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

Chip42 said:
I'm glad you decided to take the plunge. did you chose the spool for lightness or handling? I'd figure a little bit of slip would be desirable.
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Caymen wanted the spool because this particular one is extremely rare for a 7.5" and it was available for a good price. Always good to have options as unused parts can be moved on. It would definitely bring the lightness, probably 20 lbs lighter than a clutch pack / carrier setup, maybe 25 lbs lighter than torsen / carrier.

JLawton said:
Are those <gasp> off the shelf performance parts?? I've heard rumor of such things but have never actually seen any!!

:D
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Everything is a phone call away, except for that spool. Z's are pretty good for parts supply but nothing like this. A large range of parts exists for the SN95 platform; from low quality to high quality pieces. The low quality stuff is very cheap and the high quality stuff is affordable. Even "specialty" items like spherical bearings are available as kits, all you gotta do it call. That's what volume does for you in the aftermarket.

Service parts are also inexpensive but from reading the Mustang boards it appears you should sometimes spend the "big money" for the good stuff. For example, instead of the front sealed bearing cartridge for $39.50 you should get the Ford piece for $89. Twice as much money but it'll last for a year of racing instead of a few weeks, or so I'm told.

It really might be that you can have "Good, Inexpensive, High Performance" - pick three instead of the usual two. At least, it seems inexpensive when you've been exposed to race car prices involving Jensen Healeys, TR8s, Zs, Porsche, etc.
 
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I've done a bit more work on the ITS Mustang build. Jeff and I went to the Mustang breaker man that is semi-local and picked up the entire running gear of the Mustang - engine, tranny, rear axle, front suspension, sway bars, computer, brakes, uprights, and hubs. The plan is to build each of these sub-assemblies up so that when it comes time to assemble the car it'll go smoothly.

I've got the engine on a stand now (pictures are from hoist) and have learned a few interesting things about this little motor. Based on what I've seen so far it should prove to be a decent performer. One refreshing change for "modern" automobiles is that they appear to have "real" oil pans that are designed to keep oil around the pickup. This engine has a very deep rear sump pan that incorporates some thought toward oil flow and containment. Vastly different from what Ford was putting on run-of-the-mill engines from the 70s/80s.

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The engine itself is pretty small but the front dress adds a lot of length to it. The top of the engine looks like a mess but around 30% of that is the EGR plumbing and routing - EGR feeds, bypass, controller, connectors, and then wiring for the controller valve. The rest is pretty simple - fuel injection harness, coil pack, cam sensor, crankshaft sensor, then TPS, MAF harness, starter, and oil pressure/water temp senders. Interestingly enough the fuel injectors insert directly into the head. The injectors are closer to the valve than they are on the fuel injected 302/5L motors and, while not having an architecture similar to this engine, they have a very similar upper and lower intake design for the 86-95 years.

And, its got headers from the factory! Man, this thing is already optimized and no more power is to be had. We better run it back through the process and give it a weight break. Yeah. Headers. The inside of that collector is a joke with each of the three pipes coming into a triangular pie shaped merge. It is if someone cut the circle into thirds and each pipe gets a wedge shaped third to come into, no merge, just empties into space. The design of the 99-04 header is different and looks less impressive, more of a log with pipes going into it, but I suspect neither flow very well at all. There are some off the shelf V6 headers from the usual Ford suspects like Hooker, JBA, etc. but they frankly all look like crap and have large primaries, literally no merge collectors, and are not the correct lengths of anything according to PipeMax and Burns. Custom headers will be needed to extract maximum power.
 
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I started the ITS build in earnest this past weekend. Drove the car to work on Friday, drove it back home, parked it in the garage, and started the dis-assembly process. I must say it was a relaxing weekend of parts pulling, parts selling on Craigslist, sawsalls, grinders, and other assorted tools.

The car has a lot of weight in it, no doubt about that. I weighed most everything I took out and put it into my ITS Mustang spreadsheet. A few weights off the top of my head:

Driver seat 43 lbs
Passenger seat 38 lbs
Passenger air bag 14 lbs
Rear seat back 28 lbs
Rear seat Cushion 5 lbs
Mach 460 under deck speakers/amps 29 lbs
AC compressor 13 lbs
AC evaporator 4 lbs
etc.

I've got the total weight removed at home but that figure doesn't really matter a lot. I'll weigh the car on Wednesday and see what our starting place is for the cage, seat, and other needed items.

The build on the rear axle has started too. Jeff Y was in charge of taking it apart and made some progress there. Parts are on the way to be installed - LSD to go with my brand new off Ebay $45 Ford 3.45 R&P.

You absolutely cannot the beat parts cost on a Mustang. No way, no how. There are simply so many of these cars out there that new factory parts are very inexpensive and the aftermarket support is probably not duplicated on any other car in the US, maybe in the world. If you want it, can think it up, it has probably been made already.



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Couple of bucks in change, some hair bobbins, Lance cracker package, potato chips, and that was about it. Pretty clean actually.

What I did learn is things don't weigh as nearly as much as we'd like or think they do. About the only item I can remember pulling and weighing that lived up to expectations was the windows and mechanisms. Tracks, motor, runners, and glass came in right at 22.4 lbs on my certified UPS scale here at work.

Door locks were surprisingly light. Just right at one pound each for the motor/rod, and you know these things are pretty strong.

But the old "seats weigh 60 lbs each" and "sound deadening is 50 lbs" is BS. This car has some heat/sound mats on the floor which are glued in place that I calculate weigh just shy of 2.9 lbs total, based on a 1cm x 1cm sample I took and weighed, then ran the area calculations with. I'm not bothering with them because they are a bitch to scrape off.

The rest of the sound deadening in this car looked like pillows - plastic bags stuffed with some sort of matting that weighed next to nothing. These were squirreled away in various recesses of the car and easily removed.
 
Makes for a cleaner interior. Put the ice in a big thick plastic bag and break it up with a dead blow hammer. Lets you get better contact with the surface. After you see frost on the underside hit the area with the dead blow softly to break it loose. It took 15 minutes to strip the entire RX8. If you have a lot of melt strips and liner to remove just go by the welding supply place and get a dewer of liquid nitrogen, it is really fast with that.
 
Thanks for the tips fellows because I'll have to go after that weight. No death ray is available but 25 lbs of dry ice I can get on the way home from work.

We were able to scale the car up tonight and see where we're at. I have to say we're better off than I thought we were, but not where we need to be.

We're essentially at 2510 lbs with the stock tank and about 12 gallons of gas. So I'd feel comfortable calling it 2440 lbs. There are still things left to remove - cruise control, some airbag crash sensors, and a few other odds and ends like comparing a fuel cell to the stock tank. But there is a lot to put back in - cage, race seat, harness, fire system, and other racing related items.

So in addition to those dampening pads, which isn't going to be fun, I'm going to need to attack the wiring harness and remove optional circuits that we can legally remove. There are a lot of them - ABS, anti theft, power windows/mirrors/locks, AC, and so on. The harnesses are very heavy. Tonight we spent time separating the metal from from the dash so we could get to the dash harness - just the dash harness weighed in at 9.7 lbs and the door harnesses were a bit over 1.5 lbs each. In this respect it would have been nice to have obtained a five speed manual non-power window non-ABS non-AC car that never had all the options, but the single example of that I found, which took almost a year, was in very poor shape. Ford quit make the stripper cars in 95 so if you're inclined to find one look for 1994 and 1995 models, after that they all had quite a bit of options regardless of trim. Anyhow, I'll need to be thinking about very light rear suspension components as well as a light ($$$$) seat.

I have to say I'm encouraged. I know we'll never make the 24XX spec weight but if we could score a 2700 lbs weight with driver I feel we could make the car competitive. I don't think it'll ever be one of the "cars to have" in ITS but I think it can be a contender and add some flavor to the class.

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..washer .....washer bottle....Must.....must not remove.....washer bottle......

Not a whole lot under the fenders to deal with. Cruise control, washer bottle, ABS stuff, and the controversial carbon canister, which in a race paddock is more rare than rocking horse poo.

One thing that is notably absent is rust and undercoating, a welcome change from the Z.

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Forget the dry ice...sort of an urban legend and very much material dependent. For Fords you need to get the cold under the material and you therefore need to be on a rotisserie.

The N2 death ray is the nuts.

For me it was a acraper and a Dynazip. Hardwork but it gets the job done.
 
I am not sure the dry ice will work either, but it is cheap and I have 25 lbs ready to go. Removing those mats is more for aesthetics than anything else because there is precious little weight involved with them.
 
I always removed that stuff with a propane torch and a putty knife. Heat it to just bubbling and it comes right off, leaving clean primer underneath.
 
The dry ice myth is busted, at least on a 1998 Ford Mustang sound deadening removal. I used dry ice in various ways - direct on the material, in bags, taped to the bottom and nothing worked. Had 25+ lbs on hand too and allowed it plenty of time to get to as low of a temp as possible. Wouldn't crack and wouldn't chip off.

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What works really well is a heat gun and a couple of metal scrapers. About 45 mins and Jeff G and I had the driver's side about 90% done. Tomorrow we'll have two heat guns and also give it a go with the torch. There seems to be happy medium where it isn't too cold, nor too hot, and it comes off in nice large sheets.

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I calculated that one square centimeter of this junk weighs 5.5 grains. At 7000 grains to a pound and with a re-calcuation of the square area we come up with 7 lbs of material. A lot of work for 7 lbs, but with a car like this that is severely weight challenged you have to do it. Besides, leaving it was going to piss me off. I envision a nice tidy white interior for this car and having those deadening mats painted over would always remind me that I "didn't do it right".

We've also already separated a couple of wiring harnesses and removed non-required circuits that we can legally remove. Man, there are a metric assload of circuits on this car and I suspect we'll be 10-15 lbs lighter on wiring when we're all through. Be a lot of work though, but again, something that is needed. All these little pounds add up and put us closer to that unobtainable 2480 lbs weight.
 
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It's a bit late to add, but I've found that the dry ice is much less effective in summer. When it's nice and cold outside, the dry ice works wonders. I started when it was about 40 deg outside and pulled the entire floor of my Nissan out in 30 min and about 6 pcs. I got busy with life and came back about May to finish the rest of the car. OMFG I couldn't get anything to come loose!
Finally I wound up packing towels under the bottom of the sheet metal, and then put the dry ice down on top and covered it in more towels. that finally did the trick and got it cold enough the glue finally froze.
 
I think the dry ice working is going to depend on the type of sound deadening material that is in the car. Essentially you're looking marked change in the material with respect to a lower temperature. This stuff that is put into the Mustang doesn't appear to do that.

Got a lot of work done on Saturday. Jeff G. disabled the steering lock and attacked the wiring harness. The Ford PATS (Passive Aggressive Anti Theft?) system is a pain in the ass and has miles of wiring in the car. All that stuff there on the floor is part of it and the remote access / locking system. While we've identified it we can't remove it yet because we have to be certain that we can re-program the EEC-V to cope with it being missing. Jeff G is considering his Mustang work as classroom experience since he's mildly considering building one.

I spent hours in the car with a torch removing the deadening material. The torch and scraper are the most effective means we've found. And, I've collected every last scrap of it in a box so it can be weighed. So far I'm up to 4 lbs. Yay. I also finished up work putting the AC box back together and getting it back into the car. Ditto the dash board frame.

Jeff Y. popped by too and finished up taking the rear end apart before the "Scotch Educational Break" ended work for the day. Rear end gears, traction device, and rebuild kit are all here. Need to sandblast the housing and paint it for re-assembly.



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Brings back so many memories....

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End result is a bag of black tar and foam seam sealant that weighs 5 lbs.

Best thing to remove the tar? A pneumatic gasket scraper, takes the tar paper off like warm butter and doesnt damage the sheet metal underneath. Hence the name gasket scraper, if itll work on an oil pan then it wont damage sheet metal. Watch out on aluminum cause the blade will go right through aluminum too. Finish off the job with a cup brush on an electric grinder.

http://www.bing.com/shopping/search?q=pnuematic+gasket+scraper&FORM=HURE

This was my first build, first time taking this shit off and I figure out a better way that doesnt involve a torch, dry ice or hand held scrapers. Better lucky than good. Give the pneumatic gasket scraper a shot it works!!
 
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