G went for a run. After lunch I hope to get Jeff Y's graphics finished up by the afternoon and then cut some graphics for the green stang.

 

[Ron Earp]

Long day but all the vinyl got cut with assistance from my helper. All the stuff for JY's car and trailer, plus some numbers for a new ITS car that someone picked up....

 

[Ron Earp]

Jeff G put in many many more hours and got the third bar TIGed in place on the stang. Looks good and adds safety, but it also adds some weight.

Meanwhile I did some work on the brake duct fabrication. I'm fabbing up metal plates that will bolt into the stock front spolier to which we can attach a standard brake duct from the usual suspects.

And on other fronts I'm formulating plans to redo this exhaust. If you look at this picture you can see that the exhaust pipe comes out under the passenger floor pan, which sucks. That'll put the entire exhaust too low. Where it should have come out was about four inches to the left and two inches higher, thus allowing me to use part of the tunnel to house the pipe. So, more TIG work coming up.

 

[Ron Earp]

And we finally got the rear lower arms with the spherical bearings installed. That is good news. The bad news is we essentially have to build two more sets of arms with spring perches and all for the rear. Yay, more grinding, plasma cutting, and welding on the horizon.

Once all this fab work gets done I'm calling Molly Maid. The garage is a DISASTER - a fine black dust coats every surface of the garage, including vertical walls and the ceiling.

 

[Ron Earp]

We've done a lot more work over the last few days. Jeff G got his bar in, welded and painted. He did a great job on that piece although it took around ten hours of work time to complete.

Wiring has commenced on the red car, hence that big box of spaghetti that has to be put back into the car. The engine harness is in though and the ECU is installed.

A bit of tunnel and deadpedal detail on the red car.

AC box is gutted and installed on the firewall.

 

[Ron Earp]

And of course wiring continues in the front of each car.

We made new battery boxes to replace the plastic "shelf" that Ford uses to mount the battery. The plastic shelf is larger than the battery and is clearly meant for a larger unit that is in V6 Mustangs. We made ours from aluminum, folded and TIGed them, and riveted them in place.

The hub centric spacers that are used on the rear of the car arrived and they are nice pieces.

To obtain the track we wanted we would have either had to make two different offset wheels, or, use spacers. When these are bolted up the wheel spins true and much more so than the high quality non-hubcentric units we had on there before.

Rear arms with spherical bearings were installed on the back of the green car so that stang now has the rear completely done and wheels are bolted on. Minor milestone.

And here is a shot of our high tech spring retainer for the rear. It works very well and keeps the spring from falling out of the cavity when the suspension is unloaded or unbolted.

 

[Ron Earp]

Wired and functional gauge pod on the green stang.

Those are mechanical units with working lighting. Now that those two are in we're ready for an engine start which I anticipate to be this weekend.

Here is another shot of the 85% complete gauge panel that houses the non-essential informational gauges.

Firebomb is in as is the seat harness.

I'm looking forward to trying the belts out. They are narrow Schroth belts and the material feels wonderful and the adjusters are the best I've ever used. Very smooth and better than the Spacro and G-Force stuff I've had before.

 

[Ron Earp]

And the transponders have been placed on both cars. Hidden up in the driver's wheel well behind a shield to protect from debris.

 

[lateapex911]

Ron, TOP NOTCH! I had a bit of a spill and am recovering, so can't drive or do much, and this thread delivers! THANK you for the effort in keeping it going. You are a freaking machine! I thought you were married? How do you put that kind of time in??

 

[CRallo]

Ron, great stuff, keep it coming!

Jake, you didn't break a hip did you?

 

[lateapex911]

Ron, great stuff, keep it coming!

Jake, you didn't break a hip did you?

Well, they bored INTO my hip bone....but, no, I didn't break it. I did, however, break a bunch of ribs, a few spurious vertebra components, a collarbone and a 10mm compression and 15 degree forward tilt burst fracture of the L3 vertebra. Surgery was done to fuse the L2,3,4 with a bone graft from my hip, and a titanium bridge. I don't recommend it. (the situation, not the surgery...)
(And sorry to junk up your cool thread Ron! The full story is here: http://www.roadraceautox.com/showthread.php?t=39174 )

So, back on topic Ron, the cooler thing looks cool. ANy shots of those dry breaks?

 

[CRallo]

Well, they bored INTO my hip bone....but, no, I didn't break it. I did, however, break a bunch of ribs, a few spurious vertebra components, a collarbone and a 10mm compression and 15 degree forward tilt burst fracture of the L3 vertebra. Surgery was done to fuse the L2,3,4 with a bone graft from my hip, and a titanium bridge. I don't recommend it. (the situation, not the surgery...)
(And sorry to junk up your cool thread Ron! The full story is here: http://www.roadraceautox.com/showthread.php?t=39174 )

So, back on topic Ron, the cooler thing looks cool. ANy shots of those dry breaks?

Holy SHIT!!!!!! What the hell man!? Guess it coulda been worse huh? damn... would have been better off breaking the hip!

but yea... back on topic... I'll check out the post.

 

[Ron Earp]

Surgery was done to fuse the L2,3,4 with a bone graft from my hip, and a titanium bridge. I don't recommend it. (the situation, not the surgery...)?

Holy sheet! I'm sorry, that does not sound good at all. I wish you a very speedy recovery. I read the thread and I'm now forewarned.

The Earpcool V2.0 (V1.0 was sold with the Z, and this one is not to be confused with DR COOL, which still might go in the car depending on weight issues) is project number 7.3.h.4. Which means that it is fairly far down the list of things to complete before May.

The dry breaks did arrive though. Earpcool V2.0 has weight as the primary driver so components were selected with that in mind. I suspect this one will not have dry breaks at the cooler area. Instead the pipe will be hard plumbed into the cooler/pump and terminate with dry breaks near the driver.

 

[Ron Earp]

Long work session in the garage. Brakes was the word of the day, as in brake ducts.

We started with standard ABS type plastic ducts that we were going to afix to the outside of the bumper and duct in. But that didn't look that good and we were worried about airflow.

Openings in the bumper got enlarged and then we used the heat gun to deform the ducts after we'd cut the flange off of them making something like this.

These had a straight shot at the inside duct and sway bar where we wanted to attach the ductwork.

Now, while all of that looks simple it took a couple of hours. Before all of that started I got the front suspension installed, nut and bolted, and tidied up for front bumper final install. As well as did some wiring.

Once we figured out where the ducts were going we were able to run hose.

 

[Ron Earp]

And get everything strapped up and out of the way of the tires.

Of course we have two cars to build so everything we did today was done in tandem.

And with the heat treated duct installed in the bumper.

We used the green chassis with the red bumper for most of the fab work; Christmas came a bit early.

Fix that up with a bit of silver an bows and we might have a sleigh.

 

[Ron Earp]

Now the green car is dangerously close to actually doing something other than sitting around on the lift. Engine start is eminent as is running around the neighborhood as she still wears her street tag.

On the other hand, the red car came down off jack stands for the first time in weeks and that was a good sight.

Now, we did get around to one very important thing. The green car is "race prepped" in the sense that it has all of the equipment in the proper place for weighting. Thus, we scaled it. How much do you think it weighs (sans driver and zero fuel, and yes, we laid the glass into the car for proper weighting)?

 

[Ron Earp]

I've got the outlaws coming in today for Easter so work is limited. However, this morning I managed to complete the tune for the engine, upload it to my programmer, then use the programmer to download it to the ECU.

This was something of an accomplishment as I've not communicated with the ECU since lengthening the OBDII cable, relocating the port, and tapping some lines off the engine harness.

The download was successful so I think all is still good with the harness and ECU. Both engines will start with the same ECU program for a base file. Then we'll use the handheld tuner to make minor changes such as adding or dropping a bit of timing and fuel, or the PC based software if we need larger wholesale changes in the file for something that we're way off on. Hopefully the ECU will take care of itself mostly as the adaptive learning mode is still on, while all the silly nannies are off - nannies that want to pull timing for this and that, enrichen to save the motor, pull spark due to high oil temps, and so on. I'm optimistic that we'll be able to get it done with the stock ECU but if we can't we'll go to Megasquirt or similar.

 

[Ron Earp]

Got started on the wiring last night and this morning. I like wiring and my goal here is to make the system efficient and easily disconnected at all locations with Weatherpak connectors. This is the back side of the console panel that houses a number of gauges plus the Traqmate, switches, and tire pressure monitor.

The green car went off to the exhaust shop at 7am and the red one goes this afternoon at 5pm. Both need their exhaust reconfigured.

Things are moving along. I've got to have surgery tomorrow and I'm thinking I'll probably be out of action for a few days on the StangWerks. But, I hope to be back on it by the weekend.