2007 GT1000TSR Epic Build Thread!

[Department Of Boost]

Well, I suppose since this car is being wrapped up this season (in theory) I may as well do what I never do. Take enough pictures and do a build thread. So here it is, my first build thread. Let’s see if I can manage to take enough pictures (I’ve already screwed that up).

I would like to say before I kick this off that none of this would have been possible without 908SSP’s (Alex) expertise, know how, fabrication, machining abilities and his very welcome insight into problem solving. Not to mention at least half of the work being done in his shop. This is really just as much his project as mine. He has hundreds of hours in this car. So when I say things like “we” I mean him and I.

Quick background on the car. This is not the cars first “build”. It has been transforming from a daily driver 450hp blown combo into a ridiculous over the top 1000hp open track (roadrace) standing mile car that can and will still be driven on the street. This project started in late 2006 (2007 model year car) when I picked the car up new. It had exhaust, some suspension stuff, a 1pc driveshaft and wheels on it within 250 miles. At 800 miles it had a blower (Kenne Bell). Since then I have been doing it over and over again as my goals change and I try and make the combo work.

The biggest issue with the car has been intake air temps (IAT’s). Everyone has IAT problems (and most don’t know) but because I like to open track the car I have a whole new level of IAT issues. Keeping something cool on the dyno is easy. Keeping something cool at the dragstrip is relatively easy. Keeping something cool under normal driving conditions starts to get difficult. Keeping something cool on the road race track for 20min at a time is a completely different galaxy of problems. So a lot of what has been going on with this car has been intercooler system development. I put a new combo together (usually custom), test it, I’m not happy, so I do another. Rinse, wash repeat. The car has had 6 different heat exchanger/pump combo’s and is about to see 7!

Because of this the car is always in a state of flux it is never finished/pretty. What’s the point of detailing everything out if it will just be getting pulled apart and changed in 500mi again? But this is frustrating to me because I’m pretty OCD and the car is not a finished representation of “me”. So I tend not to take a lot of pictures or shoot video. Or even drive to stuff like car shows/hangouts. I think it’s a little embarrassing really. This off season that is getting solved though. I’m switching a few things around, tidying up a bunch of loose ends and making it pretty.

Here are some pics of the cars transformation to where it is right now:


This is when I first got it in August 2006. It had wheels/tires, FRPP Handling Pack (suspension), Metco rear control arms, 1pc driveshaft and Magnaflow catted X-pipe/Cat back on it within a couple of hundred miles.

 

[NUTCASE]

so....can I see pics of said blown sexyness?


money shot please?

LOL

 

[Department Of Boost]

Over the winter of 2006/2007 is got a Kenne Bell 2.6L, which was the wrong blower. I was not happy with it before I even got finished installing it. And I was really unhappy when it bent a tensioner the first time I hit third and chucked the belt. Then it was a couple of broken tensioners, no help from KB and me coming up with my own solution (the Frankentensioner) before I got it solved. The first month I had it on the road with the blower I could drive it hard at all. It was frustrating. And only the start of problems with KB. I should have gone with a Whipple.

Somewhere in there I got these Recaro’s that Alex had up in his attic. I liked them a lot!

And somewhere in here I got a great deal on some GT500 Brembo take offs.

Here are a couple of pics of the suspension. FRPP Handling Pack, a I think that is J&M panhard bar, a BMR panhard bar brace and by then I had ditched the Metco LCA’s for some J&M Extremes because the Metco’s like to cause snap oversteer because of binding.

About this time I learned the hard way (not real hard) that you want to trim your bump stops if you lower the car and you don’t want to run progressive rate springs if you’re going to drive like an idiot. Late one night, real late I was cooking through the twisty stuff by my house. I was rolling a corner posted 35 at about 100. Half way through the corner I got into some rolling bumps, the springs crashed through their travel, the bump stop on the loaded end of the axle bottomed hard and completely “bounced” the outside tire right off of its contact patch and went SIDEWAYS. For a second I though I saved it but by “saving” it and not letting it go all the way around it hooked up and rotated like a pendulum around the other way. I ended up backing the car off the road into a freshly graded “lot” (thank goodness) at just under 100. It was like a big gravel trap. I filled the car up with dirt but managed to drive it out then home. Lesson learned, no progressive rate springs, don’t neglect to trim the bump stops.

At this point I converted to a return style fuel system with designs on making more power soon. It was a one off deal, custom hat, dual pumps, etc. This was before you could buy all that stuff.

 

[Department Of Boost]

Finally got some wheels that I really liked. 18x9.5 front and 18x10.5 rear Rota DPT’s. Not expensive, but I like the look and I have yet to see another Mustang with them.

I fell into a great deal on a GT500 front end conversion. I really wanted the vented hood and the GT500 front end looked pretty cool as a bunus.

Then I crashed it. 100% may fault. I was going through a strange neighborhood, didn’t see the stop sign behind some bushes/trees and didn’t see the other car because it was behind my A-pillar the whole time. I didn’t even know I was crashing until I actually connected with the other car. Not the end of the world, it’s insured and I was just about to put it away for the winter and do a forged motor. Looks like I had a project on my hands. Note the 03/04 Cobra Afco HE in the pic. That was as big as it got at that point. Had to weld up some custom mounts. That would be the second HE on there…..and we are just getting started.

Car went to my friends body shop minus engine/trans to get fixed and I proceeded to get the motor taken care of. I really didn’t have much of a plan aside from wanting 650hp and keeping it as simple as possible. I believed KB when they said I could make that with stock manifold, etc so I just did a basic forged motor.

-Cobra crank
-Manley H-beam rods
-DSS pistons
-Stage 1 CNC heads
-Stock cams but locked out (mistake)
-Stock manifolds (ceramic coated though)

I was planning on just turning up the boost and letting it eat……..it wasn’t hungry.

 

[Department Of Boost]

so....can I see pics of said blown sexyness?


money shot please?

LOL

I'm workin on it. I have 110 pics to link in. And I need to get to the gym right now. More later.

 

[BMR Tech]

About time. Damn!

I look forward to seeing the thread go further.

 

[Taxman]

I'm in for this read.

 

[Dubstep Shep]

Geeeeezus it's about time you got a build thread lol. I thought I was gonna have my car finished by the time you made a thread.

As a bonus, if you out everything in this thread I won't have to text you with questions all the time hehe

 

[eighty6gt]

I like the cleaned up valve covers, stock pan. Hehe, those things you notice before everyone upgraded everything.

Very interested to see how the stock cam worked locked out. Assuming straight up?

 

[92 vert]

looking forward to this....

 

[BMR Tech]

I sure do wish I could see some BMR under there. Just saying.

 

[Department Of Boost]

I had noticed that the floorpan of the car got pretty hot so when had the car apart I heat shielded the entire trans tunnel.

Motor going in (duh)

Got the blower on and then realized that to run the FRPP 62mm TB I had to port the elbow. Fantastic. Blower came back off, I packed the elbow with rags and went at it. But even though I was really careful I ended up with a few chips in the blower, doh! Elbow had to come off and the blower needed to be cleaned out. Wasted a bunch of my time there.

New combo completed. Also has our first gen 10 rib belt kit on there which used a jumper snout. That didn’t work for very long. Doh!

This was my first attempt at getting tricky with the crankcase breather. That big red thing is a check valve (a big one). It opens up with each engine pulse and then slams shut in theory creating vacuum. In reality there is so much vacuum from the blower that it wasn’t needed. Looked cool though and it separated all of the oil out.

Tricky Canton remote oil filter, because why not? And the cooler is for the power steering. It sits right behind the unused foglight hole.

Another pic of the gen 1 10 rib belt kit. We were still learning at this point. And it had a big pulley on it to break the new motor in on 450hp.

I took all of that emissions stuff off the back under the spare tire well. So I needed to vent the gas tank fumes somewhere. I came up with this tricky little guy and ran a hose up to it. The cool part is with the vent on there you can fill the tank as fast as you want, no more shutting off at the pump.

The “self bleeding” clutch situation drove me batty. I just didn’t like that. So I came up with this doodad that allows you to bleed the master right away to build pressure then the other bleeder is for the slave. It works sweet. A couple of pumps and you are 100% sure you have all the air out.

Cool little boost distribution block Alex whipped up. The sender is for the AIM dash.

 

[Department Of Boost]

I sure do wish I could see some BMR under there. Just saying.

Ohhhhhhhh, all in due time. I have some branded new billy bad ass beefy BMR control arms just waiting on fasteners to go in. There will be pics of course.

 

[Department Of Boost]

Here is my first shot at a big HE. It is actually a BeCool radiator for some sort of Pro Stock application that we modded with brackets and fittings and stuff. For those that are keeping score this is the third HE.

I went with a 20gpm Meziere at this point because I thought it would be better. At the time I didn’t know if it was better or worse because so much had changed with the combo. But now that we did all of the water pump testing I know it was worse (at least with the KB IC it was). I couldn’t figure out how to mount it though. Alex came up with the idea of making a bracket that would go on the firewall and double as a “fitting” for the rear port. Tricky tricky. And if you look close the bracket is made with an angle built in to match the firewall. Alex drew this up (on paper) at my shop and then went home and made it “blind”. It was perfect first shot out. The man has some serious skills.

I modded the crap out of I think that was a canton box to work right.

I also took out the dual pump return setup and put one of the first gen Fore triple pump setups in with three GT Supercar pumps.

Alex made me this trick box that hosed all of the pump relays, etc. I mounted it to the battery box in the trunk. This was long before the pump controllers you can get now.

I found these “barrel” style connectors at a local electronics place. Pretty cool.

 

[chandlern]

In for this, taking notes....Was all the dynamat worth it?

 

[Department Of Boost]

And then it was time to go break the car in and then get on the dyno. I drove it around for about 200mi real easy to break the motor in. In that time the jumper snout arrangement for the 10 rib kit ate itself. I really didn’t think it was a long term solution, but I would have expected more than that. Oh well, you gotta try. So before it went to the dyno we went with the gen 2 belt kit that utilized a replacement snout (that we did). The plate has all the holes in it because we hadn’t figured out the absolute best way to run the belt yet. It was rough.

The dyno was horribly disappointing. It made a raging 540hp. Doh! I was baffled (I didn’t understand PD blowers like I do now), KB told me it would make 700hp. We weren’t even close. And it was down 80ft lb through the midrange from locking the stock cams in straight up. Basically it was a mess. I asked around and the consensus was that I needed headers and cams (what I really needed was a different blower), so I put some Kooks headers with matching off road X on (and wrapped them) and installed a set of Comp 127350’s and this time with 20deg limiters. Then it was time to go back to the dyno. But first, the wrapped headers……sorta. These are some Kooks that I did for/with a friend (note they are already gold). I forgot to take pics of mine, figures.

 

[Department Of Boost]

In for this, taking notes....Was all the dynamat worth it?

The Dynamat is AMAZING! I love that stuff. It was really good when I was driving the car a lot (compared to now). I put 10K on the car before I wadded it up/built the motor. I was driving it quite a bit. The Dynamat makes it very "European". And it pretty much eliminates all heat. It's really easy to do too. It just weighs a bit, that is the drawback.

My car is stupid quiet for what it is now (you will see the latest stuff soon). The car is L-O-U-D LOUD! But it's not loud in the car. I can actually talk on the phone in it. I would not want to be next to it when it went WOT though. I ran a friend from a roll last year, well it's more like I did a 60mph rolling burnout next to his door, LOL. We got to the next light and he was rubbing his ear laughing his ass off.

Of course now that I have gone full "race car" I want to take it all out to save wight. Not likely going to happen soon.

I would really like to give my F-150 the Dynamat treatment. I'm just busy all the time.

 

[Department Of Boost]

I like the cleaned up valve covers, stock pan. Hehe, those things you notice before everyone upgraded everything.

Very interested to see how the stock cam worked locked out. Assuming straight up?

I couldn't figure out how I wanted it to look so I hit them with a Scotch Brite wheel on a 90deg die grinder and there ya go. This year everything is getting powedercoated.

The stock cams locked straight up was a horrible idea. No more top end and a lot less midrange. It stayed like that for about 10 seconds.

 

[ethic1]

INNNNN

 

[Department Of Boost]

Alex was running these rotors on his car but got some 2pc floaters and I got them as a hand me down. Because they look cool.

Once we sorted the belt angles, etc out we did a nice looking set of brackets for the belt kit.

Somewhere in here I decided to finally install my AIM dash (well, it’s not the whole dash). I wanted to sink it in the dash in front of the tach. It has it’s own tach and shift lights in it so why not. It was a huge PITA is why not. I have a ton of hours into getting this to work right. It’s pretty sano though.

Alex fashioned up a trick little bracket to mount the SCT Livewire (yeah, yester-tech). It’s a great spot and I actually use it a lot for keeping my eye on data.