Fox T-Bird/Cougar Forums

This is my 88, bought it last year for $700. Drove it home pulled the motor out and converted it to h.o. with stock E7TE heads, blew a couple head gaskets and cracked a few piston skirts. I think I've put 3 blocks in it now the current is out of a 94 cobra and has lasted the longest. I've put 4.10 gears in the stock 7.5 and still has the original aod with column shift. Ran a 14.7 @ 95 mph. Got tired of being beat by srts and mustangs, put a nitrous kit with 255 lph pump I think.  47lb ford performance injectors and I tune it with a Moates Quarterhorse. Ran a 12.95 @ 106 mph with a 150 shot and was only getting faster as I was advancing the timing. Now took a break over summer from racing because I'm in Az decided to install a turbo kit got an eBay turbo and manifold set for a mustang and just got it running a couple weeks ago. Am headed to the track this Saturday plan on running 8-10 psi and launching with a 50 shot we will see what happens. Positive I've missed stuff I did all the work and tuning myself any questions just ask.

Looks like a pretty straight car and a lot of fun.

Very cool.

Have you done anything with the rear suspension?  How are your 60' times?

I didn't want to spend so much on the che rear control arms and couldn't find them anywhere else that would be right so I boxed the originals with some steel and put new polyurethane bushings in it. Also welded up the torque boxes while I was in there. Currently has nitto 275/65, runs a 1.8 60ft. I launch at 1200 rpm and as soon as my foot hits the floor I hit the nitrous.

Sweet!  1.8 must feel like rear ended by a Mack Truck.

Yeah it's a lot of fun at the track I always push it as hard as it will go and cross my fingers I know eventually the diff or tranny will give up when it does I'll upgrade it. Thinking of doing a c4 with a 9" but I like manuals so much I may end up going with a T5 or T56 next haven't decided. Obviously there's a lot to be had with the motor but it's doing ok with all I put it through for now. We will see tomorrow how everything holds up, first time at the track with the turbo.

I probably wouldn't even bother with a T5, with that kinda 60' time on stickier than stock tires, it won't last unless you get one built right. Thought about the newer auto trans with a standalone? Drawing a blank on the name right now..is it an E4OD I'm thinking of..?

I've heard of the AOD-E and the 4r70w fitting which I never considered for myself until you brought it up that might be a better way. Then I could control everything easier. I'll have to look more into that.

I love the cut and welded stock upper intake, the turbo with nitrous spool-up/intercooling setup, all the grassroots, knock-em out with a $5 brass knuckles engineering attitude that went into this car. Its all great. An 8.8, aluminum heads, and a T5 swap and this thing is going to really start hurting some feelings at the track.

That's the exact mindset I have while working on this car. I know at some point I'll take one of my blocks to the machine shop and get some forged pistons, aluminum heads, diff, and tranny and start really pouring on the boost and nitrous but for now I'm just tuning it in as close to blowing up as possible to gain every tenth of a second I can on those 40-70k cars at the track.

Ran out of nitrous at the track last time I went, so I bought another bottle figured id keep adding to my post I as do stuff. Also you can see where I mounted my boost-a-pump if you look hard enough. Also if anyone has any recommendations on a water/meth setup let me know I'm shopping for one currently

Get yourself checked in somewhere soon dog, graduating from nitrous to meth, you're a straight up junkie and need help.

If I ever catch you at my track, I'm gonna spray you like a bug.

Lmao Well if it helps I'll be using both so here's the plan I have a nitrous controller on the way that has an internal map sensor so in theory I'll launch with a 150 shot and as it sees the boost it will progressively bring my shot down as my boost rises, then that's when I want the water meth to start spraying that way I can with, any luck keep advancing my timing to the best spot without running straight race fuel  and hopefully avoid detonation we will see if my stock setup holds up enough. I'm hoping to get into the 11s or come home on a tow truck

Be interested to see how it tunes out. I'll be pullin for ya to see the 11s before the tow truck. If not, get the tow truck driver to make a pass before he loads you up. He ought to be able to get an 11 in the 1/8th with the diesels they have these days.

Back in 03 or 04? we hung out with a 94 Cobra that launched on dry and intercooled on wet. Just a fogger nozzle right in front of the dry nozzle. Had the dry on throttle activation with window switch and the wet on the shift

Used a single 15lb bottle and seemed to get pretty good mileage out of it. I guess his theory was to lower launch rpm because of the violence of the stick shift and save driveline parts. He 60 footed 1.5 and trapped 137 so couldnt have been doing it all wrong.

Thats a hell of a setup and an impressive 60' I hope to get my car down that low someday.  Before I did the turbo I had thought about using a dry shot and wet shot in two stages seeing how much nitrous it would take to break the block, was figuring I'd get a dedicated fuel source for the nitrous system and shoot for a 300 shot but I convinced myself it was probably not a great idea and I wanted something that was fast on the street without burning through nitrous all the time like I was. Air is free and I just turn up the duty cycle on my tru-boost when a Corvette pulls up beside me. Water/meth is just another safety for me. I'd be using it mainly for knock suppression under boost while I tune my timing in and hopefully will see some gains due to the changes in air density. Wish I had a Dyno laying around.

Put a new shifter in the car this week went from a column shift to this tci diablo shifter kept missing shifts trying to work that column shifter and the nitrous so hopefully this works out better. I have the nitrous and launch control wired into the buttons on the shifter. Going to a race tonight so we will see how it does. Also I pulled the trigger on an aod monster transmission so within the next few weeks I'll he putting that in.

 :roxor:   What?! No column slam shift skillz Dog ???  Hell, I can see why..sittin on them stock sponges.  Surprised you dont end up  :sleep:  at the tree sacked out on those bean bags. Wheres the race buckets ?   :dunno:   I want to see a huge exchange intercooler where that passenger seat is next time you post a pic  :beatyoass:

Somebody has been looking through my Summit and Jegs cart haha

Finally got my trans from monster transmission got it installed and didn't have second gear, So I called them they told me it was my governor and they'd send out a new one so I'm hoping to have time to just swap out my governor from the old trans for now and see what happens, with any luck I'll have it fixed by this Saturday for a race. Also I got my hands on a turbo coupe header panel.

Looks good!
How did you make out with the governer replacement?  Did you make it to the race?

The governor they overnighted me did not fix the problem, also the governor out of the old trans that I know worked did not fix it either.


Now, I seem to have also lost 3rd and 4th gear while driving it easy trying to get it back home so not the best weekend, and I did not make the race. I'll get it figured out soon and report back. The new trans has less than 50 miles on it.

Who makes that cowl hood Dog ??  Are they available pin on only or bolt down too ?

Vfn fiberglass its a 5" extended cowl. They do have bolt on options as well just not for the extended style for obvious reasons. Took them about 2 months from the time I ordered it until it got to my door. Fit was very nice from the beginning, did not have to do a lot of tpuppies.

http://www.vfnfiberglass.com/8488tbird.htm

Browsing the F-body forums, I've seen a lot of bad press about Monster transmissions. They would help a lot of guys up to a certain point, and then cut communication. Be careful with them.

Well I believe I'm in the cut communications phase now because they won't respond to me anymore  and I have been surprisingly calm with them. So now to plan my next steps why the car sits in my garage and stares at me.

Man, that sucks. I hope they make it right with you. 

Update, I decided to just buy a rebuild kit and performance valve body for my old transmission so I'll get that one going and take out the monster transmission junk and see what happened.

I've tried countless times to get ahold of monster transmission for help, even for just technical advice but no one will contact me back about anything. So, learned my lesson there unfortunately.

If you paid for it by credit card, call your credit card company and file a dispute and have them do a charge back on Monster transmission for selling you a junk transmission.

They can have their junk trans back, shipping on their dime. You don't owe them a penny, actually they owe you for trans fluid, labor , etc but you'd never get that short of litigation.

Sounds like they have a business model of ripping people off. One day, their luck will run out and they'll do it to the wrong person.

That sucks. Hopefully you get it worked out, and your money back.

Dospoogeent everything including when you called Monster Transmission then call your credit card company.  Might take a month, but you CC will get to the bottom of it. 

Sorry you are going through this.  I went through something similar a few years back.

So I ended up filing a complaint with the BBB because  they would not contact me back. Just received their response today they said they would repair the unit but I would have to pay shipping back. What I want is to return it for a full refund because  obviously I can't trust them to send me a functioning transmission. Besides that my old trans is ready to be installed and I'm towing the car to my work tomorrow to throw it in and get it running again. I miss driving it quite a bit at this point.

Good for you Dog, I wouldnt trust anything they send out at this point, either, they've done zilch to earn it.  What they have earned is to have you report their acting in bad faith to the state agency in charge of commerce and business licensing.

Once they discover that a state regulator might be investigating and/or bringing criminal charges against the company owner/ principles they may have a change of heart about you getting a full refund. The state investigation will probly motivate them more than potential civil litigation would.

I have all 4 gears again! Car pulls great and shifts perfect now, still waiting for a response from monster transmission. Now I get the car ready and tuned in for a race on June 8th I'll report back hopefully with semi-clearish videos and improved time-slips

Hopefully you can get something back from Monster. If you google "monster transmission junk", you get thousands of forum posts about them failing and Monster blaming the consumer.

Tap tap??  Gotten awfully quiet in here, i know its hot out, but are you still beatin on your junk or what Dog?  Hope your not turnin to the dark side and doin an Ls swap on that poor bird.    :yuck:

Well... its been a few long months of switching jobs, moving into a new house and about a thousand other things. I have done a few things to the ol tbird I'll begin my update with this....

Monster transmission took my transmission back, paid for shipping and gave me a full refund about a month ago which is a miracle but that whole situation is behind me now.

Since then I found an exhaust leak at my manifold which isn't great for boost and smoked my intake and also found a huge leak at the throttle body from the throttle shaft and tps sensor. Fixed the manifold leak and replaced the throttle body with a new one it spools much faster now BUT....

Last week it started cutting out, surging, and every so often when I started it, it would idle up to 2500 rpm randomly and hold it. Data showed it randomly asking for desiredrpm to be 4080 rpm. When these problems happened it would go very rich 9.0-10.0 so on a guess I took the ecm apart and found these 3:




So I ordered up the right ones and installed them in the board.



The old ones left quite a mess on the board but wasn't too hard to clean up with some rubbing alcohol and Qtips. so far all my symptoms have disappeared and it runs great.


The rebuilt trans is doing great went to the track about a month ago but didn't get to take a pass, for my little sister's going away to college present I let her race it why I stood on the sidelines and had mini-panic attacks. She is used to racing her stock 2000-something ranger 4cyl Manual. So I turned the duty cycle to 5% on the boost controller put the timing back to stock and had her just put it in drive and hit the gas as hard as she was comfortable with......and obviously no nitrous. Her first pass was a 15.2 @ 75 mph she said it was good and wanted to go faster so I advanced the timing and put the boost controller up to 45% she ran a 14.0 @ 99 mph boost gauge said it hit 4 lbs. I'm assuming right near the 1000 ft.( This was when I still had an exhaust leak.)


So now its been too hot to go to the track I'm hoping by mid-September early October it will be cooled down enough to go see what it will run.




To Vintage: I would never do such a horrible thing to a poor old tbird I'm appalled you would even say that!


The only time I work on LS motors or chevys for that matter (they happen to come in all the time for some reason haha)




I'll try and keep up on here just been a busy summer.



 




 

I'm glad to hear that Monster did the right thing. I spent a few hours one night reading thread after thread about people getting completely screwed by them.

Yeah I was very surprised. Like I said before when I first filed with BBB they offered to rebuild it but I didn't want to get the same broken trans back so I denied it, then 2 weeks after their deadline to respond to my reply they randomly accepted returning for a full refund if I pay shipping which I reluctantly agreed to. Once they called me to set it up the lady was actually very helpful and said she would cover the cost of shipping for me.

Its always something.... Fixed my last exhaust leak on the passenger side was testing the car, spooled faster than ever, but I didn't notice the oil pressure line to the top of the turbo had found its way to the left manifold. Ended up burning a hole in it while out in the middle of nowhere. Talk about a huge mess. Got a replacement line overnighted and a new pressure washer, went to put the line on but the threads on the AN fitting on the turbo were stripped so then I ordered that. Well funny story I get the envelope today and there's nothing in it. It was completely sealed but they didn't put the part in it so after a  fun phone call now I have another  fitting on the way. And hopefully everything will be back to normal again.

Ugh.  Although on the bright side nothing caught on fire with the oil leaking.

Mail ordering can be a real joy sometimes (sarcasm font).