NDog52's 1986 NA 5.3 Build - A Summary

Hi guys,

My name is Nathan. I'm from the Okanagan valley in BC, Canada. I've been lurking behind the scenes on this forum for the past several years, posting here and there but mostly just researching old topics and current build threads during the course of my build. There are a ton of experts here with plenty of knowledge! For a guy who's never taken on a project anywhere near this level of scale, your help has been invaluable. Huge shoutout to Kent at TPC, Raymond-p, Gutterboy and HotRodz of Dallas to name a few. [You must be registered and logged in to see this image.]  

My build started 2.5 years ago with a stock 1986 944 NA that I bought back in 2019. I found a 1999 5.3l LM7, harness and PCM for sale locally, already pulled from the donor truck. Not long after that, I was SUPER lucky to find a used, mostly complete TPC swap kit for sale only a 3 hour drive away for an absolutely killer deal. It came with a bunch of goodies like ceramic coated Kooks long tubes, a 5R transaxle complete with LSD, M030 sway bars front and rear, full 3.5" stainless exhaust system, etc. Some of you may have seen the 500HP LS3 powered 944 Turbo on Roads Untraveled's Youtube channel:



Unfortunately for the owner, he crashed and wrote off the car... fortunately for me, I bought most of his parts!


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The donor car

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The engine

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The swap kit

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The transaxle



My goals for the project were/are as follows:

- A performance street car that is a comfortable(ish) daily driver. This meant retaining the pop-up headlights and adding coilovers that aren't too track oriented.

- Shooting for roughly 300 - 350hp at the wheels with a fully rebuilt engine and a mild camshaft.

- A fairly clean engine bay that I could be proud of showing off. This meant starting with fresh paint in the bay.

- I wanted the car to look as stock as possible until you pop the hood. This meant a stock interior with a functional stock instrument cluster.


The build went mostly without a hitch. The engine was fully torn down and sent to the machine shop to have a head inspection/rebuild and resurface, the crankshaft polished, and the block resurfaced and honed. I took the rebuild into my own hands from there, installing new crank and cam bearings, piston rings, stage 1 camshaft and heavier valve springs, timing set, push rods, lifters, rocker arms and oil pump.

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Meanwhile, I painted the engine bay for a clean look. I also swapped the 5th gear set from the NA trans to the Turbo trans and added TPC's trans strengthening plate while I was at it.
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After that was finished, the build then transitioned to the installation phase. With help from my apprentice, Cooper, we rolled the engine under the car on a creeper.
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Next was the tedious task of making PTFE AN lines for the power steering and fuel systems.
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As we all know, the coil packs don't fit in their usual valve cover mounting location when running a hydroboost. I wanted my install to look nice and uniform so instead of having to relocate just the #5 and #7 coils I went ahead and moved the battery to the trunk and relocated all of the coils to the battery tray. I didn't want to spend the money on remote coil mounts so I fab'd my own with some aluminum I had laying around in the shop.
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The intake was a challenge. As I mentioned earlier, one of the goals was to retain the automatic pop up headlights. My cable throttle body makes things veeery tight between the TB opening and the stock hood latch. I know some guys have managed to put a tight 90 here while trimming the edge of the hood latch but I just could not see how that was physically possible with my car. My alternative? Move the whole latch! With the latch out of the way, it was still a super tight squeeze to fit 3.5" through here. The aluminum radius had to be squished into more of an oval cross section in order to clear the headlight bar and the bottom of the hood while closed. It was a head scratcher but I'm really happy with the way it turned out. Also, I won't pretend to take credit for this one... aluminum welding is a bit out of my skill set.
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Finally, just about everything was buttoned up and the car was ready to fire up for the first time last night. It still needs to have the exhaust system sorted and a proper tune done, but it was ready to fire up to check for any problems, leaks, etc.

Boom! Like nothin. The first half of the video is the 1st start with nothing but a very general base tune. It seemed to idle nice but wouldn't rev any higher than what I was trying to do in the video. The second clip is the next day, with a fairly solid base tune. Now it idles nice and throttle response is on point!


This is where the car stands today. The next couple weeks will involve exhaust work, suspension tuning, wiring cleanup, street tuning and a handful of other odds and ends. I know I breezed over a lot of this stuff pretty briefly but I'm more than happy to answer any questions!

Cheers

Nathan,

Nice summary of your build!

It's way cool to see a "Reader's Digest" version of a start-to-finish build. You have done some nice work, including a few unique things like the coil pack "nest" in the battery box, air intake, and your relocated hood latch. Thanks for sharing!

You were indeed fortunate to acquire so many 2^nd hand conversion parts...especially the 5R LSD transaxle (I'm a little jealous)! These parts all add up to a sizable chunk of cash, and some are getting hard to find.

I feel bad for guy that crashed his car and I don't know the whole story, but it's good to note that a 2800 lb car with 400 HP demands respect.

I have a friend that spent years building a big block 600 HP '68 Mustang only to sell it to a guy who bought it as a gift for his son's 16th birthday!!!  I'm happy to report that after only one week, the son survived a near fatal crash after he lost control in a curve and slammed into a bridge abutment.  The car was totaled.

Hopefully your final shake down and wrap up will be smooth sailing.

Looking forward to more posts with your finishing touches!!

Congrats Nathan! Glorious first fire you had there and thanks for the props for any help my somewhat scattered and disjointed thread provided.

Raymond's thread has been a help to all of us for sure.

I agree on having a more pretty picture under the hood which is why i went with full coil relocation myself but i was able to find some convenient places on the sides of the engine bay to rivnut and leave my battery placement completely alone.

My coil relocation kits were fairly cheap at only like maybe 80 bucks cdn on summit racing and cost me next to nothing on shipping and duty since i had those goodies shipped to a US hotel that i was at for a conference for my work.

i have a 5R transaxle as well and with the stiffener plate that should handle my advanced cam just great so i think it will serve you very well, great amazing find there; i think we all wish we could have an AOR but those are quite the unicorns so a 5R is pretty amazing to have.

watch those kooks headers as we have seen a lot of reports about those things cracking so hopefully you have some really goood flexpoints after those to allow things to move, but even with flex braids people have reported them cracking so keep an eye on em.

Cheers to another 948!