I knew there was a reason I've been sitting on that 94/95 302 T5 for the last, um, decade :rofl:

Go buy a 7.18" input shaft for that box :party:

Are you going to be running the v6 t5 for a while? Or jumping to a built box. Curious to see how it holds up stock.

You hold out - you coulda told me this is what you were working on today when I called instead of selling me more inconel studs and a radiator! Time to drop all things SM and finish my track build - shit - you'd still drive it harder than I ever could!
Time for your ass to get out here to Barber... soon as you have me a T5 plate in hand ;)

I'll run the V6 box until it grenades or until I can no longer stand the gearing. Not sure which will come first.

Good to know.

Another successful weekend at Spring Mountain with the turbo car. I can't reiterate enough how cool it is to have done four weekends in this car without putting a single wrench on the turbocharger parts. It's the same parts and configuration as what was used at MRLS with no changes, and it just works. :) It's very gratifying to see the results of my R&D efforts over the years with these parts.

The only two issues at SMMR were with cooling. The power steering system which has been quietly humming along without a complaint decide to puke its guts out 2 laps into the weekend, likely owing to the warmer weather (80*F) and larger tires (245/40 VR-1s). I was able to find some decent synthetic PS fluid at a local parts store, drained/filled the system, and the system stayed together for the rest of the weekend. Next time the PS system is apart for development, I will switch over to Amsoil's power steering fluid. I may also consider a cooler or an underdrive pulley for the pump at some point.

The cooling system was also on the ragged edge of acceptable. This is my first attempt at making a 200whp turbo car work on track with a full air conditioning system, and it's proving to be quite the challenge. Adding a reroute, dedicated radiator duct, and 14" SPAL fan helped substantially, but I was still limited to 3 laps before a full cool-down lap was required. I think the next steps are a fully shrouded SPAL fan setup, converting to E85, and swapping the tired old A/C condensor with either a new OEM unit or potentially a smaller custom unit that doesn't block so much of the airflow to the radiator. I've never been a fan of shrouds on race cars, but for a street car with an A/C condensor, I'm leaning in the opposite direction. More testing is required to make a definitive decision on that. My goal is to be able to do track days with the car at 250-275whp, so I still have some work to do. Keep in mind that I'm pushing the car fairly hard - my laptimes on Sunday were in the 2:41 range, and the fastest SPM race laps were in the 2:43s. I have the benefit of ~60whp, but I'm also carrying an additional ~300lbs of ballast, no aero, and no hardtop.

In T5 news, I got the box shimmed up and it spins like it used to. Measured .036" of endplay, and it seems to like the .038" shim I installed just fine. Budget-minded T5 adopters will want to copy exactly what I did here: 94-05 world-class V6 Mustang T5 transmission, 7.18" V8 input shaft, input shaft bearing, bearing cover, and shim kit. I have about $350 into this gearbox, vs. the $800-1000 you'll pay for a native V8 unit. No endplay, spins smooth. Next step is to finish the bellhousing fabrication and start on the shifter relocation. The eagle-eyed among you will notice that I've cut the entire throwout bearing sleeve off the bearing cover - more on that later. :)

Attachment 233278

Oo, nice. I'm glad things (mostly) went off without a hitch at SMMR. I'm interested to see exactly what you end up doing with the ducting and shrouding. I've been able to hang at MRLS without thermal issues, but Thunder Hill in August is going to be a whole another challenge. I look forward to watching and learning.

I saw the pics on my phone before I read the text and started thinking "Oh god, what did he do now? That looks nothing like my T5." :rofl:

With A/C, I found it necessary to add an external oil cooler above 230whp. This was with 16" Spal, shroud, triple pass radiator, reroute. But I don't have good access to e85, which should help.

Dropping a DW200 into the tank today in preparation for E85 tuning later this week. I see this done wrong a lot, so I thought I'd snap a few photos of what is a very simple process if you know the tricks.

Here's what comes out of the tank. Factory hangar, wiring, pump, sock.
Attachment 233273

Here's what comes in the DW200 -0848 94-05 install kit:

Attachment 233274

Here's what I use from it:

Attachment 233275

The mistake people make is removing/losing the factory fuel pump mounting bracket and sock. The OEM sock is larger and sits at a different angle compared to the aftermarket sock that DW includes, and it's critical to use the OEM sock if you expect the car to not starve for gas in high-G turns when low on fuel (<2gal left in the tank). With the OEM sock in the OEM location, the tank will pull all but about a quart out of the tank, even at 1g++.

I also like the OEM-style spring clamps over the worm drives that DW uses, so I reuse the factory hardware there.

Use high-end crimps to connect the new connector to the old wiring:

Attachment 233276

All ready to go, bolted up using the OEM bracket and OEM fuel sock oriented properly (aimed towards the front of the car).

Attachment 233277

Ready for E85 now :)

I'm not sure how much you are willing to modify that actual metal of the car, but I figure I would share my ideas and see if I am on the right track or if I am completely wrong. Either way I want to know because I want my car to be dead reliable when i'm done. My plans are to remove the bumper support and plastic 5mph bumpers in the center section of the nose of the car. From there, I plan on placing my oil cooler at an angle and ducting the air from the nose through it and then to the radiator. Is this an acceptable way to solve this problem? (see pics)
Attachment 171894

Should there be air working its way to the radiator without passing through oil cooler or intercooler? If so, how much air? I was thinking of perhaps cutting the 5mph bumpers and bumper supports to the full width of the intercooler and creating panels to either side of the oil cooler that I could open up with a hole saw if necessary. I don't mind doing things the hard way if it's a slick install, but I don't want to do things that are not effective. I mainly don't want to lose my foglights...
Attachment 171895

You definitely need to feed fresh air to the radiator that hasn't passed through another heat exchanger. I'm actually researching the cost of a smaller A/C condenser right now that will allow me to move some fresh air to the top of the radiator. I think removing the 5mph bumper and even removing the metal behind it isn't an awful idea - you would need to fabricate a tube bumper that tucks into the nose and has some sort of bracket for the hood latch (or do pins), but that opens up a huge amount of real estate to play with.

Regulator?

--Ian

IIRC he is running stock returnless fuel system for now.

Yeah, which is what my question is about. Conventional wisdom says that the NB regulator can handle the uprated pump, but my fuel pressure sensor said otherwise when I tried it. :)

--Ian

For now, no. I'm going to set up a solid state relay for the fuel pump and run the pump slower out of boost instead. The 60psi un-regulated system should carry me through ~18psi on E85 safely, and then I'll ad a Fuelab FPR and a Radium damper once I need a pressure reference. My goal is to hit my final 425whp goal on a returnless system, though.

Car idles and free-revs on E85. It took almost 90 seconds to clear the gas out of the lines at idle, but the sensor reads ~75% ethanol now. MS shows a ~145% fuel correction. It wants a little less VE at idle, but that could be the new fuel pump adding pressure at idle. Other than that, this was way too easy to set up. I installed the sensor, got it active on gas with table blending on spark/fuel/AFR targets, then tuned the car and periodically loaded my VE1 map into the VE3 slot as well. Once I was happy with the tune, I drained the tank, dumped 5gal of E85 in it, and fired it up.

Aidan, did you ever figure out how to get VEAL to play with VE3 instead of VE1? I get a Table Inactive error. If it hasn't been solved yet, it's not a big deal to have it tune on VE1 and then manually load the results into VE3, but it would be sweet if I could direct it to load changes directly to VE3 instead.

Hot restarts are flawless. I'm expecting cold starts to need some work.

Post your tune. I remember reading that error doing research. I still haven't even wired my sensor in. I have all the parts and none of the time.

Found it

Megasquirt Support Forum (MSEXTRA) ? Tuning Flex blended tables (View topic)

Basically when using flex fuel you can't tune VE3 because it isn't using VE3. It's technically using a blend of VE1 and VE3 (no matter how little VE1 is)

2 solutions.

1. Tune on e85 in VE1 and copy over.
2. Use a switch to table switch between VE1 and VE3 (instead of blending).

Option 1 is probably the easiest.

Basically it comes down to when using flex blend there are too many variables to auto tune. You need to be set to just one fuel table.

Makes sense. I think I can turn off table blending but leave the flex system active, and it should still add a multiplier. I think I should be able to tune the pure E85 maps that way, then load those maps into VE3, set the blending curve so that 75% = full use of VE3, and turn blending back on.