New shoes for the car, more brake stuff, new tools, moar fluid swapping!
Sounds like a epic night of listening to Daft Punk at the local club dancing the night away! Sadly not that entertaining. In this installment we'll cover the new wheels and tires going on and initial impressions of them, the stainless steel brake line install and brake fluid flush, manual transmission fluid swapping and a few new fun tools to make the work less painful!
New Shoes! In the previous posting I showed you what the new wheels looked like but I didn't show you the tires or them on the car! To recap, the wheels are 18x10 ET43 SVE Drifts in Dark Stainless. They are 24lbs each and while not the lightest, the price to performance ratio was hard to beat for a wheel that was in the $170 per wheel range. Contrast that with the half inch wider and 2lb lighter PF01's common on ESP Mustangs that are over double that price per wheel.
It took a while for me to find a suitable location to take some photos but I finally got the car cleaned up, the new wheels and tires installed and dug the camera out of its hibernation. Here is what they look like on the car!
I really enjoy the way the wheels look.on the car. While I don't mind the shiny chrome factory "Bullitt" wheels, the excessive use of "look at me" chrome on competition vehicles is just asking for trouble. Add in brake dust and they are a pain to keep looking nice. Black, is also the wrong color for this car. It mutes the side profile of the car far too much and makes it look incomplete. There are a few Dark Candy Apple Red Mustangs that can pull off black wheels but my car isn't one of them. These wheels are somewhere between the two, almost like a tinted chrome paint. It is black in some light, chromish in some light and anthracite in other light. It is just a cool color and it is the right combination of subtlety and taste.
It also isn't a color you see used on the S197 very frequently. In fact I struggled to find photos of these wheels before purchasing them. I bought them more on a whim. Sure there are "gunmetals" out there which are more gray than silver that look good too. It really is just hard to describe these wheels accurately and I really like it! In the brief days I had them on the car to get the mold release off the tires the number of complements, thumb ups and looks increased quite heavily. Which is great in my opinion! Let them look! I do feel like the car might need to be lowered slightly to take some of the wheel gap away. It doesn't look too bad at the moment but these 25.9" tall tires really do add wheel gap where the taller 245/45/18 ZI Star Specs I have on my stock wheels fill the wheel wells better.
Of course those "meats" also added almost an inch of tire width to the ground which should really help this car scoot around corners. Initial driving impressions are really odd. The RS3V2 has less steering precision than the narrower 265/40/18 RS3V1's I used the previous two years. They are incredibly numb on center and you can really feel the sidewalls moving around. Tire pressure is at 32 PSI for each corner so that may have to go up to compensate for that some. There is a slight, and I do mean slight, rub at full lock with these wheels and tires. I'm half tempted to buy a 5mm spacer for up front to cure this and bring the front wheels out to a more "flush" look. Then my car would be stanced yo!
So as many of you guys know, Kelly Aiken at BMR Suspension was supposed to be getting me one of their new chassis mounted watts linkages to test against the Fays2 unit currently on the car. Their unit has undergone some design changes and Kelly assures me this latest revision to the frame is the production spec unit. That should mean that I will have the BMR Chassis Mount before the first season's autocross on April 11th and 12th.
Beefy! Also looks to be pretty lightweight and have plenty of room for swaybar clearance and over axle pipe clearance (not that this is an issue with the Fays2). Kelly says the upper most hole for the center pivot is about the axle centerline when the car is lowered 1.5". I'm a good bit lower than 1.5" in the rear of this car so we'll see how it compares to the Fays2 upper hole when the unit arrives.
I plan on fully testing the new BMR unit on April 11th and 12th. The 11th is the Nebraska Region's Test'n'Tune out at the Lincoln Air Park. The 12th is the first points event of the season. The new tires will be scrubbed in, brake pads tested ad naseum and this watts link should be tested too! :)
Speaking of brakes, in the last update I showed you the newly installed Carbotech 1521 "Bobcat" pads front and rear with Centric Rotors. I also purchased Goodridge Stainless Steel brake lines, some Valvoline DOT3/DOT4 brake fluid the Motive Power Bleeder and a bleeder catch bottle. The install for the Goodridge lines is extremely painless. The Motive Power Bleeder made bleeding the brakes an absolute breeze too! I'm going to start adding brake fluid swaps to the every other year maintenance list. The brake fluid that came out of lines was chalk full of contaminants and was nearly black at times. Waaaay too long to wait to swap the fluids (nearly 6 years).
Some will probably wonder why the Valvoline DOT3/DOT4 fluid. The biggest reason was local availability. Another reason is the absence of a need for anything more heat tolerant than a fresh DOT3 fluid. I've never had brake fade while autocrossing or driving so I really don't see the need to spend big bucks on expensive fluid that needs more frequent maintenance when a cheaper alternative works just as well for my needs without breaking the bank or requiring special maintenance proceedures.
The end result was far less fortunate and nice though. Everything went well with the swap so no issues there. It did not, however, take care of the pedal effort I was experiencing with the new Carbotech 1521 pads. The 1521 pad compound is heavily oriented towards street driving and I figured they'd be about on par with stock. They will lock up the brakes just fine but you really have to get on the pedal to get them to do so. Really they just lack the initial bite that I like in the factory brake pads. I'm sure these pads will be better for modulation though so we'll give them a fair shake before we start looking to step up pad compound to the AX6 compound.
With the new Motive Brake Bleeder kit and the brake fluid catch bottle, I also purchased a DeWalt 1/2" electric cordless Impact that uses the same 18V batteries as my cordless drill uses. I have access to air tools but my air compressor is pretty small and doesn't like being used too much. This makes it good for basically removing lug nuts (one wheel at a time) and making a lot of noise. I hope to address that issue when I move into a house on a permanent basis. The electric impact has the longevity my current air setup doesn't have. It outputs 300lb/ft of torque which is more than I need it to output and it uses some pretty common batteries for other tools I have. Well worth the investment and it should make making changes at the Test'n'Tune coming up a lot easier!
The last bit of maintenance I performed was a fluid swap in the Tremec 3650 5 speed Manual Transmission. Ford puts ATF in these transmissions (Mercon V ATF to be specific) and the result is some pretty gritty, notchy and nibbly shifts. I've grown accustomed to how it shifts (requires laboring shifts when at high RPM) but really I wanted to smooth things out. Tremec recommends GM Syncromesh, which is rare as hens teeth and comes in about 8 dozen different forms from what I've read. They recommend Penzoil Syncromesh as an alternative to the GM stuff (it is probably the same stuff really) and the swap was pretty straight forward. Out comes the red ATF, in goes the clear brown Syncromesh. End result was a much smoother shifting transmission. You can feel how much slick the shifts are when you move the shifter. It didn't cure the notchy, nibbly or gritty shifts but it reduced it to a more manageable level. A short throw shifter would be a good investment but it is really low on the mod list at the moment!
Last bit of prep I have to do is a coolant flush and an oil change and this car is ready for the next season! I keep listing out what all if left to do before this car is "prepped" and really the list is getting short enough where we are almost to the "point of diminishing returns" on parts purchasing. There are three major items left on the list: Seats, Battery and finishing up the exhaust (longtubes and high flow cats). After that we are really nit picking allowances for minimal gains (accessory pulleys and the like). The direction of this car can go any number of different ways. STU for sure this year and probably next if the tires hold out that long but I have not ruled out CAM from the list of places to end up either. We'll see how STU goes before making that decision.
Speaking of decisions! I'm also looking for a Co-Driver for Spring Nationals, Nationals and possibly the Midwest Divisional Championship. I'm pretty easy going but I am looking for someone who can really show what the car is capable of. If you are interested, track me down on one of the various forums I'm on and let me know!
That's all for now! Next update will most likely be after the 11th/12th of April!
