YES! I finally got the manual tranny in my car and all hooked up right! I got the tranny mounted, bolted, and supported today, and I got the interior wiring and mechanics done (neutral safety switch, shift mechanism, shift cabling, speedo cable, trim plates) all done (I still have a few alarm wires still hanging, though), and I’ve got about half of the new wiring harness hooked up and routed, all I have left to do is put in the half shafts, re-mount the driver’s side suspension, change out the passenger side chassis support, bleed the brakes, fill the tranny with oil, fill the cooling system, and I’m ready to rock and FUCKING roll!
Power pulley kit
Cold air wheel well intake
56mm intake plenum
56mm throttle body
Ported & polished high flow heads
HiPo springs and retainers
Crane 2030 cam
Stainless valves
Forged turbo pistons
Forged connecting rods
Heavy duty oil pump
Lightened & rebalanced flywheel
Dual friction clutch
1 1/2 primary to 2 1/4 equal length headers
Dual 2 1/4 mandrel bent exhaust (X or H pipe)
Glasspacks
Superchip w/specialty programming (to match above upgrades)
And later on down the road… turbo?
Not to mention suspension/handling upgrades.
We’ll just see who wins.
Oh, and hanging the clutch pedal was pretty easy. Since I have the donor car, I just made a fiberglass cast of the firewall, and fit it to mine, then drilled in the correct places. I’d say the biggest trouble has been changing the wiring harnesses, or the f’n cross threaded lugs on the passenger side.
PS - Smack me in the head, Anth. I filled the tranny before I put the halfshafts in. And it’s specialty tranny oil. Ugh. $20 wasted.
You better get the turbo if you want to take me on! I got 300 lb-ft of torque! Crank it up to about 12 psi of boost, and you’ll probably win. Be prepared for torque steer of Biblical proportions though.
PLUS, I’ve been seriously going over options for adding the Ford SVO Blower to the Mustang, running with the 8 psi pulley. According to corral.net, I should expect actual dyno figures of 325-350 hp/400-425 lb-ft of torque…
THAT’S what you define as “pretty easy”? Man, you have my respect.
Oh yeah!? Well, just how much did your car cost? Mine was 3k, with $400 for the manual donor car. When I get the automatic put in that, and get it running, I can sell it to my sisters for $1500-2000. So that makes my cost about $1500-2000 for the car. Add in about $8000 for all the engine and suspension parts, plus another $1000 for various stuff, AND another $5000 for turbo work, and I’m still ahead! Even if we include cost of paint job and stereo, I’m still ahead. And my car’s considerably lighter than yours! We’re going to have to take THIS grudge match to KCIR on a Wednesday and just SEE who wins! BLEH!
My car has about 150 hp and 180 lb/ft right now. This will soon go up even further.
::mumbles something about wanting a convertible, and wanders off::
Uhh…my car was $19,050. Add 7% sales tax, and it came to about $20,380.
No interest charges cause I paid cash.
Yours, (adding here and on the high side) seems to be $2000+$8000+$1000+$5000 = $16,000?
Assume a stereo equal to mine is about $500 total. And assume new good metallic paint job at $1000. We have you at $17,500. An alarm for $200 raises it to $17,700. I also have a leather interior, but we’ll leave that out for now.
So, there really isn’t that large of a delta cost between yours and mine - roughly $2680.
Breaks your heart doesn’t it? And I say that with NO mockery whatsoever - I’ve been through the car restoration cycle before, and know that you can spend a lot to get something equal to a new car sometimes.
Uhhh…I don’t know who the hell you are, but please take ethnic slurs to the Pit. Thank you, please drive through.
No Nitrous kit??? What are you some kind of wuss afraid of some speed? Just kidding, sounds like fun, wish I had the time to put some work into my toy.
wolfman: Nitrous is nice, but I’ll save ‘the bottle’ for drag.
xizor: It’s called doing what you can with what you have. It’s called loving your car enough to put more into it than it’s ‘worth.’ It’s also called customizing.
BTW… would you like a 69 Vette? IIRC they only had about 150 hp. Cars haven’t always come with 200 hp, 230 lb/ft of torque, y’know.
Anth: But… but… but… my car’s pretty. And… um… I… uhm… huff helium. Seriously, though, I’d prefer to bring a mid 80’s/early 90’s car back to better than new than own a brand new one. I like working on my car, and customizing. Even if I got a brand new car, I’d have the hood up the next day, looking for ways to tweak it.
When I was out looking for cars, I came across a 1996 Eclipse GSX (turbo, AWD, but you knew that already) with full power, sunroof, leather, etc. for $16000 (droooool), and I came across a 1990 Cavalier Z24 automatic, low options, high miles, for $3000. Money wasn’t a problem. I just decided I’d rather buy the Z24 and spend the difference to work on it than have the Eclipse and be a mere ‘operator.’
But I still wish they had made a convertible in 1990 (only 1990 and 1991 did Chevy not make a Z24 convertible, because they were testmarketing a Beretta convertible. 1990 is also the only year it had a 3.1 instead of a 2.8 in that body style).
