I'm in Miami (my hometown) on vacation for a couple weeks and am helping my buddy install about 4500 bux worth of parts in his 91 LX 5.0 notchback t5 car
He probably had the last near stock one on earth.
This is the first time I've ever worked on one of these cars and wow, this thing is so simple its ridiculous.
Every part is packaged like it could be sold on the shelf of walmart, and with full instructions and details, most of the stuff he has purchased is part of just one huge kit from trickflow from the intake, heads, cam down to every last fastener.
It took us an afternoon to do the springs, shocks, and caster/camber plates... doing the front suspension on my Buick was about 100 times harder
We pulled it in the garage today to do the engine, started at like noon, by 8 the whole thing was torn down to the shortblock. This is working with an extreme lack of tools.
Im also noticing distinct similarities to GM cars. The rear suspension is almost exactly like a T/R except a TR doesnt hvae what they call "quad shocks"
The front suspension is almost exactly like my former thirdgen F body cars only it seemed less beefy, and the lengths of the a arm and tie rod are very short (cant be good)
The chassis looks like alot of thinly stamped steel, no wonder these things are light, a thirdgen k member looks like a slab of cast iron, on the stang it looks like body panel material lol
The engine accessory drive is EXACTLY the same as my thirdgen Fbody with serpentine setup. Their accessory brackets seem to be more of a hodgepodge of stamped metal parts bolted to eachother though whereas the f body uses two enormous cast AL brackets for everything
Engine wise there seem to be alot less bolts going on, obviously the heads, the intake came apart quick too.
a SUPER annoying thing is that so many plugs on these cars look exactly the same. On GM cars the plugs are all different so its impossible to even get confused. On top of that, every single ford plug has two clips, its extremely annoying taking off the plugs without breaking the clip on atleast one side.
Lets not forget the special fuel and AC line connections.. WTF?
I've been doing some research on stang boards too, trying to find out about their egr function... talk about commercialized, between every post is an ad for another cookie cutter bolt on guaranteed to give you x amount of hp in your 5.0. I knew their aftermarket was big, but its really just unbelievably big, to the point that parts have even generic brand knock offs of the real thing (he apparently has generic knock offs of FMS headers)
Just thought it was interesting to see that side of things, I've always owned gm cars where parts come in a plain brown box with either no instructions or really rudimentary instructions and alot of home made stuff. It seems like on a stang there is nothing you could think of that hasn't been tried before and is being sold for those cars
Its also not surprising why they are so light, they are really unsubstantial.
Fun to drive though, after we did the suspension i got to take it for a test run. Talk about oversteer happy! Im guessing thats a byproduct of what we did, everything I had previously heard was that they were big on understeer.
I liked these cars, I still do, but I could never own one... way too mainstream. If cars were music, mustangs would be top 40
