Hurmeez

The next job was to get the diff mounts sorted. I found some suitable box section and carved it up into something resembling a diff mount. I copied the original Escort pads in pretty much every way to make sure they'd fit the standard springs nicely. Then I welded up the original holes in the shock plate/spring mount and redrilled them further apart to take the bigger Falcon U-bolts. I bought a new set of springs for it a while ago because I thought mine looked pretty shagged. They were making a W shape rather than a U when there was any weight in the back of the car. So I threw them in and it bolted up, set all my angles, and jacked from the centre section to see what ride height I'd get from the new springs. Just to prevent any confusion, that is the car sitting on bump stops. With no weight to speak of in it. With my new springs. Yayy. So I had another look at my original springs. It turns out they'd been subjected to the ole' flipped leaf, hence their W shape. So I disassembled them and put them back together in the right order and swapped them back in to find that they gave me a ridiculous monster truck ride. So I swapped the centre leaf of the original spring for the two centre ones out of the new set and tried it again. That finally sorted it out. I didn't actually get any photos but I think it's something like a two-inch drop from stock. It did come with a whole new set of problems though. Measuring the angle on the gearbox output shaft gave me an angle of 8.5 degrees down. So I set the angle on the input shaft to 8.5 degrees up at ride height to make sure the drive angles were equal and I'd avoid any vibrations etc in the U joints. Then I measured the angle of the driveshaft itself and got 2.5 degrees. This means the U joint angles would come to a total of 6 degrees. Now everywhere I've looked online says that 10 degrees is the absolute maximum you want to run on a driveshaft U joint but anything less than 5 degrees is far more ideal. Now I wasn't completely happy but I was willing to just run it with the 6 and hope for the best but there was one other thing that meant I forced myself to do something about it. With the engine at its current angle, I was going to have a clearance issue between the front passenger side throttle linkage and the bonnet. I worked out that if I were to raise the gearbox cross-member by ~50mm, it'd put the driveshaft angle down to something closer to 4 degrees, as well as getting ~10mm of clearance for the throttle linkage at its closest point. The only other option would be to drop the engine down. But I've already go it as low as possible with the standard cross member and any more and I'd have to start modifying the steering rack mounts and suspension geometry and that's a huge can of worms that I have absolutely no intention of opening. So next job was to make a riser for the transmission tunnel. As per, I started with a CAD template, Then steel, Welded in my original boot mounting ring, Tacked it, And welded it. I reckon with a custom centre console and a standard looking vinyl shift boot, I can cover the whole thing and still have it looking fairly standard. Finally I made a new gear box cross member to lift it up into its new home. I'm much happier with this one. Here you can see just how far I've raised everything by the difference in cross members. Still no rear axles though so I can't fully and finally sort out the diff mounts and rear brakes yet. That's it for now. I'm planning on working on the throttle linkage and pedal setup next.

I started thinking months ago about the diff in the car and whether or not it'd be able to stand up to the extra power. I'd read in many places that they're good to around 200 horsepower if you are gentle on them. However, I plan to have a little over 200 and I have very little intention at all on being gentle on it. So I started looking at different options for an upgrade. I looked down the Hilux route for a while but I was struggling to find one. I then read up on the BW78 as found in @Rhubarb77's turbo pinto Mk2. Coming standard in Falcons and Commo's for decades and being a popular swap over the ditch means that there's heaps of information available on them, as well as aftermarket LSDs options, and so on. So I went down the road to the Zebra and pulled a housing out of an AU station wagon. This was the best option, other than a ute, because it had the least useless brackets and linkages for me to cut off as compared to the four-link bars and Watt's links on the sedans. I also pulled a center section out of an AU XR6 for the LSD and 3.45 ratio. That's much better than the 3.23 that was in the station wagon diff and will put me right about 2500 rpm at 100kph. All up I think it cost somewhere on the thin edge of $200. I also found a set of axles from an Aussie assembled R31 Skyline. They have the same splines and bearings but are four stud and shorter than the Falcon axles so better for shortening. Both the Falcon and the Skylines have different length axles side for side to put the input flange of the diff in the center of the car. This is another thing that makes it easy to shorten them. By putting the short Skyline axle on the longer side of the Falcon housing and shortening it to fit, then shortening the long Skyline axle by 125mm and the housing by the same, I could get away with only modifying one axle to save time and more importantly money. I ended up with something like this: I got it done by Lee at Diffs R Us. He also tightened the LSD up to the best a standard cone type can possibly be while he was there. I was over the moon with the result and would recommend him to anyone. This is a comparison shot to show the difference between the Escort and Skyline axles: I shouldn't have to worry about snapping one of these puppies. Especially considering the fact that I'll be lucky to get a maximum of a 205 profile tire under the back. Next thing I wanted to sort out was the rear brakes. While we were in the wreckers to up the diff, we noticed a Mk2 Mondeo. It had 4x108 stud pattern, vented rear disks, sliding single pot calipers, cable handbrake, and it all fit under 13 inch rims. They looked perfect. So $60ish later I got them home and started working on making them fit. The first thing I found was the central hole in the disk was too small to fit over the spigot on the end of the axles. Initially, I considered embiggening the disk to fit the axle. Then I realised the disk would be a consumable part, albeit very rarely needing to be replaced. With that in mind, I opted to spin the spigot on the axle down to keep the consumable parts as standard as possible to save headaches down the road. With that done and the disk fitting snugly, I started figuring out a caliper mount design. It came down to something I have to give full credit to the old man for. The one issue with the Mondeo caliper is the mounting bosses are well offset from the actual disk itself. This made them difficult to pick up effectively with a bracket. So we thought outside the box. It's made up of two plates. One that picks up the axle retaining plate bolts, just as the standard Falcon caliper mount did. Then a series of spigotted spacers support another plate which the caliper then bolts too. The cardboard above represents each plate and the spacers are currently imaginary. I ran the design past the certifier and he said he was more than happy with it so it was full steam ahead. I cut the plates out of 6mm steel with the gas then started putting holes where there needed to be less steel. I turned up a wooden spigot to hold each plate true to each other while I drilled them to absolutely ensure the holes would match. Next, some temporary wooden spacers were made to prove the concept. That was where I ran into a wall. The next job is to make the spacers for real. To do that I need the axles in place with bearings to confirm the disk location. The problem is, I don't have the axles at the moment. Even though the axles are four stud, they are 4x114.3 rather than the 4x108 that I need for the Escort wheels. To remedy that, I welded up the flanges (legal in New Zealand I was glad to find) and sent them away to get restudded. I made sure I preheated each axle and welded them up as hot as the poor little welder would suffer, before leaving them in the gloven to slowly cool off again and prevent any unwanted hardening. When I refaced each axle, the welds weren't much different in hardness than the rest of the axle so I was more than happy with that. So now, as I mentioned, I'm waiting on the axles before I finalise the brake mounts. Still plenty to do though...

I'm loving that Ramflo idea! I might look a bit further into that...

@fuel I did consider a cross ram style intake but as @yoeddynz said, the port spacing made it difficult to fit the runners between each other, especially with the 50mm tubing I had to work with. It is a shame cause they're a great packaging solution and look great too! @Transom I didn't realise that about the vent tubes. You're exactly right about the pcv being directly under a runner on the other side. I was going to come up with a custom tight radius 90 degree bend to fit it but if I could just plug it and use the driver's side vent then that'd be a lot easier.

In the meantime, I've been working on the repairs to the driver's door. You may remember this mess: While I'm all for the sleek look of no mirrors, perhaps this wasn't the best way to go about it. I started with a rough cut out from a paper template. Using a series of small folds in the brake, I formed it to match the shape on my dad's untouched MkI before trimming to fit. I got it tacked in place with minimal warping. Then very slowly I fully welded it. I'm no panel beater but I gave it a tickle up as best I could and I'm fairly happy with where I've got it. It's quite clearly miles better than where it was. There's still one or two patches that I want to make up but I'm happy with the progress. I'm working on something totally different at the moment but I'll wait until I get a bit more done before I show anything. Cheers.

I had no idea it had been a whole month since the last update. There hasn't been a lot of solid progress in any one place but there has been lots of small progress in different mini projects. Firstly, I got the intake situation all pinned down and finalised. I actually fairly radically changed the layout and turned the whole thing on its head. Literally. To start though, I cut what was left of the original manifold down even further, before making up some transition pieces out of the 50mm tubing I've been using, and tacked them into place. The welding on these more heavy materials isn't so difficult but once I moved on to tacking the donut sections I really started to struggle. That said, I persevered and got two manifolds fully tacked and bolted on. You'll notice a couple of things. Firstly, the throttle bodies are now the other way up to how I originally had them. Second, the right-hand bank has two sections of donut to make up a single bend. That was because when I decided to flip them all I realised I didn't have enough left of the donuts to do it out of one piece anymore, thus, two bits. As for the reason I wanted to flip them in the first place, doing it this way gives me twice as much room for air cleaners/trumpets on the passenger side bank, (forgive the paint stick rule) as well as clearing my original clutch reservoir position, while still clearing the valve cover vent on the driver's side too. It's going to be a little close between the throttle linkage on the passenger side and the bonnet but if that's the only issue then I'm a very happy camper indeed. One last beauty shot from above, Before I sent it away to get fully welded. While I'm sure with enough time and perseverance I could have gotten everything stuck together in a way that would hold water, the money I would have spent in replacing the donuts I rooted in the process would have quickly outpaced the cost of asking a professional nicely to do it. That and the fact that it's such a central piece of the visual puzzle under the bonnet, I'd rather pay for some stacked dimes then make my own bird shit. Hopefully it won't take too long. I'll be sure to show it off once it's back.

How do you deal with the engine moving around on its mounts with a bonnet sealing box? Do you just use really thick cushy rubber to line the sealing edges?

Those trumpets look very smart! Are they just a slip fit onto an O-ring? What are your plans for filters?

How did you end up doing the remote booster setup? Did you use one booster for each circuit or is it just the front brakes that are boosted? I am planning on doing a similar setup in my car and I'm trying to figure out the best way to go about it. Cheers

That's a good idea actually. I'll have to look at it a bit more.

I see. That's interesting, perhaps the V10s are slightly different to the I6s because I don't remember any other ports on the body. I'm planning on drilling and tapping some small barb fittings into the runners and plumbing them into a fabricated reservoir that sits on top of the injectors. It should look good and cover up the plastic tops of the injectors. I think I'll put a frost plug type bung in the standard injector port.

Are you using the standard injector ports for your IACV and vacuum reservoir? Thats a good idea that I hadn't considered. How are you holding them in and stopping them from popping out in the event of a backfire? Looking really good so far!

Keeping notes is always a good idea in my experience too. I've got a whole clear file full of receipts and details about which parts I've used and what wrecker car they've come off and so forth. Should be invaluable when the gearbox mount wears out or I need a rebuild kit for the brakes or what have you. I actually found a neat little cardboard number wheel from BOC in the empire of dirt the other day that tells you what amps, filler, gas, travel speed, dip rate etc. etc. to use for a bunch of different material gauges and types. It's bloody handy but now I have to figure out where the safe place is that I saved it.

See the thing I'm tossing up right now is that for the price of that helmet, or a foot pedal for the welder, I can get a mate to weld it up for me professionally. He's been doing it for a living for god knows how many years and is bloody good at what he does. It being such a central visual piece of the engine bay obviously makes me want it to look good but with my current equipment, I don't think I can make that happen. It kills me to not to do it myself but this will be pretty much the only ally welding I'll need to do on the car and I don't think I can justify the investment at the moment, especially since pretty much all work on the car is going to have to stop next year while I'm studying down south with nowhere nearby to store or work on the car. Somewhere down the track I'll definitely get more into it and upskill but for now, I think as much as it sucks, I'm gonna take the easy (and cheaper) way out and get someone else to do these particular welds. Thank you guys for all your tips and I think I'll keep trying and practicing and teaching myself on scrap but I think it's a big ole no bueno on the actual intake.

I don't have a pedal or remote amp controller on the machine. Do you guys have any experience with trying to use a machine like that or am I making it all far more difficult than it has to be?

I'm really struggling to find the sweet spot between too hot and too cold. I'll either take ages to make a tack, or it'll just melt and piss off on me. I realise that as I keep welding it gets pre-heated and I shouldn't need as much heat in it to continue but it's just so much different to steel it's like learning to ride a bike again but the pedals turn sideways and the handlebars make the wheel turn the opposite. I've given up for tonight before I turn all my donuts into a puddle on the floor.

Thanks for the tip. I've just been tacking so far but it's not too bad. The biggest difference I find is how it doesn't "jump" the way steel does when you've got two puddles next to each other. You've really got to force them together with the filler which can be a pain when you run out of hands to hold things together.

So my donuts finally turned up a couple of days late. I didn't think to take a pre-cutting photo but this was what it looked like when it turned up: I got stuck straight into cutting them up and hoping like hell I didn't screw them up. I made up a quick and nasty jig to help make sure each cut was made square to the center line and therefore the round profile was retained. It could have been better but it more or less did the job. With the jig, I got each bend cut out quick smart and taped it all up. Here is the passenger side: And the driver's side finished up too: Of course, I had to sling it into the bay and check out the fit. It'd be rude not to really. I learned a couple of things. Firstly, there isn't an awful lot of room between the passenger side strut tower and the intakes. Secondly, there isn't a lot of clearance between the TPS and the upper bulkhead at all, and no room for the clutch fluid reservoir in the position I had it. I can solve that piece of cake though by scalloping the bulkhead slightly and repositioning the clutch fluid reservoir somewhere more convenient, a handy side effect of having a remote reservoir. I also threw the bonnet on and checked that for clearance. Here is the view through the heater bubble hole: Looks good... And from the front: Heaps of room. Tomorrow I'll see about making some tweaks to try and blend the original manifold flanges into the bends better, as well as hopefully make a little more room between the strut tower and the intake. Then I'll see what kind of a mess I can make of the whole lot with the welder while making dort noises in my head. Should be swell!

That's an interesting exhaust manifold setup they've got going on. The filters are cool too. I'm not sure what I'm going to do at that end yet.

As some of you may know from the discussion thread, I took the plunge and bought a set of ITBs. It was always my plan to put ITBs on it eventually but I was originally going to just throw a single throttle body type manifold to get it running. Instead, I figured bugger it and pulled the trigger on them now. They're off a BMW S85 V10. 50mm throats with a super easy to modify link shaft that runs through the whole lot. Massive thanks to @d.p.n.s for helping me sort them out. The bonus of buying 10 means I have some to throw at my old man's zetec which is planned to go in his Mk1 Escort somewhere later down the track. After waiting a week for them to arrive I was bitterly disappointed to find that they may not be as easy to fit as I initially thought. After much head scratching (and bashing) and help from the brilliance of the hivemind ( @yoeddynz, @d.p.n.s, @Transom), I came up with a good solution to fit them under the bonnet and let air into the motor as intended. I have two 2 inch alloy donuts arriving tomorrow which I can section up to make the intake tubes. They'll be something like the cardboard shapes mocked up there. It should give me at least 15mm bonnet clearance at the closest point and if the engine mounts do flex enough to take that up then I can massage the runner until it's no longer an issue. I drew up the flange in cad and stuck it to a mock-up piece of MDF. I tweaked the shape a little then printed it again to make the final flanges from aluminium The ITBs have locating lugs on the bottom of the bolt holes so the tapped holes are counterbored to make for a snug fit and positive location. Next, I drilled the biggest holes I could, Then chewed out the final shape to a high degree of accuracy, considering the tools at hand. Laser cutting would have been way quicker and easier, but this was much cheaper financially so I'm more than happy with the result. Hopefully with the arrival of my donuts tomorrow, I can start sorting out some intake runners and figuring out this ally welding business. I can't wait!

Also, check this out: I'm basically building a Porche. Please send all fan mail to hecticklswaps@yourejealous.com.

I'll be honest. At this point, I had a bit of a crisis about what to do next. I felt like I'd done everything and I was struggling to figure out what else I had to do. That was until I remembered all the panel work I'd put off to instead make the engine fit. So that was the next logical step. Back to rust repairs. Oh goodie! Of course, since that was the next logical step, I went and did something else instead. You may remember me mentioning a while back how I was planning on modifying the radiator side supports to fit the massive new rad. Well, I made that my next mission. I started with a cardboard template of the panels I had already made all those months ago and placed them more or less in position. Then I cut it down to clear the rad. Then trimmed the premade panels to match, complete with a folded flange on both outside and inside edges. They're just sitting in place for the photos so they actually fit much better than they appear to. With that done, there really was nothing left to do other than start on some rust repairs. I noticed some bubbling around the bottom edge of the driver's door a long while ago but put off doing anything about it until now. I started by stripping the paint back over the bubbled area and quickly realised how much bog was all over the door. So I carried on and stripped the whole door, exposing a multitude of sins. First, the original issue was revealed to be an old rust hole that had been "fixed" by filling it with bog and calling it done. Then there's this hectic az mirror delete too: Just half ass weld a patch through the holes and punch the whole lot in with a hammer. Then it's easy as to bog up and no one will ever know! Easy two-step guide for any beginners out there. Probably at least 10mm over most of it. Nothing wrong with that. I initially thought that this skin was beyond my abilities to save (or my being bothered to save it) so I looked at a brand new skin. After seeing how much they want for one of them I quickly decided that perhaps I could fix this one after all. I decided to start with the rust hole on the bottom edge. Before I welded it in I sorted out the frame underneath it where the same rust repair technique had been used. Then it was the skin. I did it really slowly and ended up with fairly minimal warping Then witness paint makes it look far worse than it actually is. Because of the inner door structure, it's really difficult to get a dolly in behind it to do any meaningful panel beating but as it is I'll get away with a maximum of 1mm of filler to smooth the whole thing off. I'm much happier with it now, if only for the fact that there's some real steel behind the paint. I still have to sort that issue on the left hand side, as well as the meat hook abortion situation around the mirror. I'll get back to it in a little bit but I found something way cooler to work on right now. Stay tuned...

I agree, the silver top bodies would be a good fit. Unfortunately, I already went and bought some bimmer ones so I'll go ahead and make them work for now. It's funny you mention the cam covers. I think I can get away without modifying the passenger's side cover, however, I was originally thinking of relocating that breather vent on the driver's side because it looked like it would be in the way of the front-most body. Then I realised I'd be better to take the mountain to Muhummad so to speak and just shift all the driver's side bodies a little bit rearward to clear it. I already drew up the mounting flanges ready to be laser cut and I think it'll all turn out pretty good. If you do manage to figure out a way to make the driver's side cover look more like the passenger's with the badge and whatnot, I'd be pretty keen to buy one off you. It bugs me too not having them match.

I did consider lobsterbacking but I don't think I have the ally welding skills to attempt that sort of thing just yet. Also, it would end up being so much welding just for one, once you multiply it by all six runners I think I'd end up suicidal by the end of it. Not to mention the cost of the gas. I looked into ally donuts and I can get really tight radius bends for close to the same price I'd probably end up spending on gas just to do all the lobsterbacking, so I think that's the go on that route.

You know you're the second person to suggest the NOS idea. I think I'll go for a non-permanent bung in the BMW injector port for that very reason. As for the IACV, the one @Avenga used on his wagon looks like a really neat solution (if a little pricey). I think I'll have a look for a cheaper wrecker jobbie first but if all else fails then that's a good option.