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

Today I’m off. Im gonna try and get the steering installed, wired, and behind me. The last time it was mocked up, it didn’t fit right. I’m guessing that I have the two mount straps that are in the factory column reversed ( upside down). It’s a potentially easy to change fix. I’ll know about that here in a little bit.
The other issue is how much force is required to get the motor to assist. On the vid that I linked, the dude had the Prius steering gear all hooked up to a battery, and had one end of the steering shaft clamped in a vise. On the steering wheel end, he had a pair of vise grips clamped. All he had to do was seemingly give the vise grips a little nudge, and the motor moved one way or the other.
When I do that on mine,.......it didn’t work so smoothly. It took a lot of effort to get the thing to move. Now how that translates into steering effort once there is a steering wheel on one end, and fully weighted front end on fat tires on the other remains to be seen, but that’s going in today.

I’ll just have to wait till I can get the car on the ground to know for sure.

The other goal is to get the coil pack mounting figured out, and the wires ran to their respective plug. Once I get a mounting system for those coils made, I can start to consider mounting the engine. I didn’t want to have to either lean over the fender, or lay under the car to do that, so getting the coil packs mounted is next after the column.

I may add a shaft support at the firewall for the steering column, and I’ll do that with a 3/4” rod end, but I’ll wait to see how the whole thing feels once it’s all mounted. If anything feels a little wobbly, I’ll support it. Doing that will require welding, and that will keep the engine out of the bay till it’s done. If I had the freakin rod end, I’d just do it anyway cause it won’t hurt, but I don’t.
So,........yeah.
The hoses for the intercooler also need to run inside the frame rail like I had them the last time, and doing that with the engine out is also scads easier,...but I don’t have the hoses either...

Lastly,.....I gotta buy a new radiator, even though the one I got has nothing wrong with it. 2jz inlet/outlet hose orientation is Chevy boy sympathetic. Meaning that the inlet outlet on a ford radiator would require really long stupid hoses to make work.
And I ain’t having really long stupid looking hoses.

The way I see it, I have 4 more purchases to make this whole swap fiasco a reality. I need a Chevy boy radiator, I need 20’ of -12 push lock hose. I need a new “cat sucker” cooling fan system, and I need a stinkin 3/4 rod end. It’d sure be nice if I lived in a city that had an actual speed shop in it still,...but Summit, Jegs, and the rest of the internet have killed off that convenience.

And I probably wouldn’t buy anything cause Summit would have it for less.

Well,....the steering is mounted.

The column is two pieces. It’s the only way I could get it to fit. The motor assembly is bolted to the 4 anchor points the factory uses to hold the column. It is where all the torque will get transferred from the motor to the steering rack. There is a short 1/4 column that is where all of the electronics are bolted to. I made two tabs that hold the upper shaft to the lower. Additionally, the upper slides into a sleeved coupler to keep it all aligned.

Im good with it.

The motor assembly is completely hidden, it’s way the phck up under the dash. On a factory fox, I’d be concerned that the factory fuse box might interfere with the install,...but you could just tilt the motor down to clear, or flip it over to the other side.

The steering shaft is complete.


What looks like a 200.00 LMR steering shaft is two universal set screw double d joints with a piece of double d shaft that I cut to fit. Total cost was about 100.00. I’m gonna add the rod end at the firewall to add support to that shaft.


Still left to determine is whether the column trim will fit again. It’s really close..I think it’ll work.

the coil packs were last thing, and the mount bracket still need reinforcement,...but Im good with the location.

so,..that’s it,...once that bracket is done, and I get a rod end to support the steering shaft, I’m gonna put the engine in.

droopie85gt said:

Wow, great progress. It's like going to work when no one is there. I can get all kinds of stuff done without the phones ringing and people constantly coming in my office asking questions or needing help! I am really interested to see how the e-steering works once you get weight on it and do a trial run.

Click to expand...

It’s gonna work. The Ranger station vid shows the install in a falcon, and the guy is steering the car with a finger. All in all, the custom part of this install amounted to making the bracket to bolt the motor to that is welded to the factory front mount ( that I had to beat The remaining steering column out of ). Hole-sawing that hole larger so that the steering coupler would pass through. I had to remove all of the excess tube transitions, and bracketry off of the Prius unit, and shorten it, and the Ford column to come out to the same length. The internal intermediate shaft could’ve been done better if I had access to either a lathe or an end mill..( Like any of us would).
I think the work I do is such butchery, I never show whats behind the curtain. I planned to do a step-by-step Install, but that changed as soon as the hack in me started to take over to solve the problems related to the install.

In the end, its the finished product that I’m proud of, not the slightly wonky intermediate shaft, or the column tube merge made out of two pieces of the cut off parts of the column cut in half, ( and modified to fit after that with a cut off wheel and die grinder). I don’t even want one finger steering as far as effort is concerned,....if this thing make it one hand steerable, I’m good.

Another foot closer to the finish line...

I took the head to a machine shop that has been in this city for as long as I’ve been here back in........October?

Back in October if you’ll remember...the guy doing the head, “surfaced“ my head with a belt sander. I had to take it to a machine shop after that fix his phck up. At the same time, the guy at the head shop tells me that he “clearanced” the valves, and basically saved me hours checking and setting the valve clearances using the standard method of checking them after the cams were installed, and replacing shims as required to get the proper clearance.
Well given that he was such a phck up, I decided to check him today.

Every valve is too loose....And now my choices to fix this are minimal.
1..I keep the cams in place, and use a goofy ass tool to compress the spring, and another goofy ass tool to hold the spring down enough so that I can remove the lash cap. I don’t have the tool.
2. I remove the balancer, now torqued in to 270 lbs again, so that I can remove the timing belt, so that I can remove the cams, and remove every single lash cap, so that each one can be measured to determine what can be swapped around to other valves if possible to minimize the expense of doing it right. Then, once I know what lash caps have to be purchased, and what thicknesse,..I can go about the process of sourcing however many of the 24 valves that I cannot get to come into line.

At about 10.00 each.