After a year of building and using the forum for ideas, instruction, and confidence; I'd like to pay it forward by highlighting some of the build experience and decision making. This is a project I am doing with my 16-year-old triplet nephews. It started as a way to spend more time with them and just yuk it up, but it has turned into a really great experience. We have been documenting the process for our family and friends with a blog, and I will be taking the key highlights and decisions and posting them on the forum as I get a chance. I don’t plan to document everything, just some key decisions or techniques I haven’t seen much of or at all on the forum. There are plenty of posts showing pictures of the kit arriving, front end suspension installed, master cylinder set-up….
Some info on our build,
Our strategy: Sunday Driver, Full Fender and Hardtop
Donor car: 1997 Lincoln Mark VIII, using the 4.6L 32V, DOHC modular Ford engine, and 4R70W AOD Transmission
One of the first decisions we had to make was do we buy a kit or put together piece parts (the Frankenstein approach). I have not seen a lot of info on the pros and cons, so we put together a spreadsheet comparing the contents of the kit, vs going out to Speedway, Summit, Jegs, Heidts, Painless, .... you get the picture. We found trying to source all the parts ourselves was over 25% more expensive (we always chose the least expensive alternative). This analysis and the fact that buying a frame and then trying to fit everything is another chore, along with the fact it's just not as safe and frankly a small cabin for a group of over 6 ft tall family.
We would target a Sunday driver and an occasional outing to a show. No best of show details, customizations or expense. We just don't have enough daylight to chase perfection - not too mention with 5 builders not enough patience and conflict resolution. We are still trying to impress and get some can't believe you did this - just not a 100 point fantasy. This drove us away from the crate engine and to a donor vehicle which we procured for $1600 and have already sold $850 of part out. As it stands our budget is still a smidge over $40K - I know a lot for yuking it up
We are waiting on wheels and should be go karting soon. More posts to come on decisions and techniques so far.
As the proud owner of a garage full of parts labeled HR#894, I'm jealous of your progress. Mine was supposed to be my job in retirement, but I can't seem to reach that goal yet - so minimal work done so far. I'm glad to hear that you are engaging your nephews. Get them involved young and they'll develop skills that will last forever. Also, hot rodding needs some young blood, judging from what I've seen at car shows, etc.
So where are you located?
Good luck with your build. I'm looking forward to seeing your posts on this forum.
Keith,
Thanks - We are in Chicago. I have also noticed that although they like working on this with their Dad and Uncle, they would much rather have a new car or pick-up. It might be that eventhough car auctions are setting records now on the back of boomers, it might follow the trajectory of baseball cards.
One of the next major decisions we made was on the electrical system. We decided to use the donor car wiring for engine and fuel pump management. This also required us to deal with PATS( passive anti-theft system) - this was the cause of major frustration. We have quite a few tips to pass on if you are dealing with PATS.
Our strategy was to take the engine and fuel delivery system out of the car and the car out of the donor electrical system.
From our donor we removed every wire intact – this was a lot of work. Our plan was to remove the electrical system and the engine and then reassemble on the floor and then start cutting away section of wire and testing that the engine still started. Some of the cutting away is really easy – seat controls, radio, power windows….. for headlights, tail lights, climate controls, gauges we will use the FFR Ron Francis harness and fuse box.
During the process we needed to get the EVTM( Electrical Vacuum Technical Manual) we found it at a local library branch. It is absolutely necessary if you are going to be cutting and keeping wires.
The wiring still has PATS – we kept the SCIL( which talks with the Key) and the antenna from the donor ignition and taped them together. Make sure they are very close since when you remove some of the length of the wire and butt connect the lines, you change the resistance and the voltage drop causes the SCIL to not be able to recognize the key and then send the kill pulse to the PCM. This took us a better part of two weeks to diagnose. I will say we were also trying to remove PATS from the system without doing a re-flash – we think that’s impossible. A tip on knowing when PATS is killing the engine. Hook a test light up to the anti-theft wire from the PCM if it does not go out after 3 secs, PATS is killing the engine.
We were really concerned with heat transfer from the engine compartment to the cabin. We also wanted to keep the emissions controls intact so we really had a space problem in for our engine. There were two reasons to keep the emissions intact – one is that the engine is tuned to run with it and the second is that resale value will be higher since many states require it.
We added a heat resistant to 1100 Degree, 2000 degree continuous fabric to the firewall. We also added heat shields to the floor over the mufflers - an idea we got from the forum.
2) That caused a few issues, one the donor car exhaust manifolds now hit the frame. We changed out to shorty headers - but this changed the EGR pipe length, which then cause another mod. The shorty headers were from a mustang 4.6L and since we had a Lincoln 4.6 L the exhaust male bungs were different sizes. We had to buy a Mustang EGR pipe, but that was much shorter in length so we cut off the ends and had a heat resistant flexible tube made to connect the two end to fit our engine set up. shorty headers.JPG
With the engine moved forward two inches the A/C compressor hard line did not fit, so we needed to have them cut off and a 90 degree escape welded on – luckily our hose shop was able to do this, we needed to change the suction and charging ports locations as well, but crimped into the lines. We looked for a while for a smaller compressor with a three hole mount, but could not find one, so we got lucky this solution worked, if not we would be looking at changing the serpentine belt.
We also needed to get an extender for the Oxygen sensor on the driver’s side and we added a FORD MUSTANG SVE MIL ELIMINATOR (O2 SENSOR SIMULATOR) for the rear Oxygen sensors so we could fool the computer for any check engine faults – we did this because we want to run a wireless OBD connector to a tablet to display key engine performance and be our check engine light with specific faults displayed.
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