I recently looked around on YouTube and Facebook and found 2 dyno videos of my car I hadn't previously seen. One was by Nick (Ov3n) on NECO taken at CougarFest last year and my tuner Smokey's Dyno.
Enjoy both below.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bTSyl7YMRIc
http://www.facebook....150385726081573
-Dom
I've been pretty blessed so far with my car and how many people really like it. It's one thing to mod a Contour, I've seen it done thousands of times. However, individual tastes are always hard to satisfy and I'm welcomed by the amount of people Non-Contour and Non-Ford that have commented on how nice and cool my car is. Peer support is always refreshing and uplifting... Even when you know your car looks good.. It's always nice to know that others think the same way.
The Mid Ohio SVTOA meet
Now who would've thought that the rotors could cause a vibration at 65 that felt like the wheel weights fell off? I do, cause that's what happened to me..lol.
New rotors came on Tuesday and installed that night. I test drove the car on the highway yesterday (weather permitting) and it drove smooth as glass on the highway - Something I've been missing for over 2 years.
All done now, time to move on...lol.
-Dom
The rotors. I wouldn't have counted on it, but after checking them for balance - It sure is. 3.0oz out on one rotor and 1.5oz out on the other. This is a manufacturing issue, there is no way aside from removing material from one part of the rotor (or adding material) where it could make up that much difference.
I'm speaking to Rick @ Baer customer service about this issue, I hope to have a decently amicable solution out of this. I'll post a result when I get it.
-Dom
So, another round of RoadForce balancing and having the wheels mounted to a fixture and checked with a dial indicator. All check out good and within specs.
But it occured to me that I've been overlooking one thing. Most of my balance issues started when I added the BAER kit. I'm assuming it's possible my 13" rotors are out of balance. It's not unreasonable to imagine this - And I'm going to take this one step further. Apparently on a 9700GPS Hunter balancer you can actually check balance on
Since it's spring, and I've been buried to my eyeballs in shop work - I need to keep on my own car to get some things straightened out.
First off, my wheels. This is year 2 of dealing with these wheels and not being able to balance them. I bought them brand new from Tire Rack, and have already warrantied the tires once (and switched brands just to take that out of the picture.). I had it a week at one tire shop, and second shop (Goodyear factory store) for another week and a half where they
Since the comment was made to me that Coil On Plug hinders tuning (and power) I decided to have a little fun and dyno my car before tuning (with COP) and after (without COP). I removed the COP system and built a custom bracket out of a Taurus coil bracket which hides the coil under the throttle body. I ran stock 2002 Cougar wires to the plugs and set out to see if there was an "improvement" by running regular DIS-6 vs. COP. I installed a brand new DIS-6 coil from Borg Warner just to make sure I
I doubt I need to say more. I was contracted to install a complete Ford Racing 550HP supercharger kit and other goodies. The install went fairly smooth (97 pages of install directions which weren't exactly complete from Whipple caused some issues). However, it turned out nicer than I would've ever thought - And boy did that Mustang fly!
I'll post the video of the dyno, dyno graph and a small gallery of shots. Enjoy!
-Dom
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fudBqGg2ArI http://www.yout
Yeah, I've been neglecting updates to my blog due to me being by myself for most of the time at the shop. But no worries, I'm above water again and will start posting regularly again soon.
In the meantime, I guess I should update with some projects I've been busy with over the past few months...
Next post.
-Dom
Yesterday I had a nice day to take out my SVT and actually get some decent seat time. I'm still in the process of bedding my brake pads and seasoning my rotors.. But I did have some time to take advantage of the traction control I added to the car.
First off, the Contour Traction Control module does not only operate the brakes to slow a spinning wheel. It also interacts with the PCM to retard spark timing to bring the engine power down to slow the wheels as well. I found this out pulling ou
I've had a transmission leak that has been screwing up my clutch over the last year. So, out with the engine and trans (again).
Here's a couple of pretty pictures of my engine sitting on the shop floor waiting for the trans to be re-attached.
-Dom
Here's a few pics that I will share of Irwin's Cougar. He's already in possession of his car, and enjoying it. Some of the aspects of this build are different from our others as I have been working on making the builds as user friendly as possible in the event of repairs in the future. Stock Taurus throttle cable, stock Taurus throttle bracket, Stock Taurus cruise control cable.. That's just a start.
Enjoy the pics:
-Dom
Waiting for the tuner, now I'm just more or less storing the two cars for the time being.
I've had members asking for pics of the Cougar and the setup used for a 3L install. I thought I covered this a while back, however this car is done a little differently than the last as it has a CAI and battery relocate.
Enjoy the pics.... I've included both motors with normal setup and more extreme setup.
-Dom
It's been a rough few weeks here lately, the weather hasn't let up and we've probably accumulated around 3 feet of snow total from the storms so far and another one is headed our way tonight for another 4-6"... Anyhow.
I have a couple of pics for my customers - Irwin and Mike. Both cars are pretty much finished and waiting for the tuner to re-open and get scheduled. The Cougar did somehow manage to spring a small P/S leak (which I thought was all fixed) so I get to take a look at that as wel
I've been away from the site for a while and now that things are starting to slow down a bit I have a little time to update some things real quick.
First off is a couple of pics of another Cougar I've had in the shop for a 3L. These pics were taken a few weeks ago (lol, my camera has all kinds of pictures on it from all dates..) . I'm sure Imadrid will be happy to see these as proof that his car is almost finished and hopefully if I track a couple of outstanding issues it will be tuned and
Yes, back to the exhaust shop - This time it's all good. Replaced the tinny, rattling Dynomax with a new Tru-X core dual-in/dual-out Magnaflow. Sounds perfect!
-Dom
So, I decided to quiet down my SVT as it was quite abnoxious....
I came across a new muffler from Walker, the Dynomax UltroFlow-X which is a muffler that acts like an X-pipe and quells noise. So... $250 later (installed) here is what I have to show for it :
Yeah, I'm seeing all kinds of shades of red right now - Not to mention they must've had a 5 year old welding the pipes because you can see the exhaust expelling water out of the joints (that are supposed to be welded!!!).
Ugghh
It's been a while since I've posted an update... Been by myself mostly at the shop as my apprentice has a new job overnights that now prevents him from putting time in at the shop. So... a full shop and all by myself.. Awesome!
Moving on... I've turned over 6 cars in the past 2 weeks (mostly minor repairs - i.e. airbags, suspension and such) and have been making steady progress on the 3L builds that are starting to wrap up. One of those is Mike's Contour. His engine/trans are all ready - As
Just taking a few minutes to post some recent pics from the shop and engine builds underway.
The flywheel pics are from a 2007 Honda Accord we had in the shop (a friend's grandfather's car). Honda wanted almost $900.00 to do the job, we charged $300... banged it out in 6 hours. Needless to say, we were heroes...lol. I included a couple of pics of how it cracked and seperated from the center hub and washer. I'm working on a wrecked 1998 Mystique lately, the valve cover had a hole in it and
Normally when I go to events and such I never get pictures of myself or my car. I'm used to it, I'm the behind the scenes guy getting everyone else their 2 minutes of fame. Now I'm not camera shy... but wow.. I was in alot of pics and didn't even realize it till I went through them all. Here's a short compilation of my pics of either me or my car at Cougarfest this year. Enjoy, I had a blast the whole time there.
-Dom
I've been away for a bit from the forums but I'm back! Anyhow, the forums software is getting a major overhaul (which I bet if you are reading this you already can tell). Certain parts of the site are still down.. (Classifieds, Time Slips...) but those will be back up shortly. My aim in all this is to streamline the site and make it more rich.. Some things you can see - Others you cannot. Recently I installed "Sphinx" search into our server which is a 3rd party search algorithm which categorizes
Well, sometimes they say that if you are wishing for it - you'll get it. The overall tone of the exhaust is good, however around 2400-2900RPM the system is pretty friggin loud. I imagine I will have to experiment with mufflers again to get this quieted down a bit, we'll see.
Here's some teasers of the exhaust installation:
-Dom
