Ecomodding a 2.3L fox body mustang. Project "show me the carfox"

[radioranger]

2.3's same as the one in my 88 ranger and great motor , you will pick up some fe by running it about 1/3 quart down on oil Never overfill it, ,and replace the pcv valve often , they clog and instant oil leak, also spray some cleaner through the intake every so often, def help there, the rear diff would like th redline lightweight shockproof oil , another sure bet , they get over 38 mpg highway with the five speed pretty easy .

[R.W.Dale]

Lol I was going through my favorites list in my phone and remembered this thread and thought it'd be fun to give an "update"

Shortly after my last posts the transmission started to go out, being dissatisfied with the cars lack of power and mpg hankering for another project it became the perfect excuse to do something radical.

So the car got an all aluminum vortec 5.3 with a th400 trans carberated with a pretty healthy cam.

Needless to say the little mustang has some serious punch under the hood. And while it's an ecomodding step backwards it will still be interesting to get this new powertrain combination running as efficiently as possible. One thing I've recently discovered that held the car back before in the mpg department was that it has 4.10 gears in back, a set of 3.27 cogs are planned to improve mileage and hwy driveablity.

Other plans are a wideband gauge and some sort of GPS based speed/odometer unit to replace the old smartphone mounted onto the dash servicing those functions currently.

[American Viking]

Well I typed long list of stuff to try since I've had an '87, '88, '93 and '90 Mustangs all with the 2.3l.
Only the '87 was an automatic and it pretty much turned me against automatics forever (try 4 transmission replacements under warrantee over 31 months and 24,000 miles - then when I finally got smart bypassed the dealer and got a new trans from a local transmission shop. Only to have Ford finally had a recall on the overdrives that kept failing a few weeks later).

I'm not one that is big on cross make swaps. Here is an example of how I upgraded my 2.3l mustangs.
The 88 coupe I drove to 130,000 miles, where #3 cylinder failed a section of the top ring put paid to the engine.
Rather than spend a chunk of dough just to get back a 2.3l four, I jumped in with a big lump of backyard engineering and swapped a 3.8l supercharged V6 from a '90 Ford Thunderbird Supercoupe into it.
I loved it, the wife hated it, and my youngest son's first sounds were vroom-vrroooom.