S281 E

Now where were we. Once the block was dropped off the heads and blower were all assembled to the motor and placed back into the car. Before anyone asks the motor had a new oil pump installed, new gaskets, ARP head studs, spark plugs (Autolites were used after trying the new colder spark Brisk because the brisk were causing the motor to detonate. Whole other issue and will try to touch on later.) basically all the essentials. Again, if you have a question about anything I will do my best to answer it or get you an answer.

Once everything was in my next step was to upgrade the fuel system. The stock system was good, but only up to around 700RWHP. Since my final goal was going to be close to this number I knew it wouldn't be smart to be running the fuel system at max capacity even if I turned the boost down to have the car in the 600/650RWHP range. I look at a custom setup from Aeromotive, but as you know Aeromotive makes top notch gear, but it was going to be very noisy. I understand with aqll the power the was going to have I would have to make some sacrifices, BUT I did not want to hurt the driveability of the car or reliability. I understand this is hard to believe, but when we get to the conclusion of this long story you will understand. I contacted Jared at Lethal Performance. Jake had mentioned his name a couple of times and I remember visiting their website. Jared was very friendly and helpful. The guy makes you feel as if he were a small shop. Customer service was top notch and he ended up putting together a kit for me that wasn't even available yet. If you haven't figured it out yet I purchased the triple fuel hat system for the S197. Yes, the kit is pricey, yes not to many S197 will need this type of upgrade, BUT this kit is f*cking badass. I don't say that too often so take it as a tremendous compliment. When I received the huge box and started pulling every component from the box it helped ease my pain of the price fairly quickly. Every component was is top notch. The system uses a custom machined triple fuel hat that fits perfectly into the stock opening where my dual fual hat sat. The kit came with three Ford GT pumps, all the hoses, wiring, fittings needed. Kit comes with everything! The Zone 5 MDM is a thing of beauty. Sinc ethe entire fuel system had to be removed it was some work. I believe 6 hours total. Everything line, every hose, every fitting was placed in the stock location of the old fuel system. The ONLY way you would know of the upgrade is when you look at the fuel rails. They are beefier and the steel braided crossover tube is a dead give away that something special is lurking. (As if the blower and carbon fiber air intake wasn't a giveaway.)

Once the fuel system was completed the turbo's were next to be installed. The kit is what you would expect. Top notch gear from some expert in the industry. Rick Head from exile turbo put the kit together and actually uses the kit on his own car. SD Wheeler (Famous bracket racer) is now making the kit popular. TEAM performance products normally advertises the kit as the heritage kit. Its the same kit that you read about in 5.0 mustang a couple of months ago. Stainless steel piping, tig welded h-pipe, with or without cats, garrett ball bearing turbos, air to air intercooler...again all top notch stuff. This is a VERY pricey kit but you get the best of the best. The inlet tube is carbon fiber and the kit comes with a huge carbon fiber belley pan to ensure the turbos dont get wet. I understand that a carbon fiber inlet tube does not "add" horsepower, BUT I'm stressing this to show the extent Rick went to create the kit. Nothing was spared, if it could be done it was. Rick out did himself on this kit. Yes its pricy, but it comes with injectors and a tuner. You could literally install this kit yourself in your driveway. No cutting, no welding required. Everything bolts right up. Now we did have one little issue as any project car will have. Since the kit was designed for a stock GT we had a fitment issue since theturbos locate right next to the transmission. The E cars come with a 6 speed and not a 5 speed. At this point we though it would be a good time to remove the stock k-member and replace it with a BMR tubular k-member. The a-arms were also replaced for BMR tubular a-arms. BMR makes nice gear and this gave us plenty of room. Enough so that we are contemplating on upgrading the turbos. When doing a twin setup on the 4.6 3v motor you can go to garret's website and check th eturbo maps to see what size would be best suited. For good low end torque and high horsepower a twin set of 50mm turbos work best (rounding up). This will ensure the turbos spool quickly and do not die out on the top end. Being they are ball bearing turbos this helps to spool them up a bit quicker as well. We used a set of 55mm since we knew we would be using the stock blower to take care of the low end. We figured the possibility of going larger, but we wanted to see if we could even get the blower to work with the turbo. If it didn't we would stick with the twin turbo kit and switch back to the twin 50mm. The other problem we ran into was were to install the blower heat exchanger. The air to air intercooler was placed were the heat exchanger was. Before being installed the intercooler was painted a matte black to match the rest of the black trim on the outside of the car. The heat exchanger was pushed up so it sits right behind the grille. Since the heat exchanger is small and compact it was a tight fit but worked. Took a few custom mods but came out perfect. Since the heat exchanger from saleen comes in black it didn't have to be painted either. Now we thought about replacing the heat exchanger for the new version that comes on the 08 E cars or an aftermarket afco piece, but we knew the blower would not be running more than 10-12 psi when used as a daily driver. When the bolt ons were on the car the most boost I saw was 15lbs and the heat exchanger worked well as long as the inlet temps didn't get out of hand. Heat soak did play a factor but again we knew we would be running less boost so we figured worst case we could always go back in and upgrade if we had to. Remember the blowers only job is to help spool the turbo's quicker and take care of the bottom end up to 3400 rpm.

I guess thats it for tonight. Will put a little more tomorrow. Tomorrow I'll cover the clutch upgrade, lower control arms, and spark plugs.

S281 E

Eagle stroker. I understand where your coming from. But your still sacrificing more bottom end for top end. If you don't machine the block that means those pistons and rods are having to travel a longer distance which will increase wear. Either way I know the 08 E cars are doing it that way (Like you said) and well have to wait and see how the motors hold up. Would have been nice to do a 302 with two power adders, but thats what my 2014 cobra will be for.

sftdyna

sounds like you are going the right way, i to feel i can use a little more power now!!! but would not go with a stroker as my feeling are exactly as yours, every top shelf builder said we are better off leaving the 4.6 as is,* the little benifit you will gain isnt worth the extra load on the motor. my car runs very strong since i went with a new tune and 08 extreme cai , although i feel it now has lost a bit when i was talked into 60lb inj which i feel really werent needed, and i to have the same experience as you reguarding our tuner, im going to try dealing with brenspeed soon and maybe i can go back to the 39lb set up, its funny because i wanted to get rid of my 4.10 gears and go with 3.73 gears and was told back then i could not unless i switched to 60lb inj, well guess what down the line they got me for the 60lb inj anyway by telling me the tune they sold me for the 08 cai intake was lean, if this was actually the case which was determined by dyno testing my car with out my knowledge then how about all the other customers out of state that have purchased*tunes from them!! how many of them are running lean??????

severnrc

great info!

EagleStroker

I completely understand where your coming from, but at the same time (and this is just my opinion) when you build a car like this, exactly how reliable can you expect it to be? Most people that run at that power level rebuild their motor every few years so it makes no difference. As far as sacrificing bottom end, when your running a set up like yours it would be a matter of tuning, the s/c should give you the bottom end you want with the hair dryers giving you the mid/top end - but then you come to with that, why would I even need a stroker? Must suck to be in that situation Just my $.02 for what it's worth as far as longevity goes, i'm going on 12k miles on mine still runs like new. I still think this is a sick project, I can only imagine how much fun it would be to tune this beast.

S281 E

sftdyna, I feel your pain. I can honestly say ALL of my mechanical knowledge I have learned has come from this car. I never owned a mustang before, I never drove a manual before...I learned as I went. That went along with the bolt-ons and upgrades. You kind of learn as you go sometimes. Sucks because you always pay more for it at the end. If your going to just push the carthe 4.10 are nice, but if you plan on driving the car around town and just cruising the 3.73 are much better IMHO. I hope you get everything tuned properly and squared away. Nothing can be more fun than a good running stang, a bad running one can be a nightmare.

S281 E

Eaglestroker seems like you can see where I was coming from. In a way I wanted the stroker kit just to say I have it plus for the extra power, but when you have as much stuff going on in this car it almost raises the question if you need it. In the end I left the decision up to Al and Jake. As for rebuilding the motor every couple of years that is something to consider. The more power you have the quicker components will wear. Its only a matter of time. I don't drive the car too much right now and with the purchase of another muscle car (Hopefully within the next 3 years) will help the wear and mileage a little more. After spending the amount I have in the last 9 months I'm oping not to do it again for quite some time. The situation does suck at times. I'm still making payments and to pay for something you can't even use really sucks. Now that I have her back ALL those "concerns" seem to have left though. As for your motor at 12K that great news and I only expect you to put more miles on it and come on the forum every now and again to remind us why the stroker motor is worth the price. Heck thats how I got into this whole mustang mess.

As for the tuning I got one of the best guys on it. He has spent sooooooooo much time on the tuning to make sure this thing is perfect and hence why the car isn't finished yet. Still working on idle and decel. Its extremely difficult to have the tune spot on for a blower and turbo hence why I think not too many people have tried this setup before. Not only is it expensive, but with so much going on its difficult to account for everything.

EagleStroker

I feel you on that one brother! My set up is no where near as complex as yours and it was a nightmare to trouble shoot. Biggest reason for this is at the time it was a new market, and most parts weren't available. Any large project such as yours simple isn't possible without a good tuner/someone you trust - Period! I'm glad your enjoying everything though, the build is half the fun in my opinion. I've been around cars/motors/tuning all my life but this was my first mod motor and even though it's not the most bang for your buck, their addicting!

If you don't mind and you can PM me if you like, I'd like to see a broken down parts list with some ball park expenses as well as the kind of labor hours you've gotten logged on this already. Maybe seeing a price will help me push my mod bug away for a while

S281 E

Here we go with our third installment. Once the turbo kit was installeda new set of plugs had to be installed since the last set were completely fried. I decided to try the new brisk colder range spark plugs for blower/turbo cars. Lamotta called brisk and spoke with a service rep to determine what plugs and gap would be needed for the car. Once received they were installed and the car was placed on the dyno. Since there were so many variables to the car it was run and warmed up first. The gears were shifted to 4th for the pull and was SLOWLY ramped up. At 3200rpm detonation started. When the plugs were checked the majority of them were blown out. Another phone call was made for another set and the same questions were asked to deterine if the right plugs were sent. Everything else was checked and everything seemed to be okay. (Except for excessive boost in the intake maifold at 3500 rpm which I will get to.) We tried another set of plugs and the same thing happened. At this point we went back to the Autolite plugs and we had no issues. The car ran fine. At this point we decided to stay with the Autolites. The brisk plugs looked nice and after reading up on them I was excited to use them, but maybe brisk was recommending a too cold of range. Not sure.

The other problem we noticed was the boost spiking to 29lbs at 3500/3800 rpm. Once the plugs were replaced with the autolites we did another pull just to see how the car looked. The problem with this is thats too much boost (as you already now) for a street car. The stock pulley was on the car (2.9") so the blower is set at 11.5/12.0 lbs and the turbos were set at 7lbs. This baffled us a bit, but we did quickly realize that the blower is recompressing compressed air from the turbo's so when you increase boost on the turbo's 1.0lb this would increase the boost going to the intake manifold by 1.6lbs. What happened now were months of tweeking and tuning to deterine what would be the best combination for the car. Still not finished, but almost there. For a while we were thinking it would be better to just do the turbos, but it would have been the easy way out. We wanted something different and something special so we took the time to swap out pullies, actuators, underdrive pullies...anything we could think of. The end result (as of now) is keeping the stock pulley, but using a set of steeda underdrive pullies. This helps reduce parasitic loss which increases hp lightly and they slow the blower down. With the stock pulley the blower makes 8lbs of boost. Which help bring the intake boost down to 17lbs. Turbos are set at 5lbs for now. With this setup their is plenty of torque at 2K rpm and helps spool the turbos quicker. When doing the math the turbos begin spooling at around 3400/3600 rpm by themselves. With the blower they start at 2800/3000rpm. They reach full boost at 3800rpm now. Hence why we are considering larger turbo's. At 17lbs of boost the car made 620RWHP and 650RWTQ. 600RWTQ at 3200rpm. This is with the A/F at 11.5 and almost no timing. So the tune is VERY safe. Too safe, but at the moment I am breaking in the motor so it doesn't need to be finished yet. So take these numbers however you like. To me they are just preliminary.

On the last pull the clutch was smoked. Not that I did not anticipate this from happening, but I figured I could get a couple of months on the stock one. I researched a couple of different clutches but only one really stood out as the testimonials were always good. I decided to go with a McLeod Twin Disc Clutch with a Fidanza aluminum flywheel. The clutch is rated at 1000RWHP & 1000RWTQ. The clutch feels SOFTER than stock. Yes, you read that right. The clutch was purchased thru Lethal Performance since they had the best pricing on it plus if you can find it cheaper they will price match. This clutch is sick. No slipping, no rattles, no vibration, and it has over 500 miles on it already. Its a thing of beauty and worth every penny. With the new clutch installed a new clutch slave cylinder, and tackash drill clutch master was installed. These items were not needed, but we figured since we had everything apart it was a good time to change them. I was than given the car to drive around and put 500 miles on it before utting her back on the dyno. As anyone knows with expensive clutches (Cheap ones too I guess) if not brokenin properly can be a major headache. I put 500 mles on the car in 3 days so I could return it ASAP. All city driving and not once could I recall my left foot getting tired.

While the car was on the lift Patrick (Jakes right hand man) did not believe the stock rear control arms would hold the power we would be putting. I always assumed Saleen had aftermarket rear arms o nthe car, but thats what I get for assuming. They are the stock arms that come on a mustang GT. Lamotta does not sell parts but can get you anything you want at a price comparable to ebay. Out of all the arms they have installed or purchased they preferred the steeda billit arms. Once seeing them I agreed they were worth the money and were built very well. I also was considering griggs or BMR but for a street car the Steeda seemed to be the best choice. I'm a HUGE fan of the griggs line but the majority of their gear is meant for road racing hence why its so good. Since I was looking to keep most of the driveability of the car I was concerned of the noise and feel. I'm very happy with the steeda arms and I'm sure the griggs would have performed just as good if installed.

With the tranny done and lower control arms swapped we strated thinking about a gear ratio. The car came with 4.10 which were way too short for the car now. I didn't mind them with just the blower but with the turbos on the car we had to go down. We played with a couple of different ratios but kept the 3.55. This seems to work the best with the blower and turbo's installed. If the blower ends up coming off this will more than likely change again. 1st and second gear do not feel too short and 3 and 4 gear are just "beast" mode. The car pulls so hard and so fast. The gears are from Ford Racing and Royal Purple full synthetic gear oil was used.

Since we were changing out the gears we thought it would be nice to upgrade the rear brakes. The E cars comes with 6-piston,15" slotted rotors while the rear keeps the stock GT brakes. Performance wise its not that big of deal BUT looks terrible. Since we had purchased some items from Steeda already we went with the upgraded 13" slotted rotors to match the front. Its a nice kit since you can reuse the stock caliper. I would have liked to change the rear system completely to a 6-piston setup, BUT as you know these kits are VERY pricey and I had heard of reliability issues. Seems like most of the racers are keeping the stock pistons in the back due to the complexity of changing them out. From a performance stand point the steeda kit is NOT worth the money. Too expensive for a visual upgrade. Does look nice, but I don't feel the car braking any quicker than before. I'm sure if I were to do an actual calibrated test the car might stop a 1' sooner. Not sure. This is something I might change out again later depending on what products become available.

Hopefully this installment was as good as the last one and next time (Hopefully tonight) I will be able to cover the exhaust and actual review of the car itself.

sftdyna

wow, im glad someone with an E tried the mcleod twin disc!! im assuming you went with the rxt, you would need it it for the power your getting to, i went with the rst which is still good for 800hp and people could not believe how nice the peddel effort is !! i mean its just like stock, not an ounce of chatter and if i shift to third just a tad to quick those tires fry up like a bitch. i also found out the hard way that the boxed lower control arms never made it into the production cars, even though it says our cars have it on the window sticker!!! my car is only putting down 512 rwhp if we can trust someones dyno numbers, but my car at 4000 mi under heavy throttle was starting to get a crazy rear end wiggle!!! and of course our tuner said the watts link was all i needed well 1500.00 later no improvement at all, so after speaking with people i could trust it seemed control arms were in order, so i went with bmr control arms and guess what 140.00 later new f...in car, also i noticed my control arm angle was incorrect as are every saleen car due to lowering which is why when you hit the throttle hard them tires spin like your on ice!! so i new the next thing needed were relocation brackets, BUT!!! i didnt want to weld them, so after speaking with many people i found the only truely bolt in brackets were che so 90.00 later and once again new f..kin car now its cold here in ny but the traction is night and day to before. out of all the things i have done to sort this car out the biggest improvement were the arms and relo brackets.