Click image for Chapter 6 Engine Build Photos.

Chapter 6
Strokin' the Pony

by Ryan King
Edited by Patricia Kalin
1/07

Initially, the second stage for Project GT began with the Project LX Mustang. As I mentioned in Chapter 5 and in the Stage 2 plan, my goal is to recreate the engine that I first installed in the Project LX '87 Mustang, but with minor improvements to some of the areas I found lacking in the original design. The reason Stage 2 began with the Project LX Mustang, is that the shortblock I'll be putting into the GT was originally built for the '87 LX.

Sometimes projects don't go the way you plan.

Or at least, the way I plan.

At the end of the 2003 race season, I wasn't as impressed with the Project LX '87 Mustang's performance as I was looking for. I decided the solution to my problems would be to further modify the engine with better flowing top end components. I also wanted to beef up the bottom end to handle more output (by installing a DSS Racing main support). To that end, I pulled the motor that September.

Once the engine was apart, I went about cleaning up the mating surfaces. My mistake was to use a drill with a non-woven nylon cleaning disc. After an hour of work, I was still left with stubborn gasket material on the block, so I concentrated my efforts on the remaining stubborn spots. In concentrating my efforts I made the cylinder head mating surface uneven, most notably right around one of the water jacket openings.

Since I wasn't able to check the mating surfaces myself, I had to get the shortblock down to a machinist.

Instead of improving the engine as I'd hoped to, I ended up damaging the block beyond repair. The deck was too far gone for a gasket to seal and too far gone to re-machine because of piston height. I tried to look on the bright side: Since the engine had an oil burning problem (which seemed to have happened because the rings never wore-in correctly), this was a good chance to fix it. In contrast, I had to pay to have another block machined. On top of which, I lacked the time to reassemble the motor so I had to pay for that as well.

To make certain I didn't have the oil burning problem again, I went with a different machinist and engine builder noted for his meticulous and detailed work, Bud of Bud's Machine.

With a new engine builder picked out my concerns turned to finding another block.

After searching all over the area for a simple solution (read: an engine already pulled from a car), I was unable to find one for anything approaching reasonable and turned to the local U-pick-it parts farm. They had a couple cars with suitable motors so I enlisted the help of my cousin Brandon. We started ripping into one car in the morning, but soon after calling Brandon's brother, Derrek, in for support, discovered it had already been rebuilt and had to turn to the only other car with a roller motor, an '89 Lincoln Continental.

Derrek's added help made all the difference. With half a day lost to a bad motor we had precious little time before nightfall hit but we managed to get the motor out (which is saying something since it was February). Believe it or not, unbolting the layers of supporting parts that cover an '89 Lincoln motor wasn't the difficult part, getting it out of the car was. That isn't to say the unbolting process wasn't time consuming, it was very, but not nearly as hard as getting the motor out of the engine bay.

Let me paint you a picture: It's February in Washington. That means rain. We were lucky that day, it didn't rain, but the ground was still soft, soggy dirt, strewn with rocks, bolts and other small, discarded parts (not by us). The place no longer provided A-frame chain hoists so that meant we had to use a regular cherry picker with relatively small metal wheels.

What transpired after this was a vision of pure automotive carnage.

Now, I'm not a fan of destroying good car parts, even in a junkyard. Those parts can still be used by someone else and there's no reason to be destructive, but we were left with little choice by the yard.

After trying to pull the motor with the hoist on the dirt we realized it wasn't even going to budge. The wheels had dug themselves in almost up to the legs. It was getting late, the sun was starting to set (or, at least, the overcast skies were starting to get darker) and this time of the year, dusk doesn't last very long which means the yard was about to close. We did the only thing we could do: grab the Lincoln's hood and threw it on the ground to give the hoist firm footing it could roll over.

After some Herculean feats by the three of us, the motor came free of the engine compartment, but the hoist had rolled partly off of the hood in the process. It was now stuck in the soft ground with the heavy engine keeping it firmly in place. Just about that time the yard employees started calling for everyone to finish up so they could close.

Even though we got the engine out, the story wasn't over. The only thing the yard provided to haul the shortblock out with, was a single-wheel wheelbarrow and even though it was only a shortblock, it certainly wasn't going to stay up right in that. So we also had to figure out an affective way to move the engine from the back of the many acre yard.

More automotive carnage ensued.

We found another hood nearby that had already been removed from a Tempo, propped up beside the car. We dropped the engine on it, wrapped a broken accessory belt around the hood latch and made a makeshift “sled” to drag the engine and hoist out with us.

Once home and mounted to the engine stand, I proceeded to strip the shortblock down and get it ready for Bud to swap the rotating assembly into.

This is when the story gets...convoluted.

After I got Bud the block, he had too much work to get to it right away and the more I thought about it, the more I was unhappy with the as-yet unmentioned shoddy balance job done on the rotating assembly. By shoddy I mean that large amounts of metal were taken out of the crank in places that also left weak points in the counterweights, which were possible stress risers. When the crank didn't balance, some of those holes were welded, on top of which the flywheel and pressure plate were turned into Swiss cheese.

At the time of the original engine build, I didn't know enough to realize that thin, ragged metal started stress fractures in cranks and that a flywheel and pressure plate shouldn't be drilled into as drilled areas become weak and on an assembly that sees a lot of stress that could cause cracks which could ultimately lead to shattering of a fast spinning flywheel and/or pressure plate. That's why the SFI sanctioning body doesn't allow flywheels, pressure plates or dampers to be drilled.

I decided it was probably a good idea to just start from scratch with the engine and ordered up a crank kit from DSS Racing to go along with the main girdle.

I chose DSS Racing because I went with a budget kit from a different supplier the last time to cure the oil burning problem associated with the longer 5.4” rod design (as opposed to a 5.315” rod design that was used in the previous engine) and the engine still burned oil. To be fair that wasn't the supplier’s fault, but it still left a seed of doubt in my mind. I also preferred the better rod-to-stroke ratio the 5.4” rods provided. These reasons and more, coupled with the fact that DSS claimed their stroker kits were good to 600-650 horses when used with their main girdles, kept me from needing much more convincing. Especially when my only worry about the kit was the oil burning (because the piston pin is pushed up into the oil ring land to allow the 5.4” rod to fit with the short 8.2” deck height, which causes poor oil control) and I'd already seen Brandon's Chevy 383 (with 6” rods and similar pin issues) not have a problem. I also had the assurances of DSS' techs that they had solved the oil-burning problem associated with the 5.4” rod design. I was sold.

That wasn’t the end of the complications, though, as one thing led to the next.

At first I wanted screw-in freeze plugs installed in the block as DSS found that the improved rigidity of the screw-in plugs allowed the blocks to withstand more punishment. Bud didn't have the taps necessary to thread the plugs, so he sent the block out to another shop to have it threaded, but it sat there for a month and the machinist wasn't able to get to it. He brought it back and looked into the cost of getting taps to do the machining himself, but the cost was around $100 so to make a long story short, I gave up and told him to go ahead and do it without the plugs.

When I got the engine back, I began prepping it to go back into the car. However, the fiasco with the engine wasn’t over. Little did I know at the time, I was going to have a complete change of direction with Project LX that gave me the impetus to come up with a new direction for the GT. So the engine got set aside until I can finally get the Project GT Mustang back on the road.