My 72 Mach 1 ongoing Project Thread

[iceberg65]

I'll have to look into that; Being in Canada; even just the cost of shipping things can get to the point where it's less trouble to do a bit of extra work. I'm working on tracking down a slow transmission leak right now; hoping it's just the drain plug on the converter.

 

[Ray]

Lots of nice stuff going in that baby,!

 

[iceberg65]

I am doing what I can on a budget.

I just pulled the trans again; the stall converter seal was leaking; my own fault I was in a rush when installing it and it deformed enough to cause a small leak.

Hopefully get some time to put it back in over the next couple days. Then I'll be on stuff like putting gauges back into it.

 

[iceberg65]

trans is mostly back in now; just the odds and ends left on that like putting the drivers exhaust back on, and doing up one of the trans cooler lines. Glad the tough parts done on that one; all that for a seal.

 

[iceberg65]

Well upon getting everything back together I ended up with a leak at the header gasket (which makes the ezefi system run crazy rich) replacement on order. Not suprising for how many times I had it loosened off to squeeze the transmission by it. Just cant seem to get a good test drive in on the new rear end!

Also patched up a spot on the body near the wheel well behind the torque box.

 

[turtle5353]

Get that header sealed up and get driving!! Im curious to hear some feedback on the EFI. Let us know how it works for ya. Good job so far!

 

[iceberg65]

I am itching to drive it for sure! I did go twice around the block and it ran awesome off the efi and loved the 4:11 gears. Brakes are worlds better since getting new hoses and calipers in the front along with the rear disc swap too; although I should probably add a vacuum canister or pump for this cam.

 

[iceberg65]

Making some more progress. Starting to get the interior together; Wired in the line lock, neutral safety switch, and reverse lights to the Pro-Matic 2 shifter, got the carpet started, built brackets to fit seats out of a 2000 cougar, they are decent buckets that I had already. Also got the autometer temp, volt and oil pressure gauges wired in.

I was driving a bit the other day and the efi system is starting to have some significant hesitation around half throttle, I'll try playing with the accelerator fuel setting to smooth that out. Throttle response and power on the bottom half of the throttle are fantastic!

 

[iceberg65]

I took the car for another little test drive and It's getting misfire above around 3500rpm, I am leaning towards something in the ignition (might just be the old low octane gas too). It's a used MSD 6al box and blaster 2 coil that I dont know the history of and got for cheap so I may try swapping in the streetfire box first to see if that changes anything. The distributor is a Skip white unit (cheap but seemed to have a reasonably good reputation) And I'm on pretty much new copper core plugs and ford racing wires.

The car was'nt misfiring before the efi install witch is also the same time I swapped out the streetfire box for the 6al.

 

[iceberg65]

Misfire solved, revs strong now to 5900 (as far as I wanted to go for now) It was either old gas or the rpm module in the msd box. I added some 91 octane and pulled the 8000rpm module that was in the 6al and it ran great.

Just finishing up the interior now, do a bit of body work to seal it up and getting the back glass back in and I'll be ready to put it on the road again.

 

[iceberg65]

Got some pictures of putting the interior back in the car; My headliner is in....but not good; The aftermarket sunroof in this car made it a real challenge. I decided to just deal with some creasing as this is a car for myself to have fun in.



the carpet and fold downs went smoothly, I dont think I'm going to try to use the stock console with the hurst shifter; I think a hump hugger with cup holders is probably the way to go.





I also finished up proper seat brackets to fit cougar seats in the front and they are actually quite a nice fit. My fuel gauge seems to have quit on me now, gotta figure out if its somewhere in the wiring or if the sending unit went out on me (I did remove the sender and the gauge cluster)

I think I'm going to see if I can find some 3 point seatbelts in the junkyard at some point that I can get to work in this car, if that fails I'll order the kit from one of the mustang suppliers.

Oh and I insured it and have been cruising around over the weekend since I got the important stuff in the car now. Its running very well the efi really brought more street manners to the car with the large cam. I do think I'll have to play with the timing some still, seems to be a bit lack luster up top power wise; low end feels awesome for a 4v OC with single plane intake.

 

[iceberg65]

Well I took the Mach 1 to the strip; I was expecting it to run pretty slow but it was even a bit slower then I was expecting.

The car has a pretty good sized Erson cam (I don't have the card but I believe the specs to be a hydraulic 296* duration cam with .545 lift on a 108* lobe separation (have pic of markings on the cam) It has a Edlebrock Torker single plane intake and Fast ezefi 1.0 as well as Hooker longtube headers and simple straight pile 3" dual exhaust. Motor is completely stock refreshed bottom end and OC 4v heads. The trans is a c6 rebuilt with a transgo reprogramming shift kit and a 3000 stall converter, rear end is a 4:11 ford 9 posi.

The car could only manage a 16.1@ 88mph I was expecting high 14's to low 15's. It feels like the car is just getting to where it wants to be rpm wise when I have to shift at 6200rpm (stock valves I dont really want to push any harder then that)

Realistically I feel like it would run faster on a smaller cam; the one in it now only makes 7 inHg at idle, the duration is fairly small but its on a tighter lobe separation. The current motor with the stock pistons and OC heads just dont seem to have the compression to work with the cam as it's supposed to.

Either way; I'm planning on some head once I decide I want to park it for the season; I'd love to find a good price on closed chamber heads (or head as I have one good one) but I definitely want better valves in whatever I'm running; thats what killed my good motor like 10 years back.

The good news is, the car ran quite consistently and gave me zero mechanical issues as far as reliability goes; and bringing this thing to the strip means I've met every goal that I had set to achieve with it this year! But that time makes me feel like its running at lower then stock power; It does make some noise from what sounds like the lifter area. I ran a compression test and they were mostly around the 132psi mark, lowest being 122 and highest at 136.

 

[iceberg65]

Been a while so I have some more updates

I got the car running much better since switching to a different distributor with large cap adapter and re-curving it, and put in a start retard computer to get my initial timing up and took it back to the strip; The little changes made up the grunt I felt I was missing, I ran a [email protected] which is in line to what I was expecting out of it (I think It would have done better on the tail end of the evening but I had to lift a few times as I was bracket racing and didn't get any real test runs in the cooler evening as I placed 2nd that night. Our track is at a pretty high altitude; the DA for when I was running was at 5023ft.

It was somewhat tricky to get a good launch out of it with my not so sticky back tires and 3000 stall. It just wanted to break loose on any hard launch. I lost the final as I broke out by 0.09 seconds while on the brake at the finish line.

Also, I picked up a pair of closed chamber 4v heads in great shape to build up and replace my OC ones on the car now. Planning to do 7/16 studs and harland sharp rockers with some single groove valves; looks like alex's parts are out of the big valves right now though, hopefully they're back in stock reasonably soon. I probably wont be doing the head swap till winter hits so I have plenty of time.

how do you guys feel about doing hardened seats in them, my old set of cc heads had them all done but if I can get away with just exhaust seats then Im down to save a few bucks. The current seats are in excellent shape on the heads.

 

[iceberg65]

The strips website put up a decent little shot of me just before the burn out too. Thought it was worth sharing.

Sent from my SM-G920W8 using Tapatalk

 

[iceberg65]

Got up to Calgary over the weekend and hit the pick n pull and came out with a 3.50 gear 31 spline 9" posi center section that will fit right in the mustang for $100. Plan on swapping it in after the next race weekend to keep it going while I look at re clutching the posi that's in it now with the 4.11's

Also picked up the book on building clevelands for $20 at Mopac!

 

[iceberg65]

It was a while back now but I did get this thing out racing a 3rd time a while back; ended up 3rd in points in the street class for the year (one round away from 2nd but I red lit by just a hair) I did manage a [email protected] mph out of the bolt on low compression 4v cleveland, not too shabby, and a good base to build on. Pretty sure some drag radials alone will save almost half a second off; but incoming is a spool for the rear and and reworked CC heads as well as a soild cam for next year.

Now I have to decided weather I should put all this stuff into the old 2v motor out of it, or into the good running motor that's in it now. a teardown of the old one may be in order to decide.