Has anyone ever bored out a Mustang LX I4? If one overhauled the engine, boring it out to 2.5 or 2.6L, milled the head, did a stage 2 cam swap, and installed dual Webber carbs + header + dual straight pipes with glasspacks, and .373 gears, what kind of HP/ weight ratio/ fuel economy would I be looking at? I believe the four cylinder has potential without turbo but reducing weight is probably the most crucial part. Any thoughts?

 

Well, if you want some pep out of your 2.3 with out going to turbo, here's some thoughts...

Keep the cam you have. It will produce more power than most people give it credit for.

If your looking into more displacement, check out the 2.5's they used to put in rangers. Same block, same bore, but its a stroked unit. Grab a short block from a 2.5 ranger, or seeing how you are already a small journal bearing engine (assuming its the 93 in your profile) you can grab the 2.5 internals and swap them into your block.

Don't be afraid to get a little involved and dirty. Porting and polishing the head, along with the intake and exhaust manifold can do wonders!

3.73 gears are a bit too low in my opinion for a decent streetable car. 3.55's will give you plenty of pep without having to spin 6,000rpm going down the highway.

Your biggest downfall in all of this is the stock ECU. Those computers are a turd. If it were me, I would not even think about the webber set up (even though its cool as hell!) and check out Stinger Performance and get his PiMP ECU. It is a speed density set up, so you can ditch the MAF, it is fully tuneable, costs less than what you will more than likely have into finding a webber set up, and best of all... Plugs right into your factory 60 pin ECU harness.

I don't know what kind of power gains you will actually get, but you will notice a HUGE difference with these mods, and be right around the price you would be doing it the way you had mentioned.

 

Why would you want to go from Mass air to speed density? Mass air allows your to swap cams without totally screwing up your motor. Please explain the benifits of speed density

 

Mass air is good for those who don't want to have to tune every time they do a big change. It will allow you to do more to the engine with out having to tune every time. However, computer calculation times are a bit slower and a SD set up, and its another sensor to have to worry about.

I personally like the speed density better because you need to tune with every major upgrade. You force your self to learn how your fuel injection works, and you can get the most out of your upgrade that way. They are generally cheaper/easier to get up and running and fairly simple to tune. Because the SD system reads off tables you put in, calculation times are much quicker within the computer.

Besides, a lot of the guys in the 4 cyl mustang crowd run SD so you have a lot of support to help you out if you run into problems. And if you wanted to make an upgrade to a stock mass air 4 cyl mustang with out changing the stock tune, I think you would be disappointed.

 

So can a stock SD ECU be tuned? Would i see a performance gain just by going to SD on my stock 8 plug 2.3? I don't mean to bombard you with questions haha. I've been looking into this for a lil whiles...

 

You can tune a stock ECU, kind of. You can either make a chip for it, or get a piggy back system like a Moates Quarterhorse.

 

So what could i exspect to see out of a piggy back set up like this one? Would i be able to make the stock MAF accept the boost?