A car without a motor is pretty much nothing but an overpriced wagon — its not even as cool as a big-wheel since you can’t even pedal to make it go. Since I have wheels, I figured it was about time to do something about making it go.

I know its been a while since I posted an update, however I have been up to things this week. On Monday, I finally ordered the motor for the car! I happened to have taken today off, and surprisingly the motor was finished in just a few days (as opposed to months for some engine builders!), so I met up with Mike Forte and got the motor from him!

For more details and (of course) pictures, read the rest of the post!

So I suppose the first question is, what did I finally decide to go with.

I’d been considering a lot of engines from a number of builders, and really the first deciding factor I fell back on was the question of power. I’d been looking at a number of 400+hp 351 Windsor based engines. Most of them were running compressions in the high 9’s to do it. The more I thought about it, the less I thought a 9.7:1 compression made much sense — the added 40 horsepower over a 9:1 wasn’t going to be all that noticeable in a 2300lbs car, and the 40 cents less a gallon for 87 octane instead of 93 would be all that noticeable!

The second decision I’d been debating about was transmissions. The common T5 was out — the engine really was pushing it in terms of power. The other common ones were the Tremac TKO500, the TKO600 and the T56 — the first two being slightly different geared 5 speeds and the latter a 6-speed. After going back and forth about it, I decided on the TKO600 — it has better around town gearing than the 500, and with 300+ ft/lbs of torque, there just isn’t a good argument for a need for a six speed. Additionally the hydraulic clutch setup would’ve taken some custom fabrication with the T56.

The last decision was how I was going to get the fuel mixed with the air. Having hated carb tuning my ’68 Porsche 911, I wanted nothing to do with carburettors. Fuel injection was definitely the way to go, but there are really three options — Ford’s stock setup which doesn’t look very “classic” and two other options that look more like a carb on the engine. These two were the Mass-Flo setup and the Boss-EFI setup. Both have pros and cons, but I decided to go with the Boss-EFI setup because it can be computer tuned and thats something I’m familiar with from working with Last Ditch Racing and owning my two S4’s.

So what did I order?

• Black 351 engine block
• TKO 600 with a mid-shifter
• Hydraulic actuator for the clutch
• Bell housing
• Clutch
• Drive shaft
• Engine mounts
• Lots of bolts
• Throwout bearing and other misc things
• All the accessories

To actually get the engine back to my house, I rented a 9′ Uhaul trailer. Let me take a moment here and point out, for the benefit of anyone else who may think to do this, that UHaul’s trailers are junk and really not good for this sort of thing. However, I did manage to both get the motor into it, keep it there for the drive back here and get it back off.

So… pictures. No comments inline — something is screwed up and I’m having problems with the gallery software. I’ll come back and edit this post later when I get it fixed, but I wanted to get photos on here.