Team stang has been very busy over the last few weeks. For various reasons, Jeff G’s Mustang needed a new motor. We have come to the conclusion that his old motor was just not assembled and built well. Now, considering both my car and his car had the same builder that doesn’t bode well for Sleestak, but Sleestak is still running so we’ll stick with it.
We finally got all the parts together for Jeff’s new motor build and knocked it out in a weekend. We ran into a few snags though and learned, the hard way, that Ford really like to change things often with respect to fasteners, part numbers, and these changes generally make life more difficult.
One of the biggest issue we had was the block. We got a block out of our stock pile and had it bored 0.040” over with our torque plate. Line bore checked, decked, etc. everything made just perfect. But when we went to assemble the bottom end we found we couldn’t bolt on our windage tray because the main cap bolts that would be used to do that job wouldn’t fit in this block. Turned out that somewhere in 1995 Ford decided to put smaller main cap bolts in the engine. Our block had the large main cap bolts, so the bolts we were going to use with studs for the windage tray wouldn’t fit. Doh. Out comes the TIG and we took care of business at the cost of a couple of hours.
Anyhow, we got the bottom end together and all was good.
But, snag two appeared when we tried to fit out IJ crank scraper. We got it trimmed up to fit as in the picture above, but, when we went to put the oil pan on the damn bolts that hold the piece together fouled on the oil pan. Hmmmmm, turns out Ford in their infinite wisdom have a few different castings of oil pans, although they all look the same, and all four of the ones we had laying around were the same "no fit" variety.