Jenn and I installed the engine in the car. With two people, this is pretty trivial. We lifted the engine until we could pull the chassis underneath it.

We then tipped the engine so that the transmission would drop into the tunnel and then lowered and releveled the engine/transmission.

We used a floor jack to lift the transmission and keep it above the 4″ cross tube.

We then lowered the engine onto the mounts and installed the bolts.

Unfortunately, the driveshaft it too long. I slipped the driveshaft as far forward as I can (until the seal just touched).

But you can see that there is no way to slide the driveshaft into place. We’re at least 1/2″ too long and even that would probably cause the seal to rub on the front of the u-joint instead of the outside of the splined shaft. I’ve sent an email to FFR to see how to resolve this.

With the engine in place, I installed the headers on the right side of the engine.

The left side will be a little more challenging since the foot box is in place. We did verify that the header will slip into place, but it’s ridiculously tight. I was hoping to enlarge the foot boxes, but I don’t think there is any room to spare.

We went back to the dyno shop this morning to wrap up the dyno pulls. After doing some research last night, I was concerned that the distributor base timing wasn’t accurate. We warmed up the engine and then hooked up a timing light. Sure enough, we were advanced more than the 12º of base timing that I was shooting for. That explains why the engine ran poorly when we advanced total timing to around 32º yesterday; we were really around 35º or 36º of advance.

The first pull we did after resetting the base timing was over 500 lbf-ft of torque and over 500 hp. We did a second run without changing any settings and the numbers improved a bit more due to the ECU learning the optimal settings. We advanced the total timing to 32º again and it didn’t make any more power, but we did run a little worse. We dropped the total advance to 30º and got the best pull of the day at 516 lbf-ft of torque and 516 hp! We could probably push it further, but we’re more than happy with these numbers and the engine runs beautifully.

There are a couple of interesting observations about this graph. First, the torque curve is amazingly flat and broad. We’re over 450 lbf-ft of torque from 2800 rpm to 6000 rpm. Second, the horsepower was still rising at 6000 rpm. Although the curve was flattening out, I’m sure the power is a little higher over 6000 rpm. We’re going to set our redline at 6500 rpm, and I’m sure the power is falling by that point.

With the dyno runs complete, we brought the engine home and began prepping it for installation in the car. My dad stopped by and we pulled the exhaust headers since they’re too wide to drop into the car. While he was doing that, I pulled the flywheel and cleaned it thoroughly.

After pulling the engine off of the stand, we installed the bell housing separator plate and reinstalled the flywheel. After installing the pilot bearing and the pressure plate indexing dowels, we installed the clutch and pressure plate. We ended up setting the clutch fork pivot bolt so that there is about 1/8″ of clearance between the the front side of the pivot point on the fork and the back side of the pressure plate. This positions the fork so that it is sticking almost exactly straight out the side of the bell housing.

With the bell housing in place, we mounted the starter to the forward side. We had previously test fit it to the separator plate without the bell housing to ensure various install tolerances were met. After this, we installed the transmission which slipped into place surprisingly easily.

The push rod on the clutch slave cylinder is longer than will work, so I cut down the bearing end as well as the other end.

With that reinstalled in the slave cylinder and a couple of extra washers spacing the mounting bracket aft, everything fits perfectly.

The engine is ready to drop into the car. We’ll tackle that tomorrow when Jenn is free since she wants to help with this step.

I met my dad down at Dino Fry’s racing shop this morning. Almost immediately, he suggested canceling the dyno run because he had no way to connect his exhaust tubes (the flexible stainless tubing at the bottom left of this picture) to my headers. He suggested ordering a couple of the end flanges from the exhaust manufacturer and welding some 90º elbows onto them to turn the exhaust aft. That could take weeks, so I began suggesting alternatives. He ended up agreeing to weld on the tubing if we purchased it and I could fabricate some exhaust flanges.

My dad headed over to a diesel semi exhaust shop that had the right tubing in stock and I headed to the TechShop to fabricate the flanges. While we were gone, Dino installed the engine on the dyno.

It turns out that I didn’t need to install the water neck as he needed to remove it anyway.

After lunch, Dino welded on the elbows and a piece of straight tubing. This is 5″ diameter tubing. The two elbows and straight pipes ran about $140. Sucks to spend this much on a one-time use part, but there were no other good options.

After welding the flange in place, Dino heated up the pipes and dented it in to make room for the bolts. After they cooled down, we bolted them to the exhaust headers.

We moved my fuel tank in place and finished up the fuel, electrical and water connections. This thing is ready to run!

After a couple of failed start attempts, we realized that we weren’t getting spark. I quickly diagnosed that the FiTech config was wrong and I needed to let it know that we were using a two-wire distributor and external coil. Once that was done, the engine fired on the first turn of the crank!

After a 30 minute break-in at 2000rpm, we shut down and pulled all the plugs to confirm there were no problems that needed to be addressed. Everything looked good, so we reinstalled the plugs and got the engine ready for the first dyno pull. Here’s a video of the first pull. The engine had cooled off significantly since we shut down for so long, so we needed to let it warm up for over 6 minutes. In the video, you can see how quickly the engine fires and how smoothly it runs at higher rpms. You can also get a good sense of how lopey the idle is (which is exactly what we were looking for). I was a little concerned that the idle would be too smooth with a 114º lobe separation, but it sounds fantastic. Most of the video is just the warmup; if you want to skip ahead, the dyno pull itself happens in the last 45 seconds.

We did a total of 8 dyno pulls today while adjusting ignition advance and the accel pump setting. We saw about 465hp and 480 lbf-ft of torque on the best run, but I think we’ll be able to improve that a bit when we finish tuning the engine tomorrow.

The water neck that I ordered from TD Motion over 2 months ago finally arrived. They took quite a bit longer than expected due to manufacturing and shipping delays, but this was worth waiting for. This thing is beautifully machined and eliminates the ugly inline filler port.

I also installed the short thermostat bypass hose you see below the water neck. When I plumb in the heater core, I may see about using hose with AN fittings for all of the coolant hoses, but I need this installed before the dyno run.

You can also see a couple of lifting straps I bolted to the front of the cylinder heads. There are two more on the back of the engine.

About the only thing I dislike about this is that all three parts (lower, middle, and upper) had different finishes. The lower part had a satin, bare aluminum finish. The center part was clear powder coated and the upper part was shiny. I sanded off the clear powder coat (except for a bit that will be hidden under the coolant hose on the far left) and polished all the pieces to match.

We’re just about ready to take the engine to the dyno shop, so I’m wrapping up a few last minute details. Although this is a neutral balance flywheel, the dyno shop we’re using needs it mounted because they don’t have an adaptor flange to made directly to a Ford crankshaft. This will have to come off after the dyno runs since there is a plate that sits between the block and the bell housing and it will fit behind the flywheel. These bolts call for locktite, but I’m hoping it won’t be a problem to leave that out until it goes on for good.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I needed to use longer screws to attach the exhaust headers. Because we stepped up to 1.75″ tubing and the pipes start curving as soon as they leave the flange, some of the longer screws can’t even be inserted through the mounting holes.

I used a carbide burr to slightly relieve the inside of the hole, just enough to allow the bolts to slip in.

The tubing also prevents using a socket to tighten the bolts, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to torque these. In fact, the only wrench I had that would fit over the bolts without contacting the tubing was this old S-K box end wrench I got from somewhere. I thought I was just going to have to guess at how much to tighten these. Fortunately, the other end of the wrench fit perfectly over the 3/8″ square drive on my torque wrench.

One of the tricks with torque wrenches is that if you use an extension mounted at 90º to the handle, you don’t need to adjust the torque setting to compensate for the extension. You can see here that the wrench made it easy to access the bolts.

After figuring out the how to torque the bolts, it was pretty straightforward to get all 16 bolts in both headers installed and tightened down.

After installing the headers, I installed a stainless steel plug in the left side O2 bung.