1986 SVO Resto-mod Build

[Unclesams_SVO]

Another box of many awaiting my attention arrived the other day. I will say that this one probably has me the most worried, manly because it is not a complete kit with every connector. I may need to source what ever ones I can find the need to be replaced....or reuse the original ones and maybe just buy new pins so the only thing that I am reusing is the plastic clip.

The one thing a worries me over installing this kit is keeping the aging wiring in the car....even tho it has been stored inside most of its life wiring can cause a lot of gremlins. Once complete and paired with a new under hood harness for my PimpX I hope to rid the car of any possible future wiring issues.

It is a Ron Francis kit p/n XP-792 and I hope it will work with a SVO. (thanks to the x-mas sale I saved a couple bucks on this kit)

[Unclesams_SVO]

I am about to start tearing into the SVO again now that my work life has slowed down a little. I cannot wait to get behind the wheel of this thing again. I looked at the "new" oil filter I installed a while back and it was dated "Oct 2016". needless to say I need to get my sh!^ together and get this car back on the road. :hsrun:


Anyways here are a couple teaser pictures.... if you look really close you will see a turbo box that I have had for longer then I care to admit but excited to finally install.

SVO on Jacksstands.jpeg

parts stock pile.jpeg

[MikeFleming]

That looks like the exact same bench grinder I have.

[Unclesams_SVO]

I started the tear down yesterday, it went better then I thought it would. I was able to get it torn down to the short block in a couple of hours. My main goal was to bag and tag everything as a lot of new parts are going on the engine and I am not quite sure yet what will need to be reused (hardware, brackets, etc.). I also wanted to fit the new engine mounts to see how well they work with the MM k-member and not have a bunch of manifolds in the way.

Anyways on with some pictures.

Parts piling up from the tear down.



New specialty tools that made life way easier (www.company23.com)




Engine torn down and hanging from my Harbor Freight engine lift. (makes it really nice to work on the engine without a cherry picker in the way).

[Unclesams_SVO]

Mocking up the new engine mounts from (https://tbirdcougarparts.com), they are not cheap but they are also built very well and use poly vs' rubber thus deleting the weird engine mount shock.

There are a couple issues with the secondary smaller bolt when it comes to the MM k-member so I will have to drill a new hole on each side to prevent the mount from rotating on the k-member. Other then that I am happy I went this route over the factory mounts (even after buying the factory mounts a few years ago).

I am also able to level the engine right/left and fore/aft easily with these mounts, something I could not do with the factory mounts.

On with the pictures.

[Unclesams_SVO]

Today I had planned to install the oil pan and related oil system components, but reality got in the way. I did not expect everything to just slip into place but I was kinda hoping it would. With the planned racing events I want to do with the car I knew the stock oil pan needed to be upgraded, so I ordered one along with a pickup tube designed for the oil pan from Kevko Racing. It is baffled, has a crank scrapper and a windage tray along with a wider base to hopefully help with oil foaming.



Difference between stock a Kevko oil pan.





It also allows me to relocate and replace the oil dipstick so I can upgrade it to a locking one (no more oil spraying under the hood during Auto-crossing). Tho the oil pan said it came with the correct sized NPT hole that was not the case, so I had to re-thread one of the bungs to accept the Moroso dip stick fitting.

Moroso P/N 25973




I forgot that there are 2 different oil pan gaskets and of course I ordered the wrong one, so that was a nice speed bump in today's progress as I had to order one from the auto parts store.

Post Feb 1986 1 piece oil pan gasket (does not work with my 1986 SVO)
- P/N Fel-Pro OS-34211-R

Pre Feb 1986 4 piece oil pan gasket (with great sadness this is the route I am going)
- P/N Fel-Pro OS-30297-C

I also removed the factory crank case vent tube thing and replaced it with a part from Kevko that converts the outlet to a 12AN fitting.
- P/N K9104

[Unclesams_SVO]

It was also kinda humbling when I went to tap the oil dip stick hole in the block and noticed the date on the "new oil filter" (10-16).



Filling up the factory oil dip stick hole was pretty easy, I used a 1/8 NPT tap and then used a brass plug with some RTV to seal it up (I bought steel and brass just encase things did not go as planned).







Another unexpected hurdle with the Kevko Oil Pan was the clutch cable. I had to make a new bracket to push the cable outboard to clear the oil pan. I used aluminum bar and metal shims to replicate the factory punting style as best as I could, I also bent the clutch gimbal on the transmission to help realign the cable. (I may have to tweak the gimbal bracket some more once I test everything out.

[Unclesams_SVO]

I got a little more done this weekend. First I won the battle with the oil pan and it is now installed along with a new pickup and dipstick. I also made a new dizzy hold down (for no other reason then it looks nicer to me).

Kevko Oil pan
- P/N F800W

Oil pickup for the above pan
- F800-1

Oil pan stud kit
- K813

I bought the stud for the oil pickup tube and then found out that the factory one works out just fine with the new pickup tube. I had some oil pan Reinforcement Rails that I got from another 2300 that worked great with this oil pan. I even had enough extra studs to swap out the hardware on the front main seal bracket "cuz racecar". The oil pan tucks up nicely above the K-member ensuring.





The oil dipstick can be bent to your liking with a 3/8" tubing bender, I just mocked it into place for now and will do the final fitting once everything is installed.



I know it is not needed but I have been looking online for a aluminum dizzy hold down bracket since I could not really find anything I decided to make one using the old bracket as a template. I may hollow out the underside once a get a bit that will make that easier. I made it using some 1/4 aluminum stock I had left over from another project.

[Unclesams_SVO]

Worked on the car some this weekend (not as much as I would have liked, but is was 107* today). Started on the heater line adapter for the thermostat housing. I want to switch the AN lines and get rid of the factory steel lines for a couple reasons.....1 my new turbo is not water cooled, 2 AN lines are nicer to look at and easy to fix/repair. I just need to get everything re assembled so I can figure out how I want to run the lines, but here it is mocked up with a Speedway thermostat housing.

[Unclesams_SVO]

I also tore into the dash to replace the factory engine harness with a Ron Francis one. While I was in there if figured this would be a good time to replace the heater core (even tho it really did not look bad). I also thought well since the engine bay it torn down this much I might was well unhook the chassis harness and think about repainting the engine bay.









The real hero of the day!!

[Unclesams_SVO]

So with my bad case of "while I am here" I decided that I should just repent the engine bay since everything else under the hood is going to look nice. Over the last few weeks I have been tearing everything out sanding prepping and painting the engine bay. I did not weld the holes up (mainly because I do not posses those skills), instead I bought some panels from Scott Rod Fab (http://scottrodfab.com) finished in satin black and I think it will be a nice contrast under the hood.

Panels just mocked up to see how it will look, then realized that the SVO has a way different style hood latch setup then a regular 79-86 Mustang, so I am going to use this one for my Pace Car and order the panel with out the hood latch opening.



For the paint I went with the trusty ole rattle can of Rust-oleum primer and Duplicolor Silver 1E (the original color of my SVO). I used 3 cans of 1E and 1 can of Primer



Here are pictures of cleaning masking off everything. I used simple green and a green scotch bite pad to scrub everything down, then I used a diluted soapy water solution to clean up the surface. Once dry I used Mass Airflow Sensor cleaner and a micro fiber cloth to wipe everything down. I used this method before priming and the paint laid down great with zero fish eyes. For the finish paint prep I smoothed out and then roughed up the surface with a dry scotch bite pad then cleaned everything up with soapy water then Mass Airflow sensor cleaner. I laid down 3 coats of paint and elected to not spray a clear coat to leave the engine bay "flat" compared to the exterior of the car.





Primer

[Unclesams_SVO]

I gave the primer a few days to fully harden before I laid the silver paint down.







Also painted the hinges (hood will get painted with the rest fo the car unless I decide to do some "special".

[brsvo]

Looking good

[Unclesams_SVO]

So this next part was more of an "oh wow, I did not even know these existed" kinda thing. I am pretty sure I saw these on a thread on this forum and said, yep I need those.

When I installed my Maximum Motorsports coil-over kit I was puzzled as to why the spring could just fall out of the upper perch at full droop, so when I stumbled across these I ordered them that day from Summit Racing.

They are Hypercoil 4" Helper Springs and Eibach spring retainer. They are 2.50" in the front and 2.25" for the rear, I am running Koni Yellows with MM coil-over kit on all 4 corners. The spring and retainer are about .50" when fully compressed.

Front P/N
- Spring HYC-CS100
- Retainer EIB-Spacer250

Rear P/N
- Spring HYC-S0046
- Retainer EIB-Spacer225

I only did the front for right now as that is where most of my attention is on the car, I will do the rear when I drop the IRS to add a couple new parts to it and finish the fuel system.

Spring at Full droop



Front spring and retainer



Spring is now centered even at full droop.



My OCD was super excited when the spring colors matched

[Unclesams_SVO]

I started to install the Stifflers transmission cross member and Spyder kit. When looking at the cross member position per the instructions I may have to decide to keep the stock WC T-5 or upgrade to a TKO/TKX-500. That would be a big hit to my wallet, but then I would never really have to worry about the transmission again (especially with my new power level). So I just installed the main parts and will mock-up the cross bars to make sure nothing is in the way.

This is what I ended up ordering from (https://www.buystifflers.com)

Cross member
- TCB-M09

Spider Brace
- SPD-M02

Lower Chassis Brace (works with aftermarket K-member)
- LCB-M03

Driveshaft Safety Loop
-DSL-M02

Energy Suspension transmission mount
- 4.1104 (recommended trans mount to use with this kit)

This is kinda how the bracing will work (I realize now that I am missing 2 bars in this picture that go from the cross member to the subframe connectors). Basically it triangulates the k-member, cross member and subframe connectors to stiffen everything up even more with out adding a whole bunch of extra weight.



Driveshaft loop bolts between the transmission mount and the transmission



K-member brace works with the Maximum Motorsport K-member with out any issues.



A view of what is intsalled as I still need to mockup the cross bars and decide on what I want to do with the transmission.

[Unclesams_SVO]

I started mocking up my new radiator this weekend, it is a Mishimoto down flow (I wanted to reduce the amount of radiator hose length).
P/N Mishimoto MMRAD-MUS-79DP

Since my car has had a couple different radiators (my earlier self "modified" the lower radiator mount to work with a 95-98 Mustang radiator) I had to make something work. So I modified a set of old upper radiator mounts and bolted them to the lower core support, then I used a pair of Volvo upper radiator brackets and modified those to work with the Scott Rod Fab bumper cover. I thought about using a large Aluminum style top radiator cover.....but then where would I set my tools :Laugh out loud:

Ford Contour fan, LMR radiator side air deflector and new radiator.



Modified upper mounts (left is modified, right was how they came from Volvo)



Radiator installed

[MikeFleming]

That thing is yuuugely wide!

[Unclesams_SVO]

That thing is yuuugely wide!

Being in the Southwest I wanted as much cooling as possible.

[Unclesams_SVO]

With installing a new radiator I needed to come up with another way to mount my Ford Contour electric fan. I decided to make my own mount since the pre made option available is more then I wanted to pay. I used 26ga sheet metal and some factory-ish looking hardware to make it look oem as possible.

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I also installed a LMR over flow tank (was not really liking my old setup that was mounted on the passenger inner fender).


F94CBC8D-D8C5-4985-BB22-3CDD21043AA0.jpeg


Here are a couple of progress photos that I took while making the fan mount.

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[Unclesams_SVO]

Today I tacked replacing the valve train (I previously changed the valve seals out to I left those alone). On a side note the Esslinger rocker removal tool did not work with roller rockers from Bo-port...so that was a costly discovery

I installed the following from Bo-port:

- 1.5 Cam
- Roller Rockers
- Hyd Lifters
- Dual rate springs
- Cam keeper bolts
- Cam seal
- Sprocket bolt
- Intake manifold studs, ARP exhaust bolts

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I thought about sending the head off to get bigger valves and a Stage-3 port job, but at this point I just want to get the car back on the road...maybe in the future I will go down that path depending and the final power numbers.

Teaser shot with the Kevko valve cover and Esslinger sprocket

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