Exhaust 101

Even after realizing my exhaust leak in 2007, I didn't get around to fixing it until mid-2009, when I was living in Twin Falls and had lots of friends who wanted to help me work on my car. I bought some thrushes for Angel and they lasted me for about 3, maybe 4, months until i completely re-did my entire exhaust system, but there was a much needed reason for that...

 

Also while I was in Twin Falls I started to notice that my headlights were getting very, very yellow so I decided to drop some money on them as well, and let me tell you, that was possibly the best exterior investment I ever put into Angel. I never realized just what a new set of clear lights could do to brighten up the exterior of a car.

If this doesn't prove my point that a Fox needs new headlights I don't know what will.

Muuuuuuuch better

Cobra-esque

The first look I changed on the exterior of my car (besides paint) was the Cobra-Grill installation. I prefer to call it the "Pony-Grill" since there is no Cobra actually involved. 

This was obviously before paint, I laughed because it made my Mustang look like she had a 5'o clock shadow. At the same time i purchased my hood scoop from an '82 GT, so I painted the grille, scoop, and my cowl grille white at the same time. Also at this same time Angel had gotten backed into by a Durango, so we had to replace the drivers side fender as well.

It's hard to see in this picture, but the Durango hit me right behind the front wheel.

Here's my dad trying to rip the fender off the car.

I had to drive around like this for 2 days because I didn't have time to put the new fender on before I had to go to work

Also at this time I was literally trying to rip the luggage rack off (again trying to bring it into the 90's) I almost left the rear of the luggage rack on because I thought it looked cool. about two weeks later i realized that it didn't look cool at all.

As you can tell by these last two pictures I was having problems with my paint flaking on my bumper. This was later fixed when I learned the correct way to paint plastic parts. If you have any questions, just ask me.

Foxy Fun Time

Here are a few videos that I made of me racing and just doing some driving around. If you couldn't tell already, I love looking at my car, and therefore, love taking pictures and videos of it.

This was my first attempt at a video-recorder setup in Angel. 

My second attempt was a bit classier:

It's slightly difficult to see from this photo but I mounted a stud above the gauges 

were I can screw in any camera, video or still. Oh yeah. In-genius.

Now for the Videos

Race Car Ya Ya's

While I was attending Eagle High School I got together with my art teacher and started up our high school drag team to compete against the other schools in the area. Sadly we were the last school in our district to get into drag racing, and we started out with 5 members and increased it to 9 by the time I graduated high school. All the other teams had 20+ members. I was the president of the club until I graduated and I must say our team did pretty good for only having so few members. Our first year we finished 4th place, and 3rd place our second year. The year after I graduated we had 12 members and won 1st.

Here I am putting my headlight back in so I could get more 'airflow' into my filter. Don't waste your time, it doesn't really do anything.

First Performance Upgrades

My first 'performance upgrades' are so minor now that I look back on them that I almost shouldn't even bother posting about them. In all honesty my parent's wouldn't let me make any performance modifications while they were paying for my insurance, which is why I wisely spent my $800 on GT500 wheels and tires instead of buying a turbo kit, cylinder heads, or 5-speed transmission (even though a 5-speed doesn't make you any faster...hmmm maybe I should've put a T5 in it way back when...) so my first 'modification' was very minor in perfomance terms, but very large in my eyes. I bought a 'cold air' kit off of EBay for roughly $40 (pretty good price if you ask me) and had it shipped to me and installed it in the summer of '07 while my parents were on vacation. I'd heard people say that a cold-air intake was a good starting point and it truly is. I remember the throttle response being much quicker, and for the time, was good enough for me.

This is apparently the only picture I have of the first cold-air intake I put in my Mustang, which you can still barely see. It's odd for me to look at these old pictures and see things that are now non-existent on my Mustang, such as the air-conditioner (c'mon, I have a drop-top Mustang, who needs A/C?), the stock intake, and the old cai system.

Here are some more pictures of my other cai setups:

 This I had gotten from the PO (previous owner, not post-officer) and used for quite a while until I moved to Twin Falls, and tried a different setup (below)

 

This was a setup I had in '09 after the hood-scoop was installed. I really wanted (and tried my best) to make the hood scoop functional, as you can see from the tube and receiver box next to my intake. Needless to say, it failed horribly. I have since come up with another Idea on how to make use of my hood scoop, but I will talk more about that later. 

Needless to say this is my latest (and truest) cold-air intake system for my Mustang (now-dubbed "SC/302"), which I built myself under my company name NSP Motorsports. I will elaborate more on this system later.

My First Ideas

I soon realized that I wasn't going to stop working on Angel anytime soon, and I got carried away with ideas and was constantly drawing and looking at pictures of Mustangs to see what I liked and wanted to do to my own. I took pictures of my Mustang and modified them in MSPaint to see what ideas i liked and didn't like.

Well damn, I searched my entire computer and can't seem to find all the pictures that i worked with, which is a real shame because they're fun to laugh at, but it's also interesting to see what design cues i took with me and have applied today. I only found the picture above that I did towards the end of high school. At this point I was pretty set with how I wanted my car to look. I remember I had a few pictures where I wanted to install a Shaker hood on my car. Something I also considered was putting side stripes on Angel like the '84 GT350's, which i do have pictures of. I used a washable paint and taped off the stripes. As you can tell they didn't quite match the look I was going for:

In my honest opinion I think hood stripes look absolutely horrible on Fox-Body Mustangs. 

I think that if you had to have stripes on your Fox-Body that there  is only one way to do it where it would look alright, but I have yet to see anyone pull it off. If you want to know how I think they would look good, email me or comment on this post below.

Below are a few pictures of Mustang that inspired me throughout the years:

I've always liked the look of the gauges on the outside HVAC cowl, and I still want to put a hood tach on Angel like a classic GTO or '70 Mustang.

Out With the Old, In With the...Replacements

About a year or so after having Angel the shocks were just about gone, so I had to replace them. Thanks to my friend Clayton for helping me...and showing his butt crack.

Roughly the same time my AOD transmission dropped the 4th gear, and suffered with time-constraints I decided to put in another AOD instead of swapping to a T5 5-speed tranny. The replacement AOD lasted for about 2 years until the 4th gear was dropped from it as well. Lesson of the day: AOD's can't handle being raced around.

This was also when i discovered where my exhaust leak was coming from. I'm not sure what punctured that muffler, but it didn't look like fun.

Making People Angry

This was the first video I made with my car. Just my friend and me having some fun messing around. As you can tell...it pissed some people off...enjoy!

Meet Angel:

Here is Angel, my unsuspecting, once-innocent 1991 Ford Mustang LX. I got her when I was 15 just before I got my drivers license. It was the end of my Freshman year and I came home from a choir trip at 4:00AM,  we pulled into the driveway and I saw her sitting there just begging to be driven, that bright chrome 5.0 badge just staring me in the face saying 'race me'. I sat in her for a few hours just dreaming, waiting for the day I could actually drive her. 6 years later I was 21 and still had Angel, my first love, and the only one who loved me back as much as I loved her. She changed quite a bit over the 6-year period, but she always has been, and always will be a part of me.

 Here she is just after i got her. She wasn't too bad looking, and she was completely stock, but I already had plans for Angel. My first priority was to bring her out of the 80's and make her look more modern, so my first modifications were new GT500-style wheels and painting the black trim white.

 Fun in the high school parking lot

The came the fun part: Paint

Going In

Coming Out

The Finished Product:

At this point I thought I was mostly finished with Angel. Her trim had been painted white and I thought it made her look at least 5 years newer, just by appearance. I also filled in the "MUSTANG" lettering on the front and rear bumpers because I noticed that a lot of people didn't think it was a Mustang, but rather some sort of convertible Taurus (idiots). I changed my mind about the lettering after I got into college and removed the vinyl stickers that I had placed in there 3 years earlier. I wanted to add a Mach1 chin spoiler onto the front, but that was as far as I was going to go at that point...little did I know that it was only the beginning.