As always, I wait til the last minute to work on my car before driving it out to the Carlisle All Ford Nationals which are coming up in 3 days. The car got pretty neglected during my very long manual swap so I've slowly been working at trying to tidy things up.
Currently I have to finish the following
- Flush/Refill trans with Amsoil
- Oil change
- Adjust ride height again
Here are some of the things I've added to my car to mix it up for this year ( I hear 3 turbo marauders are coming this year, 2 of them twin turbo, gotta stand out somehow)
Ridetech HQ front coilovers / rear adj shocks
I still have to play with the height on this, the car measured 27" from the ground to the top of the wheel well before with my previous lowering coils. I had raised these coils 4 full turns but after it settled the car is at 26 1/2". Still need to find another 1/2"
I have the car sitting on winter wheels while I await Detroit Wheel to finish doing the PVD chrome on the normal ones. 2 were widened by weldcraft
I also decided to finally fix another issue that was bothering me. One of my coil cover bolt holes got stripped out years ago because the powdercoater didn't cover them. The guy who originally tuned my car had used hardware store metric bolts to hold the cover on, I finally fixed it properly with a timesert kit and got these coil cover's I've been wanting for a while. My stock polished ones had seen better days during my manual swap.
Next on the list was replacing my factory pitted fog lights with new Morimoto LED fogs. For some reason, Lightwerkz now sells adapters to fit these to a Marauder, so I decided to try it out and see if that was actually true.
The last thing I did tonight was install a very rare prototype part that shouldn't even exist anymore. Some of you may remember me talking about the Marauder S55 prototype that I believe was at SEMA in 2002. The car had a totally different interior from the standard car and one thing that changed was the gauge cluster. The cluster managed to show up for sale on the marauder forum a while back posted by a guy who worked on the emissions side of the marauder team. I PM'd him and quickly bought it while people were still fighting over it in the FS thread. I had always loved the S55 prototype in high school so I'm very excited to have a piece of it in my car.
One thing that confused the hell out of me and I'm sure very few people outside of Ford knew about this, but the gauge faces have no green filter so it lit up amber. I have a feeling auto meter actually made these faces (as it says on the face) and auto meter gauges normally use bulb condoms to change the color.
I had to throw some green LED's in there to make it semi-normal looking again, I may experiment with putting LED strips in places to make the light more uniform and brighter, as well as bring the red back where it belongs.
I'll update the thread as days go by and the "to-do" list gets crossed off. I'm sure I ultimately won't get everything I want finished in time but I'll be satisfied if I make it there/back with no issues.
Currently I have to finish the following
- Flush/Refill trans with Amsoil
- Oil change
- Adjust ride height again
Here are some of the things I've added to my car to mix it up for this year ( I hear 3 turbo marauders are coming this year, 2 of them twin turbo, gotta stand out somehow)
Ridetech HQ front coilovers / rear adj shocks
I still have to play with the height on this, the car measured 27" from the ground to the top of the wheel well before with my previous lowering coils. I had raised these coils 4 full turns but after it settled the car is at 26 1/2". Still need to find another 1/2"
I have the car sitting on winter wheels while I await Detroit Wheel to finish doing the PVD chrome on the normal ones. 2 were widened by weldcraft
I also decided to finally fix another issue that was bothering me. One of my coil cover bolt holes got stripped out years ago because the powdercoater didn't cover them. The guy who originally tuned my car had used hardware store metric bolts to hold the cover on, I finally fixed it properly with a timesert kit and got these coil cover's I've been wanting for a while. My stock polished ones had seen better days during my manual swap.
Next on the list was replacing my factory pitted fog lights with new Morimoto LED fogs. For some reason, Lightwerkz now sells adapters to fit these to a Marauder, so I decided to try it out and see if that was actually true.
The last thing I did tonight was install a very rare prototype part that shouldn't even exist anymore. Some of you may remember me talking about the Marauder S55 prototype that I believe was at SEMA in 2002. The car had a totally different interior from the standard car and one thing that changed was the gauge cluster. The cluster managed to show up for sale on the marauder forum a while back posted by a guy who worked on the emissions side of the marauder team. I PM'd him and quickly bought it while people were still fighting over it in the FS thread. I had always loved the S55 prototype in high school so I'm very excited to have a piece of it in my car.
One thing that confused the hell out of me and I'm sure very few people outside of Ford knew about this, but the gauge faces have no green filter so it lit up amber. I have a feeling auto meter actually made these faces (as it says on the face) and auto meter gauges normally use bulb condoms to change the color.
I had to throw some green LED's in there to make it semi-normal looking again, I may experiment with putting LED strips in places to make the light more uniform and brighter, as well as bring the red back where it belongs.
I'll update the thread as days go by and the "to-do" list gets crossed off. I'm sure I ultimately won't get everything I want finished in time but I'll be satisfied if I make it there/back with no issues.
