[Jay S]

I am going to start a thread for my W72 4 speed build. I had a lot of pictures at one point but can’t seem to find them now. But I have some pictures I will share, with more to come, including performance numbers, and show some of the mods I have done to the car. The car retains all it’s original drivetrain, which was a 200 HP W72 400 engine package with a ST-10 4 speed and 3.23s. It has fairly standard options for T/A’s in my area, PS, PB, A/C, rear defrost, firethorn red deluxe interior, and sterling silver exterior. Overall it is still in nice shape, with about 94,000 miles on it now. It has been repainted once, to a charcoal gray with black graphics. We do all of our own repairs, and paint and body work at our own shop. If the thread last long enough it will likely catch the repaint back to the factory silver.

Back when I first bought the car it hadn’t seen much love for awhile. It took a lot of little repairs to get the car so it was a dependable driver. Still have some things to do, such as the dash lights still don’t work and it is missing some ducting on the A/C. It ran pretty well though, my wife even drove it to work for a month while I worked on her daily driver. It was not particularly economical to drive, took some cranking after it set to get the qjet fired up, and 12- 14 mph was about what it averaged for fuel milage. It seemed to be dependable, at least until the heat core started leaking. I bypassed the heater and some how got an coolant air lock up in engine and it overheated, was pinging rather badly and hammered out a rod bearing. It happened after 20 miles of driving, with even a cool down in between before hand, I thought it was in the clear. So I had the stereo cranking and didn’t hear anything except the radio, until the noise was loud enough I heard it over the radio. About a mile from home I heard the rattling, and I looked down at the gauges and noticed it was overheating, I pulled off the road and shut it down….But it was too late. Funny thing was after it cooled down it still was not very low on coolant. I let it cool down, added a 2 qts of coolant, and drove it home.

Anyway, that is a little of the back story to what led me to these engine mod’s I did, and now have. My goal has been to retain all the original parts on the outside, including the 6x heads and factory egr intake, and only modify the engine on the inside. I will add the specs in my next post. I have and have had quite a few pretty fast street and drag cars, several low 11 second cars, a couple in the 10s. A couple turbocharged combos, but most the combo’s are fairly high compression (10-12:1 scr) naturally aspirated pump gas combos. I don’t beat on this one a terrible amount, it is more a fun cruiser. If it can run in the mid to upper 11s I am pretty content. I may have over shot that here initially with 550+ hp, but I would like nothing more than have to take off the headers and run log manifolds to slow it down. Hopefully by the end of this thread the car run deep into the 11s with it’s glorious (I am being sarcastic) egr goodies and looks something like this: