Mustangs Plus 2015

It's been a while since I've been out to the Mustangs Plus show, but this weekend I set the alarm for 4:30 am (!) and joined up with the BAMA guys for the trek out to Stockton.

Pit stop in Tracy and still not day time...

Mustangs Plus is all about getting there early in order to snag one of the better parking spaces, so for the last few years the BAMA folks have been leaving earlier and earlier....and it hasn't helped, because everyone else has been doing the same. Fortunately, this year someone in the club managed to pull a few strings with Ron Bramlett and we got a bunch of spaces together very close to the front (and Ron's mic...).

Among the vendors at the show was longtime friend of BAMA and eight times SCCA National Autocross Champion Mike Maier and the crew from Mike Maier Inc in Livermore. (Formerly part of Maier Racing Enterprises in Hayward). Mike recently filmed the clip below with the guys from Ford Racing.

Mike Maier's "old blue" 66 coupe

This lime green (in my langugue) MACH 1 was a personal favorite. I like the out-of-the-ordinary stuff.

It's Mustangs Plus and that means there are always some unusual cars at the show including this very rare 70 cyclone and a cool fairlain.

Plus the usual selection of  what I guess are now mid-period cars.

Even the USPS tried to "muscle" in on the action!

putting the brakes on

I finally got back to some mechanical work at the beginning of October. Longer term followers of this blog might recall that I had a few problems with my front brake system. I tossed away the six cylinder drum components and replaced them with an old Granada set up that I acquired through the BAMA mafia. Later I found that the the hub size on the replacement Granada rotors was too big for my wheels. This led to me transferring the car from the Green Room to my garage in Emeryville with a pair of Ranger wheels on the front. That was in April 2012, and that's exactly where those wheels stayed for the next two and a half years.

Ranger wheels: not very sexy.

I always planned to take the replacement Granada rotors and have the hubs turned down so they fit the wheels. But I struggled to find a machine shop that could do this for me. Later I talked to Mike Maier about the inadequacies of the Granada swap. A couple of months after that I was in Reno for Hot August Nights when I found myself being dragged into the "Big Boys Toys" exhibition hall, and slowly sucked towards the Stainless Steel Brake Co stand. A few minutes after that one of the Summit Racing guys was passing my credit card though an exceedingly hot swiping machine. It must have been hot, because the credit card was melting when I got it back!! A week or so after that some very heavy SSBC boxes showed up at the house. Around this time I also ordered the roller spring perches from Opentracker Racing that we've all heard so much about.

Roller perch (left) and static stock option (right)

After tearing off the Granada spindles (and all the related parts which I spent time restoring...sigh...) it was straight forward to install the SSBC spindles, dust shields and rotors. It's probably fair to say that the SSBC system is overkill for this car, but I just decided not to make any ecconomies with the brakes.

Getting the caliper brackets and calipers assembled and installed correctly was a bit more traumatic, but I eventually got there. Then I wiggled the car away from the garage wall and did the same to the driver side.

Wheels fit now..!

The SSBC brake system comes with a new master cylinder (MC), flexible lines, and all the hardware. It also includes some short sections of hard brake lines, because the setup requires several modifications to the stock lines. Plus you have to install a proportioning valve (PV) that wasn't needed with the original all-drum system.

One of the reasons for working on the brake system now (and the fuel system next) is that I wanted to get all the lines installed before I put the engine and transmission back in. So I ordered up a set of stock brake lines from NPD and set about attaching them to the chassis. The rear brake lines went in just so, and I made finger-tight connections to the wheel cylinders. Nice. The central line at the transmission tunnel and firewall and the connections at the front discs were also pretty easy. I was able to utilize most of my shinny zinc plated hardware with the SSBC brackets.

I bolted up the MC and connected the brake pedals and the piston. You are supposed to bench bleed the MC before installing it in the car, but I didn't because I only bothered to read the instructions afterwards. At this stage I was a little bit more concerned about where to mount the PV and how to get the lines anywhere near to the MC, never mind connect flawlessly.

Of course there was no distribution block included with the SSBC kit, so I had to dig out the original and refurbish it. That's one more time that keeping EVERYTHING from the tear down has saved me.

That's better

I guess it also goes without saying that the brake lines that come in the SSBC kit have completely different connectors to the ones that come from NPD. And they're not quite the right shape, and anyway I've never had to make custom brake lines before, so why not now? Well the answer to that questions is probably "because it's a tedious PITA!" First I had to invest in a pipe bender, and then a flaring tool, and then in some extra brake lines from the local parts store, and then some more spare brakes lines...and...well when it was all done it looked like this:

Now to me it wasn't too bad for a first time, but I know for a fact that some of the flanges are not right, and that a lot of the bends look amateurish. For now though, it's a start.

To be continued...

waiting for the heads

OMG It's been FOUR months! There have been a number of "down" periods on this project - and many more periods of intensive work - but that last few months have been somewhere in-between: short bursts of work punctuated by longer periods of...nothing. Oh well...

At the end of my last post I found myself unexpectedly in need of a valve job and without a machine shop. There are ways to find these things I guess (like the interwebs), but, as mentioned countless times already in this blog, I like to start by asking the guys in BAMA when I need something. What was unusual about this time around was that instead of finding a machine shop, I found a specialist head builder that was already in the club! In fact, the owner of Heads by Steve in San Ramon has decades of experience building heads, many have which have been run in NASCAR teams.

So I cut a deal with Steve to do the valve job, install 7/16 inch screw-in studs, and port match the heads to the gaskets and the intake manifold. When the heads came back a few weeks later they were just....well....immaculate.

And the ports were just so smooth, I could see the increase in power!

While the heads were away, I was marooned at home, surround by lots of boxes filled with shinny new engine parts. This spurred me on to crank through some of the half- and three-quarter-finished mini projects I'd previously abandoned. The first one was the tail lights and trunk wiring harness, which I couldn't face after the painful process I endured below the dash. The tail light buckets were refurbed, and painted brake gray (outside) and brilliant white (inside) back in the Green Room days.

The concave tail lights were the feature that first attracted me to the 67/68 cars in the first place. I acquired a bunch of extra OEM trim pieces from my buddies up the Street at Mostly Mustangs and picked out the best six pieces. I replaced the rubber pads, although attempting the glue the new pads to the trim pieces with weatherstrip adhesive was an abject failure. The studs and nuts were zinc plated way back when...

The tail light connectors were, of course, not included in the Pathetic Painless wiring harness, so I adapted the originals. I did the same with the back up lights. And the fuel tank sender connector....and most of the stuff in the engine compartment too no doubt. The Pitiful Painless harness was actually too short to reach both tail lights, so I did a bunch of chopping and joining of wires that I would rather not have had to do. In the middle I ran out of the wire connectors supplied in the P...p...p...FUCKING AWFUL Painless kit, and had to run to Home Depot. Grrrr!!

I also completed installing the Dynamat in the passenger compartment and taped the joints. Long-overdue!

Next time: Engine Rebuild. I mean it this time!!

engine rebuild spec

The 1969 351W I've been working on for this project has come a very long way since I first set eyes on it back in July 2011. For a start I had to transport it back to the Green Room, where it sat for about nine months before I moved house. After that another seven months ticked by before I started the tear down on my birthday in 2012.

Martinez, California, July 2011

I took the stripped down block to Stirtz Machine in Oakland for magnaflux and integrity testing. The guys at SM are real old school.

On the weekends, they build their own racing cars.

The block came out all sparkly, and the cylinders only needed basic honing - very fortunately because the block has already had an extra 40 thou hacked out of it and anything more than a honing would have been terminal.

After the block passed, I went back to Stirtz and dropped off the heads, pistons and the crank shaft and left the oil pan and timing chain cover for clean up. I also had Carl balance the crank and grind the pistons to uniform mass. I'm pretty sure that I also asked the guys to "sort out" the heads, and although they did give them both the magnaflux treatment, I got the impression that nothing else was needed....so I took everything back home and painted it all red. (Except the crank. And pistons).

It's been a while since the odor of red paint dissipated from the garage, and while I've been making progress in other areas, the motor has been sitting on the stand, providing me with somewhere to stack miscellaneous small items. I've probably mentioned that I've been "narrowing down the spec." in half a dozen or more posts, but the truth is, I've found this process very difficult - which is why it's taken so long. I mean figuring out what cam to buy was tough, and that's just a case of looking at some data. I'm not building a track car, so I don't need anything too wild. (I actually settled on this one from Comp Cams).

Even it my days as a professional scientist I *hated* doing any kind of background research, and it was no different with learning about engine components. When it came down to figuring out spring pressures, retainer styles, guide rails, screw-in studs and yadda yadda....I was about ready to die from lack of interest. This might sound like heresy to most "car guys" but that's how it was. The minutiae of the mechanical aspects just don't do it for me when compared to rust removal or installing a wiring harness. If I could have waved a magic wand at the Summit catalog and had the engine gods assemble my parts list I would have. So, after months of procrastination (and, let's be honest, stockpiling some $$$) I called on my BAMA buddy Chuck and handed over my credit card.

We started off by inspecting the heads, and the first thing Chuck told was I needed a valve job and some replacement valves. So more machine work in other words. This might not sound too bad, but in the seven months since I collected my engine block, Stirtz Machine closed its doors for good after Carl retired. I called S&S in Hayward, but after informing me that "we're not taking no more heads right now" the bird at the other end hung up on me! Still, we put this little snag to one side and spent a couple of hours figuring out exactly what parts I needed to go with the cam. Or Chuck did really. I mostly just listened. I've always gained a much richer understanding of something from fifteen minutes with an expert than I ever did spending hours reading.

The spec. I finished up with was designed around the Comp Cams CCA-CL35-416-3 Cam and Lifters set (Hydraulic Flat Tappet). I bought compatible Comp Cams rocker arms, valve springs and retainers, valve locks and valve stem seals. I also bought new ARP main and head bolts. For the rest of the rebuild I picked up some Comp Cams push rods, a full set of Felpro gaskets, replacement main (std) and rod (-0.10) bearings, piston rings, and a Melling oil pump with a new driveshaft and a Comp Cams timing chain and gear set (Magnum Double Roller no less!). I also splurged on a pair of Hedman ceramic coated shorty street headers. The metallic gray coating goes really well with my aluminum intake manifold and the zinc-plated accent pieces I'll be installing in the engine bay.  We decided not to order valves just yet pending consultation with the machine shop...assuming I can find one!

Lots of boxes like this in other words

Ahhh...headers :)

This is probably a photo too far....