Progress Thread '88 GT Hell Horse - All over the place

Monkeybutt2000 said:

Stud gun?

Click to expand...

Yes, I used a stud gun that I got from Harbor Freight to remove the last bit of dents that I was not able to get from inside the cowl area. The majority of the work was done with a ram press on a hydraulic ram pump from inside the cowl area pushing up while using body hammers to shape/flatten.

I have gotten some additional work done, but much picture wise to really show. I gutted out the rest of the items under the car AOD transmission, driveshaft, and rear half of the exhaust. This did also include a lot of vacuuming of spider webs and nests after it sitting for almost 3 years now.

The next step is to gut the rest of the unneeded wiring including factory engine harness, fog light wiring, and the alternator and starter wiring as well. I won't be using any of it as it will all be new custom harness that I will build. The plan is to also pickup a SN95 fuse box to wire everything to as well.

To say the least things have been quite busy the last few months as I can see that my thread hasn't been updated in quite awhile.

There has been some progress over the last couple of months since it has warmed up. The main project was the assembly of the Shortblock.

Here are some pictures of the progress:

Before I could assemble the Longblock I had to of course check for pushrod lengths and piston-to-valve clearance. The picture below shows the miles of room that I have due to the large 13cc dished pistons that I'm running. This will be a 9:1 compression build giving it plenty of room for the turbo that's coming.



Also I had an idea for some valve covers using the Slant Style Tall Valve Covers from Proform. I removed the raised lettering and painted them paint so I could put the builds logo on them. Thought they came out pretty good looking.

Now that the valve covers were ready to go it was time to button up the rest of the Longblock.

The next project was to finish working on the intake. Since I am using the Ford Tubular Intake, I already port matched the upper tubes to the gasket. The main work was that was needing to be done was on the lower intake. There was a lot of material that needs to come off especially on the head side of things.

With the intake all ready to go I got the lower painted (not the upper yet as I am working on something special for it). Got it installed along with the fuel rails to get us to were it is now.

Now that the engine is pretty much ready to go. It is time to put some effort into the engine bay to make room for the turbo thats going in, so the body saw came out and a big hole in the apron there is now. I did get Scoot Rod panels for the car, so once everything is built turbo wise I can trim-to-fit the panels to cover up most of the hole I cut.

Made some more progress on the car. Got the car the rest of the way stripped down removing the stock fuel lines, throttle cable, etc so that I could work on getting the engine in the car. Pulled the engine off the stand and installed the rear main seal and flexplate, so I could start working on the 6R80 adapter plate. I got all the holes tapped and countersunk on the adapter plate along with tapping the blocks dowel pin holes. I test fitted it on the engine and it all fits very well. With the adapter plate on the engine, I started measuring my torque converter to flexplate spacing. Its supposed to be 3.1mm - 4.7mm of spacing and I have 8mm, which means that I will be pulling the torque converter to far out of the pump. So I measured the length of the stud on the torque converter and substracted out the depth of the flexplate + additional needed space to get it in spec = 6mm. Since the studs on the torque converter are fine thread pitch this gives me 4-5 threads of engagement, which is plenty and no modification of the stock torque converter.



Now that I got past of the worrisome parts of needing to ship out the torque converter to be modified or buying an custom built one. I moved on to installing the engine in the car, so I can start working on the turbo piping. This will be the first time this car has seen an engine in it in 4 years so very happy days