Greenbean - The 98GT - turbo 460 swap

I put a few bolts in the front accessory drive plate. It took a while to find bolts in the bolt box that were the right length and it was a little tricky getting the gasket to lay flat. Once the main bolts were in, I set the alternator on. Like the cam position sensor, I was concerned that the raised intake might present a problem, but it fit perfectly.



The next task was to index the trigger wheel for the crank position sensor. With a magnetic sensor like this it's pretty easy. The wheel is free to spin so with the engine at TDC, you just line up the proper tooth (5th one from the missing tooth for an EEC-V) and the magnetic field holds it there while you mark it. Then you pop it off and weld the wheel to the hatchet spacer. Easy peasy.

I also worked on the front engine accessory drive, mounting the harmonic balancer, spacer, crank pulley, idler pulley and belt tensioner.

Converter is in and the trans is on! It went together really easy. Almost time to drop it in. Just need the header adapter plates my friend is making for me an it will be ready.

E4OD controller mounted and transmission dipstick shortened. The dipstick was for a truck so it would have stuck out of the hood by a good 8". Haha.

BigBlockRanger wrote:Converter is in and the trans is on! It went together really easy. Almost time to drop it in. Just need the header adapter plates my friend is making for me an it will be ready.

Is that the Oil Pan that came with the Truck Engine?

Yeah it is the stock F-250 pan. Same pan that is used for Fox swaps.

BigBlockRanger wrote:Yeah it is the stock F-250 pan.  Same pan that is used for Fox swaps.

That's the same oil pan that i have on my 466 in my Mustang although i just bought the Canton 429-460 Fox Body Swap oil Pan to put on in the future!!

While Judd was grinding rivets to remove the ball joints on his car, I started on wiring the Optishift transmission controller.

Somewhat surprisingly, I had a hard time finding the correct wiring diagram for a 1998 Mustang GT. I finally bought a 1 month subscription at www.alldata.com and found everything I needed and more. $20 well spent.

The sucky part of this wiring project is that the ecu is in the passenger kick panel. I had to remove the passenger seat so I could get my big, stupid body in there to access the wiring. So far I have power, ground and the TPS connections soldered in.

Next challenge is getting a speed sensor signal to the ECU and to the Optishift. This E4OD does not have a speed sensor output so we have to come up with a work-around solution. This is the same problem we had to overcome with the F250 project. On it, we took a front wheel ABS signal, ran it thru a Ford F-250 PSOM, then it went to the ECU and Autometer speedometer.

If I am thinking correctly, we should be able to feed the rear ABS signal to the Optishift, and then use it to output the proper 8000 pulse per mile signal to the ECU.

When Plan B becomes Plan A. I was planning to use some adapter plates to bolt the standard 460 headers to the efi heads. I was not 100% convinced I liked the idea. Today, Is found some very thick washers the perfect diameter to fit in the header tube. I cut them, welded them in and ground down the welds. I will shape up the ports with the die grinder and surface them on the belt sander. Should be good to go with no additional width added to the engine.

Also, it is amazing how much easier it.is.to.weld wearing my reader glasses. Haha. Getting old sucks.

I finished up the headers. I am really happy with how they turned out. I installed them and then we decided to try to drop the engine in the car.

We (Judd, Jonathan and me) struggled with it quite a bit. We pushed and pulled, jacked and pried, but could not get it to move back and drop over the engine mounts. Then I noticed that there was a tab on the side of the E4OD that was hitting the firewall. I was tired of messing with it so we quit for the day. Once I trim that tab off, it should slide back and drop over the mounts This AJE k-member has engine mounts that looks nice but are really hard to deal with.

I think it was a good call on not using a header adapter plate. I doubt the engine would have fit with the headers on. It is really tight going in.





In retrospect, had I not modified the engine mounts to move the engine 3/4" farther to the rear, the engine would already be bolted in the car.... Oof. Haha.

And it's in! I sawed the offending tab off, which is waaaay easier said than done, and wiggled it back and over the mounts. Slipped a bolt in each side and let out a sigh of relief.

Man, what a pain. I started working on the steering shaft and it quickly became evident that there was no way it was going to fit. Not even close. Like several inches off. I have had plenty of trouble in the past getting the steering shaft to fit thru these Hooker 6224's. It wasn't a huge problem with the old QA-1 kmember that offset the engine to the pass side (like stock). But when I went to a motor plate that centered the engine, it was a huge problem. It appears that this K-member centers the engine as well. I am sick of fighting them. I think I am going to cut the #7 header tube and reroute it to create a much larger space for the steering shaft. #7 has been bashed on a lot to make the shaft fit. The #5 tube may need to be massaged a little as well, we'll see. Luckily the header basically falls out of the car and luckily Judd has a 460 head I can bolt them to while cutting and welding.

#7 tube chopped out of the way. Slipped header back in. #8 tube is going to need a big-ish dent to clear the frame rail because of the engine offset, (or lack thereof.) #5, #6 & #8 will all clear the steering shaft fairly nicely. I think #8 will fit better when I drop the back of the transmission down just a little. It is currently as high as it will physically go. Dropping it a little with also improve access to the electrical connector on the top of the E4OD's MLPS, which incidentally got crushed when we installed the engine and trans. Luckily I have a spare.

Worked on the adapter plate for the throttle body a little today. It was going great until I realized I drilled and tapped the TB flange holes 90°off. Nice. That would be great if I wanted a forward facing TB, but if I did that, absolutely nothing else would fit properly. Looks good though. Haha.

I figured out that if I rotated the throttle body elbow slightly, the diagonal bolts would line up with a couple of holes. So I marked two more holes, drilled and tapped them. The rotation is not really noticable.

I cut the big hole in the TB adapter plate today. It cut pretty easily with a coarse blade in a jigsaw. The trick is to use a little WD-40 and it cuts real easy and nice. Then I took the die grinder and cleaned it up. I am very happy with how it turned out even though the TB is rotated a skosh.

Overhead shot so show throttle cable routing.

Man this has been a great project to keep up with !! I cant wait for the intial startup !!

Header is finished and installed.  It was quite a job getting all the tubes in, and the steering shaft threaded through everything.  At one point I was not sure I was going to be able to do it.  There's just no room to work down in there.  I ended up putting studs in the head for the hard to get at locations and that helped tremendously.  It's sort of a catch-22 because the studs make aligning the header easier, but they also make it harder to wiggle the tubes in.  

Anyway it's finally done and I can move on to making the transmission mount.

The stock transmission mount won't work with the E4OD. It will bolt to the trans, but would require considerable modification to attach to the car and have clearance for the exhaust. So I busted out my modified pipe bender and bent a piece of tubing to have a U dip in it. The bender really works better with larger diameter tubing but the bends turned out acceptable. It looks like I made it and I'm ok with that. lol I still have to make a bracket that attaches to the car's subframe on either side. I'm still deciding how I want that to look.

How it fits in car so far.

I finished the transmission mount for the E4OD.  It is just made from junk I had lying around.  It's not perfect but it'll do.  I need to paint it and I might weld the brackets to the subframe.

It looks like it's going to hang down quite a bit. The trans mount looks to be very tall. Any way to modify / shorten it so the trans crossmember does'nt need to hang so low?

The angle of the pics make it look like it is hanging low, but it is at least a couple to three inches higher than the bottom of the headers. A 3" pipe coming straight out of the collectors will pass right under the crossmember. The trans is as high in the chassis as it can be without modifying the floor pan.

Painted and installed. I also picked up a belt for it, which is actually for a 2006 Mustang GT.

Transmission crossmember in relation to trans pan and Hooker headers.

Cool. Yeah, from this angle I can see that it tucks up more nicely under there! I like the progress you are making!