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So some time earlier this year, my friend (we'll call him Eric for the time being), sent me some rambling strange message about some fruit rally. Eric often has strange ideas that may or may not be feasible so I kinda lumped it in the bucket with things like Sea Cows and something called the Gambler.
Turns out he wasn't messing around and suddenly I'm getting pictures like this(actual pictures he sent):
At this point in time I was still not actually convinced we were actually going to do this.
Given he's seemingly not going to let this idea go I give in and look at more details of the fruit rally. And the rational part of my brain must have been doing something more important (thinking about cats or MS2 boost control?) because I end up agreeing to co-drive with him. Things go from bad to worse and we decide that the 1991 mustang 4 cylinder automatic in the yard is the car for us! Around this time some good news comes in that our mutual friend EO2k has agreed to join us as well.
Some pictures of good ideas that came about in out group chat...
At some point, I think G called it a moostang in chat, and thus the team/car name was born. Some internet sleuthing lead us to this:
Eric and the car are now in Oregon and it really needs to get to my house in the Bay Area a few weeks before the Rally so maintenance/mods can be done. So while Eric did some basic maintenance to ensure it's "road worthiness", G and I hatched plans in commiefornia...
As part of the maintenance that Eric performed, he changed the transmission fluid. This is what he found in the pan:
The report I got from him after the test drive with the new fluid was that the trans worked, but that it also "sounds like a ratchet thrown in a barrel" when engine braking.
With some amount of bravery (or a lack of a sense of self preservation) Eric decided to drive the car down over the 4th of July weekend and come June 30th he began his epic journey.
At 7am I was awoken to a call from Eric. Normally I don't pick up the phone unless the world is ending, but this seemed an appropriate time to do so. He relays to me that he's made it about 150 miles from home but that the transmission isn't working well at speed and has spewed a large amount of fluid. After some frantic calls to basically all of southern OR's u-haul rental agencies, we determine that he has no choice but to drive on. After some thinking we figure it might be something terribly wrong in the overdrive system (see above pictures?) and he gets to drive the next 500 miles in 3rd.
Some (lots?) miracles later (including the theft of the transmission dipstick) and we had this...
Since arriving in CA, the moostang has begun an epic lame transformation but that will be a story for another evening on which I don't feel like laying on the ground under a moostang covered in multiple gallons of ATF. I'll leave you with this picture to keep you interested.
How many other engines can you spot in this photo?
As alluded to earlier, the autotrans was junk after the drive down from Oregon. We suspect that the metal "worms" seen above are actually the remnants of the spring that locks the torque converter once the overdrive kicks in. Because the OD never locked, the converter just continued to spin and generate heat. After 650~ish miles of I-5 it was essentially boiling ATF out of the trans constantly. I believe the driver burned through 2 gallons of ATF? Most of that is on the bottom of the car. Its ******* hideous. Burnt ATF is almost the worst thing in the world (other than maybe gear oil) and we spent the weekend swimming in it.
The trans is dead. Long live the trans.
So what to do?
Simple! Go to the junkyard and find a trans that'll bolt to a 2.3 Ford.
A trip to the pick-n-pull yielded this magnificence!
As you can see, that auto trans isn't done leaking **** everywhere. **** that trans. Ungh.
The transmission is out of some breed of 80's 2wd Ford Ranger. I thought at first it might be a M5OD, but it turns out its a Mazda box. Very similar to a TII I believe its called a Toyo Koygo transmission?
Such dirty magnificence!
Unfortunately the driveshaft is about 3" short, but it used the same yoke. Score!
Fortunately the FLAPS had a clutch and flywheel in stock, but UNfortunately the flexplate bolts for the automatic were too short for the flywheel. Of course they are fine thread metric bolts and it was the weekend, so we were pretty well boned. We spent an inordinate amount of time scrounging bolts off other things in Gesso's garage, but couldn't find what we needed. We decided the because we couldn't make the flywheel bolts longer, there was only one other option.
And while Eric and I hid outside the garage and took pictures, Gesso and his giant forged tungsten ********* stood in front of the ******* wheel of death and started cutting.
As you probably guessed because this ISN'T a pic from the hospital, it worked and IT ******* FITS! Unfortunately I missed taking pictures of the trans mount fabrication, but trust me when I tell you its awesome. It even has a bushing!
(The next day we went to the junkyard and got some even longer bolts from a random Nissan, but still, this was sketchy as ****)
There were also some wiring considerations because we don't have such niceties as the neutral safety switch and reverse switch, there was a bit of wiring to figure out. Good thing Gesso is s-m-r-t and knows how to talk to the angry pixies.
Because Ford is a bunch of bastards, we literally had no idea if this thing was supposed to take gear oil or ATF, and we have no idea how much. I believe it got filled with a couple quarts of GL-4 and we are going to hope for the best. It's got an overflow so I guess we can't overfill it? Glug Glug Bitches!
We decided that maybe scabbing 3" onto the driveshaft was not something we were comfortable with, so Gesso took the shaft to a legit shop and had it retubed and balanced. It wasn't that we were worried about our fab work, it was more that we were worried about it coming apart and pole vaulting the car on the highway.
We got lucky in that the car came with a stereo with a USB in, so at lease we can have some sweet tunes while we roll. Gesso, because he is ever the overachiever, made this awesome USB thing so we can charge phones and whatnot while driving.
As you can see here, it fits great. Also shown, our first attempt at a shifter. Also also kinda shown, we had to remove some car to get to the turret to come up through the floor. It sits probably 3"-6" closer to the dash than a stock Mustang shifter, so sacrifices were made. The stock Ranger shifter all kinds of didn't fit at all so it had to be modded. This version wasn't quite right, but you can see where we are going.
You can see the structural cardboard added to keep the smoke out of the cabin. Apparently if you open the windows, this thing looks like something out of a Cheech and Chong movie, what with all the ATF burning off the bottom of the car. More on this later.
Add a little carpet to class up the joint, and the shifter is essentially done. Aww yiss.
Too good. My brother and a couple of other friends race a mid engined duratec geo in lemons. What are your plans after you blow it up? Exploder motor with a HO cam from a foxbody?
I'll be honest, I'm a little nervous about these switches.
Because the transmission and mount were changed, the exhaust had to be rerouted as well.
All performance exhaustsare made out of pie cuts, right? To maintain ground clearance, the decision was made to run the exhaust over top of the cross member. Because the exhaust now runs a bit closer to the body, its "helping" to remove the ATF from the pan through the application of heat. As soon as you open the sunroof or the windows and get some negative pressure in the cabin, it sucks a columb of burning ATF smoke into the cabin.
As you can see, it had plenty of space to draw air up through the center console
So seeing as we went from an automatic to a manual trans, we were one pedal short. The Ranger transmission uses a hydraulic TOB (that we replaced with a new one from the FLAPS) so at least we knew we were going to have to play with fluids. We had the hydraulic handbrake out of a Civic SI that we were SORELY tempted to mount in the car and use as a hand clutch, but eventually we scrapped that idea.
Using a combination of random things in Gesso's garage from various other projects, plus some luck with random eBay stuff, this thing was created:
Like, I literally cannot even. I think @gesso is going to have to explain this one.
The ranger ToB uses some hellish one-off o-ring and pin based fitting with a molded plastic hose to connect to the clutch master. That plastic hose was cut (by whomever removed the transmission from the ranger, blessed may they forever be for saving us that hassle).
Also the ranger clutch master is some plastic garbage.
All of the above combined with the fact that foxbody uses a cable clutch and we didn't even have that, means we were going to end up with custom clutch hydraulics. After half a day if driving to hydraulic shops in the east/southbay and getting turned away from each empty handed (we even spent 30 min at swagelok with their application specialists), we figured out that -4an hose would be a press fit on to the ToB fitting.
After a non-trivial amount of misery trying to get the fitting in the ToB (see above pic that was take by shoving my phone between the trans and trans-tunnel because I can't get my head in a 3" gap, also note the o-ring that should be on the fitting /sadface) there was success. May the fitting never leak and the press fit on the hose be satisfactory.
So now we have some stainless hose hanging off the transmission. Time to drill a hole in to the cabin!
At this point we discussed using a hydraulic handbrake (dorifto!) as the clutch master, but it was determined that this would be terribly hard to drive in traffic. But I couldn't figure out a better way to mount a pedal and master cylinder, so I ordered some $40 piece of garbage off Amazon (if eBay offered prime shipping I would order from them too...)
The reviews of the handbrake said the master cylinder it came with was pretty bad (get what you pay for) so I ordered a wilwood master cylinder with built in resivour. By some luck it was the same bolt pattern as the one that came with the handbrake and it all went together just fine.
At this point it was a trivial matter to bolt this where the dead pedal was, remove the giant lever, bolt the actual dead pedal to the lever, buy the wrong fitting to connect the an hose to the master cylinder, blame summit for the wrong fitting, use a flare tool and a random brake line from the Honda to connect the an hose and the master cylinder, convince my SO to help me bleed the system, and then Hoon around in our manual 4 cylinder Moostang!
So as frightening a concept as this might be, the thing moves on its own!
Apparently it got to this point under its own power.
And does she move! Haha! Ok, actually the speedometer is completely inaccurate at this point. We jammed the Mustang mechanical sender into the Ranger transmission so I'm shocked it does anything at all. I'm working on a plan to get us some GPS based speedo readout to avoid tickets.
So here is another mechanical fun thing: the car has AC. Or I should say, it had AC, but it died on the way down from OR.
The compressor clutch has seen better days.
Like, much better days.
Its factory installed (as opposed to dealer installed, as is apparently common with this cars) so Gesso decided that AC would probably be a good idea with 3 sweaty dudes in the car and bought a new clutch. Bless his soul. We are also going to fabricobble some sort of awesome sun shade for the gianormous rear hatch window to try to keep temps in the car under control.
Something like this, but more DIY.
So apparently we are going to have AC! I am excite
SO now that the car moves again, Gesso immediately put it to work.
As you can see, its basically a Ranger now and it does have SOME cargo capacity, but with 3 dudes + snacks + water + redbull + cloths & stuff + tools + extra fuel + (maybe) spare parts + extra oil + extra coolant and things are going to get snug quick. This will need to be addressed.
Rivnuts. Is there nothing they cannot do?
I don't know where he found it, but Gesso scored a Yakima Rackima for the Moostang.
Gesso then decided to drive the car to work. Upon arrival this conversation took place:
So as you can imagine, its got its own unique ...bouquet.
To give you an idea of what we are up against, this is what was found upon removal of the seat.
But we've got more important things to deal with!
Racecar lights! Actually, if you look closely in this image, you can see the remnants of one of the headlight bulbs floating around inside the reflector. If you scroll back a couple of posts, you can see where one of the headlights is full of water. <insert headlightfluidjoke here> Bulbs last about 2 minutes inside these headlights once it starts raining at all, so it was decided that aux lighting would be a good idea. Plus its a rally car, it definitely needs more lights.
Because the fuel gauge is wildly inaccurate, Jerry can seemed like a really solid idea. Also, a wild roof rack appears! Now we'll have PLENTY of room for extra gear!
Also seen in profile. It should make quite the site heading down the road.
07-12-2017, 01:49 AM
superSEKRIT moostang project - lemons rally 2017
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