Croke's 1984 Mercury Capri Turbo RS Build Thread

[Paul]

Hello all,
My name is Paul. I'm a good friend of The Crokes and I'm putting together a "build thread" of sorts for their super-awesome 1984 Mercury Capri Turbo RS. Before I knew the Crokes, I had never even heard of one of these, much less actually seen one.

I know Mike had been working on it for some time and added a front mount intercooler, more boost, different intercooler piping, the whole bit. Well, the motor met its untimely demise long before its time and Mike needed a new motor. I was perusing a local junkyard one rainy day with a friend of mine and happened on a near-complete 1987 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe. I called Mike and asked him if he wanted it... the motor was soon liberated from it's longtime home and delivered to his house. We got the whole motor, VAM, ECU, and anything else I could pile on it for $240!

So that's where we'll begin I guess. I'm trying to convince Mike and Skye to convert the car to the newfound serpentine belt setup - but we'll see.

As I do my own powdercoating at home, I offered to do a complete custom powdercoating job on the entire motor, trans, well everything. I just started when I got a beginner's powdercoating kit for Christmas, but I'm getting better at it and I really like it!

Here's a picture of a motor I'm building (with the help of Croke) for my '89 notch. (sorry guys, I don't own a four-eyed car)




Since there were A TON of parts to get cleaned up, I spent a few hours in the driveway with my pressure washer blasting 24 years of dirt and grease off of everything. Then I took it all to my friend's shop to use his shot blasting machine to rip off any remaining muck or coatings with great efficiency.

Anyway, now I have TON of parts ready to be smoothed out and powdercoated. Here's just the ones I blasted today (I have more in bins)

There are some fox parts (for my car) mixed in with the 2.3 stuff. Sorry.


...more turbo four stuff. Sorry for the blurry picture. Also some fox steel brackets.


Ford 2.3 Turbo valve covers. One of them is damaged and I'm going to try to fix it up a bit before I coat it. Both of these will receive some trick custom powdercoating for The Crokes. I have two just in case I really hose one up.


Four sets of stock fox valve covers. I'll be sanding all these down and coating each of them different colors. I think I'm going to try silver, gunmetal gray, charcoal gray, and either chrome or flat black.


The fox valve covers (and all of the turbo 2.3 stuff) will go through several stages of smoothing and standing as seeen below.


...and they'll end up looking something like this:



So this weekend I spent some time beadblasting and powdercoating the transmission case for the Capri. Croke thought it might be neat to have his transmission powdercoated because he saw pictures of the case I did for my own car.

So, here's his stuff after pressure washing and before blasting:



Then blasted and prepped for coating:




Then covered in light gray metallic powder, right before it goes into the oven for 18-24 minutes at 385*.



...and the final product!


Croke is going to get a rebuild kit for it, and he's going to rebuild his old tranny. He's also going to teach me how to do it so we can do the same for the T5 from my '89.


Anyway, I'll have tons more pictures as the build progresses. I hope maybe his car and my car can run by the end of the year and we can race.


Thanks all!

Paul.