eddioso

I have a 98 GT manual with just a cold air intake and flowmaster cat back. There seem to be a few different ways to go with upgrades so I'd some opinions on which way to go.

Full length headers plus H pipe? If so which brand to match my flowmaster cat back?
Full PI head swap? is it worth the cost?
Cam swap and intake manifold swap on my stock heads?
New plenum and throttle body ? best makes for stock intake?

What have people out there done with their stock 98 GT's without breaking the bank.

mrtstang

Gears and tune. After that, full exhaust, and either a pi swap, or some good cams with a pi intake would be best imo.

02stang2113

Do a pi swap first imo then gears

dr.apex

How many miles are on the car? No sense in doin mods on the car if its got high mileage. Depending on what you want the end result to be. You should start out with the bottom end, then the top. Once you have a good strong motor.....then you do your mods.

teej281

^Wrong. If youre doing cams, youre probably going to do most of the stuff that would fail for high mileage anyways. I mean you still gotta worry about the bottom end but the valvetrain is going to be overhauled. But yea, you'll be fine. People put blowers on motors with 150k miles and they run fine. So with that said, do either a full pi swap or get a pi intake manifold or replacement intake manifold like the edelbrock or trickflow track heat intake manifold and some npi cams with valvespring upgrades. You could use some stage 2 n/a cams or if you want to do a blower in the future, you could do some stage 2 blower cams.

dr.apex

those people are the exact idiots im talkin bout. Then they try to push a 200 shot or 18+lbs of boost, blow the motor and wondered what happened.

I guess thats good advice if you're into half-assin it.

teej281

Wow are you ignorant. Anyone with a stock shortblock should never put a 200 shot or 18lbs or more of boost through that stock motor, no matter if its brand new or has 300,000 miles. Stock motor shouldnt be pushed past 150 shot or 10-11 lbs of boost...and that is QUITE a lot for a stock bottom end to handle. Our motors have been shown to hold about 10lbs of boost or slightly more or about a 150 shot. JayC is running stage 2 cams and a 150 shot of nitrous if i recall correctly. Other people are doing some similar setups just fine. And some of them are at or above 100,000 miles and are doing just fine.

98redstang

1. If you have enough money do the pi swap first. Than i would go with the gears. and than the headers and go for an o/r h pipe with the flows trust me =). Dont worry about tb and pl they dont really do anything unless your blown.

2. If your on a tighter budget i would definatly go with gears first. Our year has 2.73s stock. So youll notice a huge difference with the gears. I got my headers and midpipe for 400 on craigs. So you could do that after the gears. And than once you save up more go for the pi swap.

The biggest difference your going to see is with the gears and the pi swap. Its gonna be like a whole new car.

dr.apex

First of all, there is no need for the name calling. Second of all, it's about time you understood my point.
Most people start out with the regular ol run of the mill bolt ons for more power. After they get there, 99% of the time they figure out that they want more.
So the advice I gave gives that person a head start on the right way to get to your ultimate goal. that way, when you get to the point where the lil sissy 150shot or girly 10lbs of boost just wont do, you now have the ability to run a big boy shot of go go juice or boost.

teej281

If youre going to do the pi swap, you might as well do the npi aftermarket cams and a pi intake and you'll keep your compression ratio incase you want to run a blower in the future and you'll have the benefits of the pi swap without having to remove the heads and all that install.

dr.apex, you really havent been in the mod motor world for long have you??? Bolt-on's are really kinda pointless when you can put nitrous or a supercharger on for reasonably cheap these days. You can put a supercharger on the car for about the same price as full bolt-on's. So its kinda pointless to do bolt-on's first and end up with 250-260rwhp when you could do a supercharger and have 350rwhp. Then when thats not enough, just start doing the bolt-on's and they'll seem worth the money due to the supercharger being there. And if you do the supercharger first, that could be more than you'll ever want so you have no reason to spend any more money. So why spend all the money on bolt-on's and then the supercharger when you could be happy with just the supercharger and dont need the bolt-on's to be happy.