I wish mine still looked as decent as it did on the stand
alas I am lazy and never clean it so its full of road grime now.
Ha, mine will end up the same way, believe me. I put a bunch of effort into cleaning and painting the Explorer intake when I installed that, and aside from the occasional wipe-down of the upper, it never got much attention once it was in the car. When I yanked the engine, the lower was all covered in road crud and dead bugs, haha. If you're gonna drive the damn thing, it's going to get dirty.
something has to suffer even a little which adds up somewhere down the line if you know what I mean.
See, I think this is where a lot of car guys get hung up. We're told our whole lives by "experts" that building an engine is a series of compromises. You give up a little bit of this for a little bit of that. To a certain extent, some of that may be true, but I really believe that if you think outside the box a little, you can do some pretty awesome stuff.
I could ramble on about this stuff forever (my wife tells me I need to start a blog, haha), but another topic for discussion that kind of further shows how SBF guys get "stuck" in a mode of thinking is throttle body size. Look at how mainstream SBF throttle bodies from
BBK, Holley, etc only go up to 75mm, and yet the Coyote comes from the factory with an 80mm TB! It is still really common to see guys build 347s and bigger with 75mm TBs. I'm not here to bash guys who have 347s with 75mm TBs, don't get me wrong. It's just another thing that kind of makes you think.
my buddies vic jr 210 heads, come on strong around 4k and pull past 7k with ease, nasty awesome setup this is!
if ya ever need help with checking clearances or whatever, let me know, its only gas money lol
Is that the car that had the TFS stage 2? 7K on a stock bottom end would make my butt pucker a bit, haha. Not sure that I'm that ballsy! I think I'm going to limit this thing to 6500 or so until I build a more durable bottom end.
Funny story, but I will tell you that one of the first things that got me interested in this whole big head/small engine thing was my lame ass '06 Fusion DD. It's just an auto with a 4-popper, but when you have your foot in it, it shifts at 6500 every time. Which got me thinking, if my snoozer daily driver easily buzzes to 6500 rpm after sitting in a traffic jam for 30 minutes, why the hell do I want to build an engine for my Mustang that has a lumpy idle and still only makes power to 6000-6200?
:
So that brought me to doing some research on "big" heads/intakes and how to cam them to work well on small engines and now here we are.
Of course, all my logic could be flawed, and this car could end up being a turd on the street. If that's the case, I still have the hardware in place to make a mean stroker out of it so, it's a win-win in the end.
ANYWAY, thanks for the offer man.
I'll shoot you a line if I run into any trouble. You're definitely going to see my ass at ORP this summer, though. I think I still owe you a meet-up at the dragstrip, right?