03DSGGT
SN95 Supporting Member
Well, today after almost a year of sitting in the air, I finally put the car back on the ground. For those of you that don't know the back story, last spring the car developed a pretty nasty tick. I was pretty sure that it was a bearing noise, because a couple of years ago, I bought a NPI junkyard motor, had all of the machine work done, and built my first short block, just to learn how to do it. I didn't want to mess up my 40K mile stock short block, so that was pulled and put in the corner. I bought all of the bearings in standard size and pre gapped rings, and threw it together, no checking clearances whatsoever. So after 2 years of drag racing and plenty of shifts in the 7K neighborhood, it was pretty believable that the tick was bearing related. Well, after pulling the engine out and tearing the shortblock down, all of the bearings looked fine. Some had more wear then others, but nothing spun. So I started pulling my Trick Flow heads apart, and found 2 trashed valve guides. I never thought to check the heads to begin with because they had less then 5K on them, and Ive never ran any sort of forced induction. SO, the heads went to Trick Flow, and they did some testing to try to figure out what had happened. In the meantime, I figured that I would build up the Teksid block that I have sitting in my garage for a few years. The plan was to do a big bore, high compression, carbed, N/A motor. I started collecting parts for the shortblock...forged rods, forged Cobra crank, bearings, gaskets etc. The build kind of came to a stop when I figured out that Im going to have to have a custom set of pistons made, which is pretty pricey, as well as sleeving and machining the block, not to mention a reputable shop to do the sleeving and machine work. So by that time, Trick Flow came through and hooked me up with a brand new set of heads and all of the gaskets to put them back on. That was pretty late in the year, and I knew that the car wasn't coming out for the rest of the season. Well, as we all know, being newly married and having bought a house a couple years ago, things come up, and projects get put on hold, which is what happened to my Teksid build. It was decided during this past winter to pull the stock shortblock back out of the corner, clean it up, plastigauge everything just to be sure, and throw my new Trick Flow heads on it. It killed me not to have it last summer, and I promised myself that Ill never go another summer without driving it. So I bought a larger set of cams (CMS Stage 3 N/A) and totally redid the rear suspension. I did a couple cosmetic things to the car as well. I got rid of the smoked tail lights for a set of 99/01 Cobra tails, had the trunk lid repainted all grey to get rid of the black painted tail panel, put in a set of stock headlights rather then the clear cornered headlights that were getting pretty nasty, and got rid of the Bullitt fuel door for the stock one. So here are a few pics of the car finally done and ready to go!
I have a brand new 99/01 Cobra front bumper in the box and I have an NOS in the box 99-04 V6 rear bumper that Im going to have painted next winter, then the outside should be complete. My current Cobra bumper has all been cut out underneath because the previous owner had an intercooler, so I want to have the extra support with the new bumper. I also upgraded my MGW shifter to the new style handle, and I painted some of my billet interior pieces in a flat aluminum, to kind of tone things down a bit, and I found a NOS Bullitt shift ball that I topped it all off with. Don't mind my nasty floor mats, I also have a brand new set of those that will be going in this summer...
I have a brand new 99/01 Cobra front bumper in the box and I have an NOS in the box 99-04 V6 rear bumper that Im going to have painted next winter, then the outside should be complete. My current Cobra bumper has all been cut out underneath because the previous owner had an intercooler, so I want to have the extra support with the new bumper. I also upgraded my MGW shifter to the new style handle, and I painted some of my billet interior pieces in a flat aluminum, to kind of tone things down a bit, and I found a NOS Bullitt shift ball that I topped it all off with. Don't mind my nasty floor mats, I also have a brand new set of those that will be going in this summer...
