I bought this about 8 years ago. I drove it home from Knoxville to Memphis...about a 7 hr drive. It already had lots of good parts. 5 lug conversion, ported E7's, Weiand Stealth intake, BBK equal length shorties and offroad H pipe, plus Cobra wheels. It needed some work. There were (and still are) a couple of rust holes around the sun roof, the dashpad was (still is) rotten, it leaked everywhere and the shifter vibrated pretty bad at rpm. I pulled the engine, replaced the main and rod bearings, re-ringed it, replaced the rod bolts with ARP and ARP main studs. I bought some 210cc intake pro topline heads and put it all back in. I pulled the tranny and found the yoke bushing was shot and the yoke was worn out. While in there I put a billet cluster support on it and reinstalled with scattershield since I like my feet. I put on the bbk longtubes and then found a deal on a brand new T5Z and bought it and put it in, because the old T5 had a buggered up input shaft and I was going to have to rebuild it completely anyway.
I then bought a Holley Commander 950 4bbl throttle body efi setup and installed that. It was pretty awesome just getting in it and turning the key like a late model car and it would fire right up, whatever temp and it ran great. It took a lot of manual tuning, logging, tuning etc to get it dialed in. I found a deal on a complete Holley HP TBI setup and snatched it up. I haven't installed it yet, but I am looking forward to all the features of it, especially the self tuning part!
I haven't been really happy with the wiring I did to put that in. I soldered most connections, but I took the easy way of connecting them and routing them, which just added to the spaghetti mess of the factory wiring.
Which leads me to now. I have been acquiring parts whenever funds allowed. The best part is a low mile .060 over 351W. It's a Fred Jones reman with less than 400 miles on it. It was put in a E 250 van which had a tree crush it just a couple of weeks later. The neighbor of the van owner bought it and had it for about 10 years always planning to put it in his 51 Ford pickup, but never did. It's got cast pistons, so I am thinking the cheap way to upgrade that would be to put .060 over Lightning replacement pistons in it. They are hypereutectic. I've gotten some Lunati hydraulic roller lifters and probably will get a custom cam ground for it.
I've already added Maximum Motorsports full length subframe connectors and also added upper torque box enforcements when I noticed they were cracking.
It's still quite nasty hot and humid here in the Memphis area, so I am just piddling when I can. I have been mainly working on cleaning up the garage to get some space to do things.
First things first, since I know the 302 runs, will be to completely redo the wiring and add the HP EFI. I am probably going to do a partial wire tuck and convert the headlights to relays.
I have been thinking of some of those replacement headlights with the halo's in them. I think the late model Challengers look badass with just the halo's on. But I am not sure how rectangular halo's would look.
I am going to keep the battery in the stock location but switch to one of the lightweight small AGM batteries in the stock location. I plan to have functional A/C and cruise, but I am trying to figure out how to get rid of all the 1985 TSAD wiring and rewire the A/C without it. There has to be 20 lbs of computer and wiring that all they do is the A/C since the smog stuff is long gone.
Once the wiring is done and I know the new EFI setup works, then it will get the 351 swap. When I have the engine out I will clean and paint the engine bay. Not sure about hole filling or Scott Rod panels yet.
Anyway here's some pics of what it looked like when I got it.
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