Building the Boosted Smurf

[psulja]

Had my Squaretop manifold inlet matched up to the bigger skunk2 throttle body.

[psulja]

The following posts are copied and pasted progress from the past week or two

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Car finally moved today which means progress should be pretty steady since it's 15 minutes from home and down the street from my work.




Got it in the garage and started to strip it down to get ready for paint in the engine bay.


This is as far as we got for the day since I've been up for the past 24 hours


Meant to take pictures of the completed hot side while it was together but wanted to get moving on the car and forgot.

Here's a pic of my wastegate dump with all the pie cuts ever

[psulja]

Some photos of the completed exhaust work stolen from the Glease Manufacturing facebook page.





A straight through didn't work anymore with the rx7 diff as I had mentioned before. John fixed this with a few pie cuts.


I also didn't like how short the tip was so I had him extend it a bit. It's a little long but hopefully I won't melt my bumper now.



Completed hotside:

[psulja]

This morning after work I headed to the garage to do some more work on the car. Pulled out the engine, trans, exhaust, and front subframe to do some more prep on the engine bay. I always thought my car was relatively clean until I started going at it with degreaser. Apparently all that textured black stuff I thought was just undercoating was actually road grime from 23 years. Made some decent progress but will be back at it again tomorrow morning. Engine bay should be primered by end of day tomorrow, ready to be pained.

I'm going with mariner blue on the top half above the "shelf". The lower half will be flat black so it can always look cleanish.

[psulja]

Holy progress! Keep it up man.

Gotta take advantage of this motivation while I have it lol

Rocker guarded the wheel wells. Just doing some more cleaning and prep on the engine bay before paint

[psulja]

Masked off the car and painted the lower portion of the engine bay. Will go back in a couple days to spray the upper half.






I already hate any kind of painting related work. Can't wait to get back to putting the car together!

[psulja]

So I'm pretty happy right now. First day/night of my 3.5 month layoff and I got a solid amount of progress done. Finished prep work, primed, painted, and cleared the bay. Going to let it sit for a couple days before touching anything.







Looks a bit darker in this lighting




Extremely pleased with how the black and blue combo came out, especially for everything being done with rattlecans!

One day I'll actually bring a real camera out to the garage rather than my phone.

While I wait for things to fully dry and for my engine to show up I'm going to get started on my subframe tomorrow and then start putting the engine bay back together.

[Hyper]

BIG PROPS for loving your car that much. I can picture the outcome it's gonna look sick as hell

[treeafodo]

You should use some of that paint for the rear bumper ;) just kidding. I wish I had a heated garage so I could properly paint.

[psulja]

Not even going to touch the exterior until end of this year probably. Back bumper doesn't bother me enough to paint it and I'm too busy spending all the money ever on getting this thing running again

Swapping control arm bushings currently. Also brake lines are being installed again

[riefdaddy]

I'm enjoying you refinishing your car. Question, are those brake lines routed higher than the master cylinder? How will you bleed the air out if they are? ;)

[psulja]

Never really thought of that as an issue since building pressure in the brake lines should push all the air out.

Finally done with these bushings! Just gotta finish cleaning the front subframe and then all the arms can go back on the car.

[riefdaddy]

Hopefully it won't be an issue, but it will probably be harder to bleed than normal. If you fill with pressure, or pull a vacuum it probably won't matter one bit.

[psulja]

So this happened today. Also, this is why everyone needs to own a Grand Marquis.





I cannot thank Bryan from Fab9 enough for everything he's done to make this happen.

Hopefully will be picking up most of my leftover parts that are at Fab9 this weekend and progress should be a bit more steady in here.

[ADOBOMiata]

I noticed your build thread is really detailed here. On CR it's straight to the point.