NikwoaC's "Commitment Issues" Engine Build

Mustang5L5 said:

Woah. He has returned.

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Indeed. Hopefully permanently, but I make no promises.

FastDriver said:

Your last post in this thread was 7 years ago. Never do that, again.

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I honestly can't remember now why I stopped posting... I haven't stopped Mustang'ing. But yea, I've recently kind of realized that I missed the value of car forums over any other kind of social media, so I figured I needed to come back.

Noobz347 said:

Wait.... You don't look Chinese at all!

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Hey, you were the one that decided I was.

General karthief said:

You missed me right?

No, really, you missed me?

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I see that I missed some promotions around here. How many of you guys are mods now?

So, I guess some updates are in order.

Yes, as you can see, I still have the car. Since I've taken my sabbatical from StangNet, I've:

Converted the front control arms to 2003 Mustang units (specifically from a Cobra, but IIRC they're all the same) and corrected some front end geometry that was always not quite right. I learned that the '86 K-members are narrower than the later units, and the longer later arms help correct for that when using 94-95 spindles. It actually makes the front stance fairly aggressive, but manageable. I did have to roll the fender lip.

Upgraded the rear upper control arms to Steeda aluminum units with their 3-piece urethane bushings on the chassis side and UPR spherical bushings on the axle. This finally matches my Steeda lowers that I installed in 2009. No, it doesn't bind, that's urban legend perpetuated by people who don't know how 4-link suspensions work. I personally haven't noticed any increased road noise, but this car rides like a lawn tractor anyway, so what's a little more vibration? Handling and rear-end predictability is definitely improved. Not to an insane degree, but it's there. Installing these arms turned into quite the fiasco, though. For whatever reason, the inside axle-side flange on the driver-side control arm interfered with the pumpkin casting and I had to grind material away from the control arm. Nobody at Steeda could explain this, even after long hours of phone calls and emails with their technical team. Maybe my car has a weird casting flaw in the 8.8...? I will say that the flanges on the Steeda aluminum arms are significantly larger than the factory steel units or even Steeda's own steel units, although they claimed that they've never seen an interference issue like what I had. I'll upload pics if I can find them.

Installed 3" stainless tailpipes from Pypes. The full exhaust will eventually be 3", but I did these at the same time I did the UCA's.

Installed a Holley Terminator X EFI kit on the car. After my second A9L died and Moates closed down, I figured it was time to take the plunge. I'm glad I did, because my experience with it has been awesome. The car runs so much better now, with easier and more capable tuning.

I've done some other small things to the car, like switching from 1.6 to 1.72 rockers, slowly restoring some interior parts, etc.

Like I mentioned before, I'll post some pics once I find them...