1995 Ford Mustang Convertible |
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GT? |
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Cobra? |
Our
Mustang started out as a 94 GT convertible. It was a fun ride, and the AODE left
our minds uncluttered by thinking about shifting as we enjoyed driving around
Kauai, but performance was certainly lacking.
But the car's good looks, exceeded its attitude, especially after we added the Classic Design Concepts style bar.
The first order of business was getting our aging Mustang nimble and sure footed. Since it is a convertible it already has a K brace and strut brace in front. Maximum Motorsports came to the rescue with a pile of go-fast parts. We added Bilstein struts / shocks, Eibach springs, and poly bushings to tighten up the handling and Wow! it made a difference. We did need an adjustable pinion snubber to cope with the lower Eibach springs, but the stock steering rack mount seems perfect. YMMV. We did add Maximum Motorsports caster / camber plates to insure correct alignment with the slightly lower springs. The convertible chassis needed stiffening from a pair of sub-frame connectors.
Putting the suspension onto the pavement is performed by 17 x 9 Cobra R wheels and 245ZR45/17 front / 285ZR40/17 rear Bridgestone RE730.
The ride is wonderful, not harsh at all, and the handling is almost go-kart like. You can push this car way harder than you think you can and it just goes where you point it.
Now things really got out of hand: we had a great looking Mustang that handled like a canyon racer that barely ran 15.5 at 88 in the 1/4 mile. Sometimes wishes are granted. On this island in the middle of nowhere where we live I found a recently wrecked 95 Cobra with only 35,000 miles on the odometer and no apparent engine damage. I snapped it up for a song from someone who didn't know what they had.
The plan was simple: pull the Cobra's 5.0 engine and T5 and transplant them into our GT.
Oops, or should I say Yippee, it turns out I didn't even know what I'd bought. When we got the 5.0 out of the totaled Cobra, here's what we found:
Chip
Edelbrock Performer heads with an exquisite stage III port and polish!
Ported and polished Cobra intake (It is OK to polish intakes with port FI)
Balanced rotating assembly
225 lt/hr inline fuel pump
X pipe
Pro 5 shifter
There was also a Vortec blower! Unfortunately, it was damaged in the crash.
We dropped the pan and pulled the heads to be sure everything looked OK. It did.
I started the swap by reading a couple of articles about swapping T5s into AODE cars. Some articles discuss the swap into a Fox. and here. Look for articles about swapping into a Fox-4 if you can, they are just a little different: here. That pretty much told me what to expect and we really didn't have any surprises.
I did swap the pedal assembly first. It took a leisurely 3 hours to get the brake / clutch pedal assembly out of the Cobra. And it took about another 3 hours to remove the automatic's brake pedal and install the brake / clutch pedal assembly. FWIW, I decided to completely remove the steering column when I swapped pedals and that saved me a lot of time.
With the pedals already in place, we pulled the GT 5.0 and AODE and installed the Cobra 5.0 and T5 in two days. No surprises, just lots of electrical connections and plumbing.
Since everything was apart it seemed silly not to use a new clutch. I tried - and had nothing but trouble with the BBK aluminum clutch quadrant and adjustable cable. I finally found true happiness with the Forte units.
It started right up, but was down on power and didn't idle very well. We were just tired and it took us a bit of playing around to remember we need the add-on chip with the Cobra computer and the 70mm MAF instead of the one from my GT. That got the power up where it belonged but the idle was still poor. We found a couple of bad sensors and that fixed that.
I removed the cats from the X pipe and replaced them with 2.5" straight through racing mufflers. The old Flowmaster two chamber mufflers in back were WAY TO LOUD without the cats. It was a real "bad boy racer" sound that forced me to drop the RPM to 1500 whenever I passed a patrol car. I put on DynoMax Super Turbo mufflers - the same ones from after-cat kit - and that quieted things down nicely.
Since the crankshaft pulley looked suspect I got a set of polished aluminum March pulleys #2110. (To bad the alternator pulley wasn't right. March wouldn't admit their mistake so I had to have that pulley machined locally for $20.)
On street tires at our notoriously slippery strip my best run was 13.5 at 103 MPH. I'm happy.
Cold air - Some 3" PVC pipe gets cold air from a K&N Filter in the finder well.
4.30 gears - 4.30:1 gears put me through the traps in 4th gear, but more importantly match the big cam making the car a pleasure to drive.
Cobra white panel instruments - I pulled the instrument panel from the Cobra and used those pretty white face guages.
I replaced the intake fuel pump with a 190 ltr/hr unit.
I can't say enough good things about the TwEECer. A bit of time yielded a tune that was max performance with great streetability too.
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Page lasted updated April 06, 2008
