Whoa there...bald is the mullet for the new millennium!!! And bald is beautiful!!!
Drag Week build started in January 2016. Started with the front end. The core support had some cracking and the sheet metal had been hacked pretty badly. I wanted to strengthen everything, tie the frame rails together more rigidly, relocate a full size radiator forward but still have it fit under the hood, replace sheet metal around the radiator, fit a precision 750 intercooler and be able to run a bumper. It was a pain in the --- to make it fit, but it all worked out.
Back to T3: rewired car front to back to clean up old wiring hacks and changes that I had made over the years, built an intake with some TIG help from JT, and all of the other things that come along with building a car fresh. Fuel system, plumbing, gauges, accessories, etc.
Decided to lose the GRM flames...they were fading and starting to chip. Plus, being a street car again, I'd prefer not to have the car stick out like a sore thumb on the road as I'm doing any street tuning. Plan is to repaint the whole car black and just have the red ES bumper and ground effects stripe (like stock), but didn't have time to get it done.
Roll bar was repainted black (again, to bend in), it got the front half of the interior, carpet, uncut dash, glove box and carpet. It also got sound deadening material from the front kickboards all the way up the firewall to control noise and heat.
Also, had to keep the GRM gauges that my boy drew for me when we made the car a $1000 car. They're now proudly displayed on the rear quarter window. :-)
Krickey you put in the hours! Gauge cluster is the best mod
AJ (no More Alan) 84 Rampage RT TIII/568 Quaife 87 GLHS dealer optioned Red 16V Masi/568/Quaife
90 Masi 16V White/Ginger/Black
89 TC Masi 16V Red/Ginger/Black
86 GLHS #110 RoadRace Built 89 CSX-VNT Recaro Car
89 Turbo Mini 'Woody' 85 GLHT 'RedBox'
2014 Explorer DD'r 3.5Twin Turbo Ecoboost AWD and 500HP
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Drag Week: Finished, but didn't run as well as expected. I made some street runs, tried working through the cal, sorted through a number of issues before leaving, but essentially left untested. Ran in the test and tune and on day 1, and the car was running low 12's but had significant tuning issues that I just couldn't isolate. In the end, I took a bunch of timing out and added a ton of octane keep the car in one piece and ran the week running mid 12's, which was far from my goal. Also broke down once with a bad cam sensor and managed to suck a piece of friction tape into the turbo when the air filter elbow (which I'm assuming I didn't tighten) slipped off the turbo intake. That little blob of melted tape managed to lock the turbo up. Amazingly, that little incident did zero damage to the turbo.
After drag week, I found two key problems that impacted my ability to get the cal to work. My 02 sensor and knock sensor were both not reading correctly. Long story short, once I figured out my sensor issues I had to rebuild the cal from scratch, but started to make some huge progress based on my street testing.
I've been to the track twice since Drag Week. At the Cecil County fall event, I had a fuel slosh problem which had me cutting out 40 feet off the line, but still managed to make a few runs and gathered quite a bit of tuning info. I went back to Cecil last week with it and ran it on straight pump gas to make tuning runs to build the shape of the spark curve. It ended up working out great. Made 15 passes, making changes along the way. On 18 psi on pump gas, best pass was an 11.28 @ 121.1 mph. Also went .29, .30, .33, so it was far from a fluke. I later turned the boost up a bit to 20 psi, still on straight pump gas and went 11.14 @ 122.4 mph with a 1.61 ST (my best ever!) and backed it up with an 11.19 and an 11.20, both at mid 122 mph.
I have what I need as a baseline cal to start building my race gas tune. Next year, more octane and more boost!
Last edited by Pat; 12-08-2016 at 06:50 PM.
Holy cow Pat, those are great times at Cecil!
-Gary Mazzone-
1986 GLHS #168
That's great! Glad those minor issues didn't cost you any parts, seems like any of them easily could have!
Dont push the red button.You hear me?
Nice job rebuilding the core support and making the IC mount; your use of those Chrysler lower radiator rubbers is a nice touch
John Laing
"The sole condition which is required in order to succeed in centralizing the supreme power in a democratic community, is to love equality, or to get men to believe you love it. Thus the science of despotism, which was once so complex is simplified, and reduced . . . . to a single principle."
-- Alexis de Tocqueville
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--Ayn Rand
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-- Justice Antonin Scalia