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Topic: 1988 Thunderbird from Sweden (Read 49625 times) previous topic - next topic

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #120 –
Great you've got it running!  Beat me to posting a video! 

6 rib belt leaves room for the fan...

Can hear the surge at idle.  You may find "clocking" the MAF (or rotating it in small increments to get the sensor in "clean" air) will clean that up.

Congrats on getting it running!  Your comment in my thread about a procharger sounding "like pure shag", is about right!

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #121 –
Oh yes, now it's your turn to get yours running so I can hear that one ;)
The OEM fan will be changed to electric fans later on.
Yeah, the idle was rough which sounds good though but it's gonna be fixed with tuning and some adjustments. This was the first and second start ups with a basic tune.

Cheers mate! It was really loud inside the garage. Probably abit quieter outside but it's still freaking loud! I like it! The cops in Sweden won't like it though. You're not allowed to legally change ANYTHING on a car, not even tire widths.

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #122 –
Weren't much to do today. Try to tune it but I don't have the correct MAF values and the place I bought it at keeps BSing me and wont send me the correct values for the MAF they're selling.
So all I can do is wait and see if they soon will send me the  values.

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #123 –
Non T-bird update.
Bought some new subwoofers yesterday. Also got a box with it. I just put it in my car for some testing, going to build a new box in april/may or so.
What is it? It's four DD 1508's. Small s that has plenty of punch. Feels like someone is punching you in the face when the drum hits.

Ghetto install! Look at the pieces of wood underneath it ;)


And a video of them in work. They're only getting 300w a piece from my DLS A6 amp. Gonna keep that amp for a while because I'm lacking funds for this project, but in the future a Mosconi could most likely be the one to replace it.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=KZ-jtoQtZuU

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #124 –
A small T-bird update.
Me and my father has been trying to tune the car for the last couple of days but at the moment we have a problem. The AFR is perfect in open loop. As soon as the car goes in to closed loop it leans out. Really weird.

Anyways, here she is outside the garage

And a picture of me tuning it, trying to get it to work


I also got a flat tire on my Lincoln :P But the snow is melting away so I'm running her on summer tires now. A month too early, good thing it's been a quite warm winter :)

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #125 –
Not much of an update but it's something!

The front broke off in the corner a few years ago and we glued it back together and it worked over the summer but when I removed the front clip it broke off again. So me and my dad took some fiberglass bondo to put it back together. Seems to work, really steady now!

Before sanding

After around 5 minutes of work

With this little  :)

Some masking

And some paint

Good enough for something that's never gonna be seen anyways

Washed the engine bay and remembered I have this sticker on it :D Quite a while ago since I last dragraced it. That was when I was 15 :)


I have to work outside because my dad has temporarly (or permanently? ;) ) kicked me out of the garage because he's gonna paint the engine bay and underside of the doors (bady painted under the doors from the factory).





Also our little device for turning our garage into a paint booth. The one in the ceiling is the filtered intake and the thing on the floor is for drawing it out. All of the work benches and so on is covered by all the plastic you see hanging around on the walls.


The thing that sucks the air out


Does it work? Well my T-bird is painted in that garage with those stuff so you be the judge :)

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #127 –
Cheers mate! It does the job ;)

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #128 –
What happened yesterday:

I recieved these!

Mmm, Siemens Deka 60lb

And the intake went off!


Today I installed the injectors, put the intake back on and with some fix in the tune for the new injectors, guess what?
IT WORKS! With some work on the tune, it actually idles well, goes abit on the fat side when I give it some gas but that's no worries.
I even took it for a test drive! Nothing fancy, it just works!
Hangs on the throttle abit and I think the MAF table is wrong.
Other than that, some few tweaks to it and it's actually driveable!
I'm in a good mood now :)

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #129 –
Another small update then.
Did some more tuning this saturday and got her running well! Still got some adjustments to do with the MAF table but overall, she's drivable.
But I can't rev her/go into boost. I thought I set the timing at a safe level but apperently I have way too much timing on her so she starts detonating. So that has to be fixed.
Other than that, she works! I can drive it! I also blew the power pipe off once... At only 7psi...
But it's boring not going in to boost ;) Gonna do some more tuning on her soon so maybe I can start having fun with her.
But I did test her in boost a few times, only got as most around 7 psi boost and holy hell she pulls hard! Can't wait till I can go WOT on her! The AOD will spit it's guts all over the place!
Also my mechanical fan was in poor shape as I think I've mentioned here. Started leaking fluid so I went out to the winter storage and stole my fathers fan out of his T-bird. So now the car doesn't overheat anymore :)
Woke his car up and after stealing the fan I put her back to sleep again :P


That's it for now! And on tuesday there's a big car cruise outside town and I will definetly bring the T-bird there! Pics will come ;)

EDIT:

I thought I'd set the plug gap just to see if I could get rid of the problems.
My friend had set the plug gap to 0.028 earlier but I noticed that a few of the plugs were down to 0.018 (!!!)
So I set them all to 0.033, spotless! I didn't revv it like a madman, only to 4.5-5k RPM, nothing of what my ears could catch.
So the tuning can now continue! :)

And people, I suck at reading plugs (I'm from the wrong generation :D), how do these look? All of them looked like this

Close up

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #130 –
Good and bad news!

Good news: The WOT tune is getting better and better. It's pretty  close to perfect now! And it hauls ass!
Bad news. Well, I'll show you with pictures.

Hmm... Milk

A fine weather for investigation!

I thought the Procharger idler pulley looked abit weak, and so it was. It has been flexing, hitting the waterpump pulley


Valve cover off!

Yup, my car is officially a cow!

Well hello there beautiful ;)


Now there's your problem!

Hall of shame underneath/next to dads Cobra


And how she sits now :)

Not bad day. I got to sleep half of the day, tune the car, break it and tear it apart! All in one day :)

A colleague brought this to work a few days ago.
1926 Bugatti Type 43 :D Badass!

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #131 –
 headgaskets, looks like its well under control though!
83 Thunderbird Heritage - Right Hand Drive
95 Falcon GLi

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #132 –
Glad to see your enthusiasm wasn't dampened by the set back!

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #133 –
Headgaskets suck! Instead we should just bolt the heads directly to the block ;)
86T-bird: Not at all! Only took me about half an hour of laughing about it until I started tearing her down.
The only problem I have now is that on monday I'm traveling to Shanghai for work for 2 months, and half of the cars engine is in pieces :D
But my father found some headgaskets in the garage, Fel-Pro 8548PT2 to be exact. So I'm trying to find out if they're anything to have on a boosted application, if so I'm gonna have it back together and running on friday!
But I need a bigger supercharger pulley. 12psi at 4500rpm was way too much boost. And I already have a huge 3.75" on it! 86T-bird do you perhaps have a bigger sized pulley?

1988 Thunderbird from Sweden

Reply #134 –
A 3.75" pulley is pretty small!  Particularly on a small engine with a modest intake & exhaust tract.  I have a new 4" if you are interested, but I'd suggest at least 4.25" to slow that thing down! 

As far as headgaskets go, it may make sense to use a piece which is not as sturdy as an MLS or other units which are boost friendly applications.  The headgasket will then act as a "fuse" to keep other, more serious damage from taking place. 

With a stock block (don't you have a stock S/O short block too?), you should be limiting boost to 8 PSI.  My P600B only put out 9 PSI and made between 475-485 to the wheel (closed & open exhuast).  That was enough to have chunks of block casting show up on the drain plugs, which resulted in the current project using an A4 block and forged rotating assembly as a base. 

Sorry to hear you'll be away from it for a couple months.  The tear downs always go really fast, but reassembly is a much slower process, particularly when there's a time gap. 

Hope you have good luck getting it back up running and sorted out!

PM if you're interested in the pulley, but even with a 4", you'll probably be limited to 5,000 RPM.