Cars

In July 2019 I bought my 1966 Ford Mustang coupe and started the process of restoring it to working order and eventually to be nice to look at as well. I bought the car non-running and after it had been sitting for many years and not used much even before then. I did not have much of a chance to work on the car that summer before heading to college so all I did was find a replacement set of cylinder heads from a 68 mustang and start to diagnose the issues that were screaming loudly. It was very apparent that the car was dragging to a halt under internal friction and had no chance of actually running without a significant amount of work. Seen below is the car in its initial condition and some of the work I was able to get done that summer, including a camshaft swap, changing the cylinder heads, and replacing the timing gear.

In the summer of 2020 was when I would finally get the Mustang on the road and roaring to life. To start with, I replaced the hood with a nice new one as the reproduction one mounted had been bent and rusted beyond repair. Next was the process of the complete mechanical overhaul of the car, the only things being untouched to this day is the steering box and the differential. To start with the motor was pulled, taken apart, and inspected. What had clearly occurred is that the oil pump drive had fallen out during the previous owner's cylinder head swap so the engine had no oil pressure for every attempted start and was completely ruining all of the internals. When the transmission was refreshed with new seals it was found that the rear output shaft seal had been simply hammered into the transmission and was being chewed up by the gears, as seen below. The steering linkage was simply missing most of the castle nuts to hold any of it together, so it was ready to kill me if I had ever tried to drive it on the street. Finally, the oddest of the issues was the complete lack of the front passenger wheels bearings, they were completely gone, not worn apart, gone, never even installed.

Before doing most of the work on the Mustang I built an appropriately large workbench in my garage. It is completely overbuilt but could easily hold an engine block on any of the shelves, which was a potential reality for this project. The design was made in AutoCAD which allowed for a simple materials list creation and a great design reference to experiment with changes in height and size. I also worked on this project from this point forward with a fantastic mentor and friend of my dad who had spent most of his life working on old Fords and building race exhausts. Aside from machine work, he and I have done all of the work on the car.

The engine was machined and the bottom end was built for mild street performance and all parts were balanced. Before placing the engine back in the car, all of the steering linkages were replaced, the wiring was cleaned up and some rust dealt with, and many broken elements of the interior were replaced (such as a destroyed pedal assembly). The transmission was cleaned up and both the fluids in it and the differential were changed. All of the wheel bearings were replaced and packed full of grease. I replaced the horrible skinny tires and mismatched wheels with aluminum alloy wheels and summer tires which dramatically changed the handling and looks of the car. We assembled the engine with all newly machined parts and painted it all to the original Ford colors. The only fabrication that had to be done till this point was new supports for the radiator that returned the airflow to close to the original and better support for the new radiator. The sheet metal supports were made by using cardboard-aided design, transferring that to AutoCAD, and then taking the DXF file to my local metal shot to have it cut with their plasma cutter, then bending it in their sheet metal brake.

Sadly after assembling the motor, getting the car running, and driving for around 750 miles, an apparent ring gap issue came up and the cylinders were being excessively oiled causing carbon buildup on the valves and oil soak on the spark plugs. The motor was pulled and taken back to the machine shop for diagnostic and rebuild, and at the same time, the course of the build changed from my original goal. Up until this point, I was going for simple stock like street performance, but with the engine taken back apart I decided to convert the motor and cylinder heads to a hydraulic roller camshaft instead of flat tappet, higher performance intake, and general improvements to make it more fun and a little more reliable. At the same time to deal with the rapid shifting required to drive it on the street, I changed the close-ratio 4-speed to a 90s model 5-speed with an overdrive gear. The original suspension was hard as a board in the front and far too loose in the rear so I replaced all of the springs and struts with modernized equivalents with adjustable damping. The steering wheel was also replaced to make it more enjoyable to drive and safer. This is where the project currently stands as I wait for the machine shop to find replacement cylinder heads for an odd error that was made when machining for the roller cam conversion.

While in high school I purchased my 1983 Honda Civic for $500 as a project to start learning about cars and having a lot of fun. To start with I had to get it ready for a Smog test which involved working on the vacuum system, distributor, and fixing the rusted out muffler, and by fixing I mean welding on a straight piece of pipe to let that 59 HP flow freely.

My goal for the Civic was to have a fun car to go blast down gravel roads (slowly) and learn about automotive aerodynamics. The first modification I made was a simple ducktail spoiler mounted to the rear trunk lid. To determine the height of the spoiler I used a very basic 2D CFD software and recreated the cross-section to look at the flow characteristics. Now I won't kid myself and say that this spoiler did anything noticeable, for the aggressive rear window slope I would have needed to mount a wing around two feet above the rear and be going faster than the 4-cylinder motor could propel this car. All that the spoiler did was make the rear end a little less drag-inducing and mostly looked cool. See below are images from my mounting procedure which involved using roofing sheet metal and hardware store parts.

The next evolution was to make the Civic look nicer, run cooler, and increase its rally ability. Seen below to the left was the very crude rear diffuser I made to help smooth out the airflow that was disturbed by the trunk and gas tank, which in reality likely did very little but had a noticeable effect on the dust plume behind the car at high speeds as the car propelled dust up into the air from underneath. The next was to make it more usable, which involved adding front mounted fender mirrors, a large interior panel mirror, and mud flaps. The last modification I did was to remove almost everything off the front end to allow the radiator to take in as much air as possible and make room for mounting two large Hella lights for off road use. At the same time I also added a rigid front air dam to stop some air and other debris from getting under the car.

Shortly after I set my eyes on a pre-smog vehicle as I realized that there was very little I could do with the Civic to increase its performance while still passing smog every two years.

As a daily driver, my C30 has not been as extravagant of an adventure as my Mustang or Civic, but I have had a lot of fun over the past few years tailoring it to my needs. My initial plan was to create a fun and fast car for the street by lowering it on performance suspension, tuning the engine and exhaust, then any other modifications I saw fit. First, I swapped the wheels and tires for lighter weight wheels and newer high performance all season tires but those were rather quickly bent out of shape by the harsh roads so I decided to go in the opposite direction from what I was planning. Once I had my Mustang as a performance vehicle for the street and potentially track use, my C30 needed to be my go-anywhere vehicle to get to bike trails and campsites. Seen below are a selection of the modifications I have made so far, with the most current configuration with all-terrain tires, small wheels, and a thick aluminum skid plate.

The next steps for the C30 are unclear at this point, as the project has no end goal, just small changes as I need them. Most likely the changes to come soonest are inverted strut long travel coil overs, an AWD conversion using a donor car, and lighting updates to make it better in the wilderness. The coil overs will be bolt-in while the lighting and AWD will require some fabrication. The AWD swap is rather easy as far as AWD swaps go, it requires a donor S40 or V50 (sedan and wagon that are on the same chassis) that is already AWD then swapping all of the necessary components over to the C30, then routing a splicing wiring and fabricating a custom exhaust.

At some point there could be replacement of the small original turbo with the larger turbo which was used on the Ford Focus RS from Europe that shared the chassis and engine from the Volvo C30. Similar to the Mustang, I would also like to work on the aerodynamics in some way, likely a different rear wing or changes in the aerothermal systems.