Build Thread 1978 Mercury Cyclone. The pig is in the pen.

madspeed said:

speachless

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Since when?

You guys don't even know.

4 days spent straight at the machine shop getting all the loose ends tied up.

If this guy wasn't my close friend, I'd have to see a banker to finance the work.

I'll post pics (probably Sunday, (My wife has my Saturday corrupted)), but this is what we did:

1. Made spacers to stand off the rear caliper mount brackets from the axle brackets.
2. Blasted, and drilled the front SN 95 spindles to accept the bumpsteer kit.
3. Made three inserts to replace 3 freeze plugs to allow water to enter the motor from the side.
4. Milled my exhaust manifold flange. ( it was warped to hell from welding)
5. Turned down the nose of the cam, and drilled the front journal to accept two 1/4" dowels so that a SBF billet cam gear would fit.
6. Machined a MS 36-1 reluctor wheel to fit the SBF harmonic balancer.
7. Made a cam retainer thrust plate to hold cam in block to work w/ SBF cam gear.
8. Turned .300 off of crank gear to get it to line up w/ cam gear.
9. Turned an additional .050 off of crank snout to accept crank gear.
10. Machined crank snout to accept full length key way.
11. Machined .300 off of each stud pedestal to allow guide plates and studs to fit head that had factory shoulder mount rockers.
12. Drill block to allow for Australian head dowels.

This amounts to about 24-30 hours at shop labor rates for a machine "Job shop". IDK how much that would be in the real world, but I'm sure it would be astronomical.
Tomorrow will be my last half day there, and I should be able to pick up the block which will be the last hurdle to assembling the thing once and for all.

Oh,...and I changed the title of the thread, again. After referring to it so long as the Monster, I've become accustomed to the namesake,...so that sticks. The car itself will be badged w/ the Cyclone decals that I posted earlier in the thread,..but officially, from now on,,...I will refer to the car again as the Gila Monster.

tannerc91gt said:

All this thread title changing really makes this confusing

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OH SHUT UP! You are the KING of thread title changes.
If you changed clothes as often as you've changed your thread title, You'd have to get sized for a female -3 fire suit,
Then you could be a Drag Queen, instead of a thread title change King.

A5literMan said:

Eww...that face! But the rear looks good

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That is a 1970 Mercury Cyclone Spoiler, Built by Ford to compete w/ the Plymouth Superbird and Charger Daytona.

A5literMan said:

From that last pic those tails wouldn't be a bad idea for your project?

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They would be a great option,....if they were available.

It's all about what I can get through a repro parts house if I'm to take another retro approach on a set of tails. To my knowledge there isn't any supplier of any tail light for a Mercury product other than the 67/68 Cougar,...and even then that is only because it's basically the same tail light that is on the Shelby.

Tail lights are back on the shelf for now,..the engine, (and all of the idiosyncratic little mods that were required to get it done) is on the short list for completion, as is the rolling chassis.
It's a damn shame when you have so many things getting ready to happen that you have to hand the projects a hat check ticket and make them wait their turn.

It's been a long day and a half.

On Saturday morning, with everything I needed at the ready, I rolled the bare block out into my driveway to start the process for the rebuild. I spent the first two hours cleaning the block, caps, and crank. This engine was by definition, driven to death in it's previous life,...and the engine oil, (what little was in it) had evidently been beta tested to determine its ability to withstand being subjected to extreme temps, all while running at the bare minimum.
What that meant for me this morning, was that despite the fact that it had been ran through a hot tank, there were still hidden pockets of burned on, caked on sludge that was lurking there,..........waiting for a chance to fck up my new engine.

So I scraped, scrubbed, and brushed until that sucker was clean.

Then I taped it up, and painted it........

Are you ready for it?


Orange. I painted a Ford engine Chrysler Hemi Orange.

It was at this time that my beautiful wife changed her tone, and her pleasant reminder that I had another "committment" at noon was now something like:
"Get your Mother Fu kin ass out of that garage, and into the shower if you're going w/ me to the party!!!"

Now how could I refuse that?

So this morning I was holding all of the cards when she asked what my plans were.
"I'm gonna finish my day in the garage that I got cheated out of yesterday."

No comment from the spousal unit.

That said, I went downstairs, and got my funk on.

Today I had a clean block, so I installed the cam first. I installed the cam first to be sure that the 460 roller lifter wasn't gonna hit anything it wasn't s'posed to. It didn't ( That's cause I built it)

This is one of the things that my machinist did for me last week. Originally, we attempted to drill the cam for that dowel that would be necessary to put a SBF timing gear on it, but the freakin camshaft was so hard, that it screwed up the dowel alignment when we tried to drill it. So I bailed on that plan, and had him drill two smaller .250 dowels. By keeping the diameter smaller, it didn't get into the harder material that was farther out from center. I also had him make the thrust plate, as the stock piece was too thin. This one measures about .240.

Now there had already been another guy that had done this before, but he took the SBF chain that came in the kit, and removed one link, and then put it back together. I decided to try and find one already complete. After spending a few days, and about a dozen phone calls working on it, I found one.
According to the source, this is the stock chain for a 78 Toyota somethin-or-other. It is made in India, and is suppposed to be as good as the DiDo chain that came in the kit I bought from Summit.
Fortunately, it only cost 15 bucks.

But,.....I had no idea if it was gonna fit.

The next thing I did was place the crank. ( So I could see if the damn chain was gonna work)

So did it work?


Like a champeen! Not too tight, and only barely enough slack to allow me to get the damn thing on.

Like it was made for it.

Well, actually it was. That crank gear had to be cut .300, and the snout of the crank turned down an additional .050.
A keen eye here will notice a full length crank keyway that goes completely under that crank gear to the front of the journal.

After breathing a huge sigh of relief, I moved on to fitting the rings. Recommendations called for a .025 top ring end gap, and the same for the second.
Once all of that was done, I threw them dudes in there.

Racetec 3.700 bore 2618 forgings. Compression ratio should be somewhere around 9.0:1.

I stopped here on the engine, and moved on to rebuilding my lower control arms.

I have to use stock arms, because all of the aftermarket stuff is longer, and I can't afford anything longer, else wise my tires wont fit.

I heated the bearing shell the old bearings were in, and after about a minute of direct heat, they started to bubble. I whacked that b itch w/ a chicken peen hammer, and it shot outta there like a bullet. I did all four in about 30 minutes that way.

I put it back together w/ some red poly bushings I bought from Summit last week (one of those boxes I didn't even open till today) and some cheapo-degreapo 95 GT ball joints from the Zone.
Painted it black, and............... Now I present them to you.

Behold the lowly, lower control arm.

They're red, but I painted them black. I'll take some lacquer thinner, and wipe off the red parts so the OCD's out there can sleep tonight.

I also stripped my 95 spindles of their splash shields, and about 19 years of grease and dirt.

This is for another day

The three discs are made out of .500 thick aluminum. The intent is to use these for water fittings. I partial filled the block, and I doubt that a stock WP will work properly, given that it's impeller would be even w/ the fill line. The missing plug was where my machine shop decided that I didn't want the three brand new plugs in there if they were gonna run it through a final wash, and they beat two of them out before they realized that there was cement behind the bottom 2/3rd of the plugs.

I still have to degree in the cam ( Something that I have never done before in my entire life) and torque the bottom end. For now, it's bagged.

I'm gonna work on getting the car on the ground to roll it out and clean up my disaster garage.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled GT40 HCI swap thread, already in progress.

RacEoHolic330 said:

Aside from a full blown racing setup, I've never seen so much custom machine work and fabrication done on an engine. I sure hope this thing provides you with loads of reliable enjoyment. I thought your 89 was quite custom. This is batsh*t crazy.

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That was the primary reason for the Fairmont in the first place. I wanted something I could strip to zero, and change anything, and everything I wanted. The engine just happens to compliment the body in that regard.

84Ttop said:

I couldn't have said this better myself!

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Well it seems everything that you, and @hoopty5.0 say these days are right on the money anyway, so why not let others just do the talking for you?