Another FC 5.0 "race car" thread!

[meech]

Trx 400's are some of the most fun quads I've ridden. Bullet proof and easy to ride. on that note, stop riding and start wrenching! haha

[Zach Thomas]

Haha "But I'll be fast(ish)" love it! I keep saying that to myself to! Took mine for a drive yesterday to check everything and make sure it was ready for the exhaust shop. It was fast but I have such short gears im always shifting (3000K rpm at 60...). A guy at work just finished a SR20DET swap into his 240. He is running a bigger turbo and other bolt on parts but it feels much faster then my RX7... But then again I really haven't gotten on my RX7, I don't want to blow it up yet. Trans only has about 3 miles on it so I need to let that break in first.

Man, sr20 s13s with just a modest (around 300-330whp) feel incredibly fast to me. I almost traded my 04 wrx with 300 whp for an s13 coupe with 330whp and it was soooooo much fun and so powerful but I couldn't afford to straight trade for it and 3k at 60 would be fine with me, but then again I'm used to dailying a miata now and it's around 3k at 60. My wife also has a miata and we did 80 mph from my house (north of Seattle, WA) all the way to Reno to visit friends. I think it was about 4k.....that little 1.6 couldn't have ran better than it did that trip and get that exhaust done and post some pics on instagram, I'm pretty certain I'm stalking you on there!

Trx 400's are some of the most fun quads I've ridden. Bullet proof and easy to ride. on that note, stop riding and start wrenching! haha

Lol I really don't have a ton of riding experience, but I've ridden multiple banshees, a couple 400ex's, a couple yfz450s and a few trx450r's. I'm totally happy with switching over to a trx450 But riding hasn't gotten in the way as much as house projects have, staining my fence is killing my free time. And putting in some OT hours to help pay for house projects and the FC is mostly just making me have no time to work on anything and somehow still not have any extra money



You can see my kind of weird driveway setup that I scrape coming down everyday in the miata. Also, that part of the fence went super fast for the staining. But since I procrastinated and the weather is getting bad I can only do bits and pieces at a time. But I also managed to build a Teeson111 clutch slave cylinder mount:



Not the greatest pic, obviously I still need to build an adjustable pushrod for it. Also need to reinforce it a bit and build a backing plate. But the process is started.

Also ordered up a plastic abs sheet to start building my gauge cluster. I'm using some leftover autometer ultra lite gauges that I never used on my 71 Nova project. Still need to order a tach and speedo to complete the set, and possibly get a different fuel gauge but I think they'll look pretty good. The grant steering wheel and autometer don't normally belong in a Japanese car in my opinion but with the 5.0 I think I'm allowed to do it

[Teeson1111]

niiiiiice

[Skervey]

Slave cylinder looks good! One thing I did different is I threaded the holes in the bell housing so I could take the slave cylinder on and off along with the bracket. Made life a bit easier when I went to rebuild the trans. I also did another video for the car! Check it out on youtube!

[Zach Thomas]

Having done build threads for a few other cars in the past I will fully admit I have failed at keeping this interesting oopsie. Anyways, some minor progress from the last few weeks

First off, painted the headliner black and installed it. Turned out pretty good but the headliner wrinkled a bit in a few spots which I think was from me applying entirely too much fabric paint



Thank you S5 for taking horrible pics even for a cell phone :/ The pic above shows only the headliner but I also spent about 5 hours (or more, I don't remember) piecing together my sunroof from about 3 different sunroof assemblies. I ditched my earlier idea of an easily removable bolt in panel and just went back to stock. Very happy I did, it works pretty good minus the fact you have to push up on the back of the panel sometimes to get it to open properly (apparently a common issue on FCs).

Also threw in my sweet hella USDM grant gt steering wheel that was originally gifted to me by my wife years ago to put into my 71 nova project (which sidestory, is up on CL for 10K and I want it back but the guy won't take the 4k I offered him which is really all its worth...anyways). I think it looks great in the FC though to be honest, especially once I put in my silver faced autometer gauges which were also originally intended for my Nova



Then started finally assembling the 5.0 now that I have the gasket set for it! New timing chain set was installed, and I did a half ass lapping of all the valves since I already had to pull the heads apart to do the valve stem seals.







That's where it sits as of now. I need to go buy some replacement bolts for the lower intake that I lost/broke before I bolt it on. Then need to find someone local to polish my foxbody valve covers. Engine and trans would be back in the car right now but found out the tailshaft housing on my t5 is destroyed so waiting on a good used housing from eBay. I've had little time to work on the FC because my wife's miata has needed a good bit of maintenance recently, my truck needs tie rods and door hinge pins, and my "quick" side job of fixing up some stuff on a family friend's e28 has turned into a miniature but major pain to deal with.

Plan for the rest of the month is hopefully bolt engine and trans in (for real this time ) and possibly begin ordering parts to make my fuel line. AN Ford EFI fuel rail adapters to an AN fuel barb adapter most likely. Hoping that early next year I can bring the car to a local driveshaft shop to get that taken care of. Then everything major (swap wise) should be done at that point, minus the exhaust.

Old total $2910

T5 tailshaft housing $50
Grant steering wheel adapter (used one meant for an NA miata) $20
VSS, T5 output shaft seal, timing set and gasket set $100 (yay rockauto!)

Current total $3080

[kaclaytor]

Love the progress so far. Can't wait to see the finished product. Motivation for my swap.

[Zach Thomas]

Thanks kaclaytor!

So motor was going to go in today or tomorrow, but I'm gonna have to wait til after the new year to do that I went to swap out the tailshaft on my transmission (since the one on there was destroyed where the output shaft bushing and seal goes) and ran into more issues. The shift shaft is bent pretty badly. If I still had my oxy torch setup I'd have already bent it straight, but my bottles disappeared while they were at a neighbors shop years ago so initially I was too excited to care, plus the trans had shifted fine when I'd played with it before. But while reassembling I could not, no matter what, get the shifter block to line up properly due to the bent shaft. So within the next week or so I'll be ordering a good used part off eBay and then the motor can finally go back in.

The nice carnage on the old tailshaft



And where it will sit until I get a new shift shaft



Really, really hoping that this trans works good once I have it all together and in the car. The guy I bought it from claimed it worked fine but I didn't notice the clapped out tailshaft and he also was selling the trans because he parted out his foxbody since he lost his license from driving like a jackass too many times....guess we'll see. The gears looked okay and the shift forks look fine, not many metal shavings either so I'm hopeful still.

[Skervey]

Glad you got all this figured out before it went in the car! Also you shouldent have to take the whole car to the drive shaft shop. If you get both ends for the drive shaft and give them really good measurements then they should be able to build you one if they are any good. Also its a good idea to have it balanced just so you wont have any vibrations in the car when its done.

[Zach Thomas]

True Skervey, I keep forgetting that I won't be able to accomplish my glorious original plan which was to have the car 100% ready to drive minus driveshaft and have its virgin drive be from the driveshaft shop to home haha. I have the original turbo 2 shaft, which will get dropped off so they can get the correct flange for the rear (or reuse the one on there if it's worth using). I assume the original FC driveshaft is too short to just chop down and change the front on, but if it's not it'd be nice to save the money of an entirely new driveshaft. I'm not even sure what to expect to pay for it....?

Haven't ordered any parts yet for the car, what with Christmas destroying every financial aspect of my life (we don't even exchange gifts with anyone but my parents and my wife's parents.....I dunno how we always end up broke during this season). But the interior is slowly being painted black and installed (oh how I hope duplicolor vinyl spray holds up for at least a little while). Should have it mostly installed by the end of this weekend and I'll get some more iffy cell pics up of it. Also scored an autometer tach to match the rest of my gauges on eBay, and I'll be perfectly honest I drunkenly bid on it and forgot til I won. I rarely drink, and never buy stuff online while drinking but I'm kinda happy how this played out!

Seam sealer $15
Autometer Ultra Lite tach $70

Current total $3165

[Skervey]

Nice score! You may be able to give the drive shaft shop ur t2 shaft and the output shatf for the T5 and they should be able to re-tube it to the length you need, I had mine re-tube and balanced for $180 I think?..

Been thinking hard on going EFI the only thing I lack is the main plug that goes to the ECM. That and some of the sensors and distributor. How bad was it to rewire the SN95 stuff to run stand alone? Also what ECM did you get I have the TM40.

I finally found a drift event that happens almost every month here locally. I am going to go this weekend just to scope it out! I don't have the mazda right now I moved city's and jobs so im living with family for a few months to save me from paying rent! Hope its good and hope to shoot some video!

[Zach Thomas]

Skervey, good to here on the driveshaft! And I can't remember for sure what ECU I have, I'll have to check on that. It wasn't too terrible for the wiring buuuuuut since I haven't ran it with the wiring setup as is I'm not 100% confident yet that I have it right haha. Once it's running I'll feel better about it. The only real downside I can think of with going EFI is that when you delete all the emissions stuff it'd be ideal to tune the car for it (then you don't have to worry about throwing codes or it running poorly, etc). So getting a Moates or something would be a necessary thing IMO. I intend to either get a Moates shortly after I get the car finished or just jump over to Megasquirt. I like the idea of Megasquirt more but most likely I'll stick with Moates or something. Less headache overall, although my desire to do EDIS ignition is fairly strong and Megasquirt would make that easy. And good luck at the event! Maybe someday I'll make it out to Evergreen with the FC.

Minor update for this thread, although overall progress has not been much. Pretty much repeating what I did this time of year in 2015....bought a blown up Banshee quad project. Oops. It was cheap, I made a bad choice, it's now in the garage getting more attention than the FC. However, I did get the engine and trans back into the car! Here's a couple quality cell pics









Bad shot of the interior, but it is nearly fully reassembled minus the dash and shifter area. Also notice the zip ties holding the radiator fan....kinda forgot to build mounts for it. So those will get made up and welded on soon. Hoping that over the next week I'll get the valve covers and the upper intake painted (wrinkle black). Then I'll install them and move on to solving how to hook up my fuel lines to the stock RX7 lines (they're different diameters, likely just throw a reducer inline). And even more fun, figure out how to do my heater hoses. I should have just built a stripped racecar oh well.

So maybe I'll make my goal to have this running (not necessarily driving, but running) by July. Since I'm fairly certain that's the goal I set for myself last year.

[Skervey]

Looks clean man! What are you going to do with the headers as far as a coating goes?

[CTeunuch]

But I got my Granny's kit Scored it for $250 from a friend of a coworker who had supposedly used it in a twin turbo 5.0 FC that is now powered by a Mustang 2.3 turbo! Super excited to have the brackets, now I just need to order my gasket set and start reassembling the engine.

Nice to see a 5.0 swap instead of another LS engine!

Any info on your friends 2.3T car? I'm a 2.3T nerd and I'd love to check it out if he has a build somewhere.

[LaMaR-]

i gotta ask man, what distributor are you running? My distributor hits my hood and I Need another inch or so clear.

[Zach Thomas]

Hey Lamar, I'm just running the stock distributor. It looks like it'll clear but I haven't tested the fit yet with the plug wires on it. It should work though, I've got the same setup as Teeson111 on here and his clears fine I believe.