Lonnie
Blue Oval Chips
Brad A (twistngo) from the CVN site had brought his 00 P71 Crown Vic to me for the initial tuning. This was the first install attempt of this particular supercharger system in any Panther platform. Tork Tech Brad has posted his install procedures in another thread so if you want particulars on the actual install look here. Tork Tech install thread This supercharger can also be made to work in the Lincoln Town Car as to why I’m posting the results here. The battery must be relocated to the trunk.
I had to work this between the clean up and repairs from the storm damage at the shop besides reconstruction so I wasn’t able to devote all the time I wanted to this project. I was able to go over several areas to ensure installation was safe, mechanics and electrical. I did have a few surprised but all in all it was pretty good install.
I didn’t like the idea of having an open element air filter stuck in hot engine compartment even if the setup was inner cooled. So I built a real CAI for this setup that shouldn’t be to hard to reproduce since I made some templates. The filter is now inside the fender and completely enclosed from any water/dirt spray from off the front tire and road. It gets it’s fresh air supply from the opening at the bumper. With that tackled and all the induction air leaks taken care of it was on to some of the electrical problems.
You can not use the stock alt. discharge cable, it’s just too short. If you do the only routing is dangerously close to one of the idler pulleys to which I found will rub and cut through the cable. Luckily this was one of the first things I spotted when Brad dropped it off. Any further run time and it would have been a melt down.
The location of the coolant tank hinders the effectiveness of the coolant system since it sits too low to allow the system to be fully filled. So what you end up with is a large pocket of air so that the Tstat never actually senses coolant temp. In turn the actual coolant temp ends up being much hotter before the Tstat opens. This can be taken care of by installing one of the older style tanks over on the passenger’s side fender and making the tank the high point like it should be. With us Town Car owners, I’ll have to look at how to approach this since our windshield washer is taking that location. It shouldn’t be too difficult to come up with a solution though.
There were a few other changes that needed to be done but I will be taking those up with the manufacture. I’m still working out the details on this and will be offering the kits here in the near future. They are very interested in marketing a kit that will work in the Panther platform. And now that AED is out of business there really is no direct bolt in kit for these anymore.
As for the dyno results; our main concern for now was a safe tune so that Brad could break the engine in. This engine had next to zero miles the freshly built short block. So the first concern was getting the a/f back to a safe ratio. Someone had lowered the car lift for the dyno down onto the wide band cable and sensor crushing it prior to me using it. The damage was bad enough that it required all new parts. So I ended up using my portable wide band for the a/f and why you don’t see it on the graph. The a/f was kept at 11.6 – 12.0 throughout. After the break in and the new parts are installed for the wide band on the dyno I will tighten up the curve.
Now Brad had the heads cleaned up slightly and they removed the swirl damn in the combustion chambers. This can be seen in the torque curve at the 2000 rpm range. These swirl damns promote low end torque so removing them you give up some low end for increased top end flow. I’ve addressed this already and once it’s back on the dyno I can more thoroughly evaluate it. Some would think there was a centrifugal SC installed if they weren’t told, they leave the same signature.
This was the base kit and so boost level is advertised at 9 psi. The most seen was 8 in this setup. But remember boost is basically a measurement of restriction. With the heads being ported your boost level will decrease.
Timing for now was kept down also since we wanted something conservative for the break in. The fuel was 93 pump gas, no additives so I could have put more timing in. The other thought was with his coolant system not up to specs why chance it.
If you take a look at the print out you will see the shop was 106 degrees. Even with 3 fans running we couldn’t get the place cooled down under 104. With that high of ambient temps the inner cooled air was 144. I have a plan on this also if Brad allows me to make some changes. Engine coolant temp I was amazed at stayed right around 180. But I think this was more due to the fact that since the coolant system wasn’t fully filled and there was no way to fill it completely with the tank being installed too low I didn't allow the engine to idle very long. Start it, make a pull and shut it off. So what I did in the mean time was used a thermal coupling on the lower lines and monitored it that way to be safe besides the data logging.
All in all with all the obstacles I think the setup performed very well.