We're finally making some big gains in our Colt of Personality Pro Touring project, and this month, we're stuffing the engine and transmission into the car for the first time.

If you've been following our Colt of Personality project over the last year, you know that we've been tackling major bodywork and installing the front suspension components over that period, in addition to a brief interior makeover. With this month's installment, we take a look at March Performance's serpentine pulley setup for the 5.0L Coyote engine, the powerplant that will soon take up residence between C.O.P.'s fenders.

OK, so the idea might be shocking and a little "out there," but hear us out. In the realm of mid-to-high-end customs, the Coyote 5.0 is an interesting, and as time inches on, very viable choice. It offers great power (we've seen the standard GT engine pop 460 horses on a dyno with minimal tweaking), better than average fuel economy (stock GT Mustangs can see 26 mpg), and can run a 13ish-second quarter mile. And best of all, it is less expensive than a professionally built 351ci pushrod V-8.

5.0L Coyote Swap Headers For Mustang, Falcon, Cougar, and Fairlane
Doug's Headers, a division of Pertronix, now offers new long-tube, race-style headers for the new Ford Coyote 5.0L engine swaps in '64-'73 Mustangs, '60-'65 Falcons, '66-'67 Fairlanes, and '67-'68 Cougars. These headers were designed for use with IFS conversions kits from TCI or similar designs, and will work with either six-speed manual transmissions or the factory Ford six-speed select shift automatic.

Slow Crank When Hot
You would be my second or third opinion on the problem I am having. I own a '65 Mustang with a rebuilt 289ci engine with some enhancements to it. The car has no problems starting up if it hasn't been used in a week, but during the hot weather we experience, the car would barely turn over to start and on one occasion it didn't start at all. I checked the starter and the starter solenoid and they were good. However, the battery was showing a low level of cranking amps. I was told to charge the battery for a couple of hours and that should rectify the low cranking amps. On a hot 95-degree day, I took the car out and when I returned after a short 20-minute drive, I turned the car off and tried to restart the car and it barely started again. Do you have any suggestions? I missed out on taking the car to the Hot August Nights show in Reno, Nevada, due to this problem.

John Honesto
Via the Internet

When we talk to car owners about what parts of a project they enjoyed tackling, and which ones they hope to never touch again, it always seems that wiring comes out on the top of the "never touch again" list. While some owners cringe at the thought of doing something more basic like wiring in new gauges, it's the complete re-wire of a project that gets most of them shaking from bad memories. Blown fuses, hunting down problems, and generally just getting everything looking neat and safe can often be a hair-pulling experience. Wiring doesn't have to be this black art that many think it is. Even a couple of hours with some basic wiring books, or looking over the shoulder of a more experienced friend, will do wonders in helping you to understand things like how basic circuits work, load capacity of a specific wire size, properly protecting circuits, wire routing/covering, and more.

VDO Plug-n-Play Harness
Continental Commercial Vehicles & Aftermarket, manufacturer and supplier of VDO OE-engineered instrumentation, now features a premium automotive-grade wire harness as standard equipment in every VDO Viewline five- and six-gauge instrument kit. Called the VDO Speed Harness, this new ready-to-use wiring harness features a plug-n-play configuration that helps make installation simple and trouble-free.

Today, most everything you can think of for your home or garage is offered in package form. From home theater systems to oil-and-filter kits, packages offer several benefits to the end consumer. First, packaged items are designed to work together harmoniously. There's no hunting for the right A/V cable or wondering what lifters will work properly with a certain camshaft. The parts are picked by the manufacturer to ensure that when you open the box, you've got everything you need. You won't be fighting to fit things together, either. Oftentimes the package concept will save the consumer a few bucks as well.

Modern automatic transmissions have come a long way over the last 20 years. They are more efficient, shift smoother, and are sportier than ever before. But there's still no substitute for sawing through the gears on a twisty mountain road or the occasional track day. And when you compare the fun of a modern manual transmission to what you get from a 45-year-old slushbox—well, that's not exactly a fair fight.

Having a firm idea of what you expect your engine to do once it is bolted between the framerails will ensure that once you have assembled it, that you are using it in the manner it was designed for. Brent Lykins of B2 Motorsports (Simpsonville, Kentucky) was building a small-block Cleveland powerhouse for a customer, and together they came up with a road map that would lead them to peak performance.

We took a trip to Lodi, California, to visit Kevin Sittner, owner of Precision Machines, to talk cars. Kevin has been around cars since he can remember and has always had a thing for early Fords. His shop focuses on the build and preparation of street, autocross, road course, and even some drag cars. The cars he builds are products of years of track experience, and they don't flaunt the newest shiniest parts unless they meet his standards. He builds cars that work, period. We asked him what are the most important things to consider when building a car for autocross and road racing, and what we can do to our street cars to make them perform their best. His answers cover performance upgrades, safety items, and preparation for the event.

If you're a regular reader of this magazine, you may recognize this 1964 Falcon Futura from past tech articles involving a complete TCI suspension makeover, and more recently the Champion aluminum radiator install from a few issues back. With the car running great, and the killer suspension holding its ground, it was time to dip into some simple bolt-on accessories under the hood to get the car looking a little better.

If you have a 1968 Mustang with the typical small- or big-block Ford engine offering between the framerails, you can source a direct-fit bolt-in radiator from one of a dozen or more different sources. A few days later, a big brown truck pulls up to your driveway and drops off your shiny new thermal transfer unit—it will probably take you less time to bolt it into your Mustang than it will to get it out of the shipping box. However, things change when you start deviating from stock. The most basic of upgrades, like a serpentine pulley setup, for instance, might relocate the water pump inlet from one side of the block to the other. Uh-oh, your stock radiator no longer works. A solution might be as simple as a custom lower radiator hose. There are a few "custom" radiators on the market for the most popular upgrades like '87-'93 5.0L Mustang engine swaps, but when you really start “going wild,” your best option is going to be ordering a custom radiator to work with your choice of engine and other major mods.

When we last left off, our High School Hauler 1970 Mustang was mid-way through an interior makeover that would not only make the car safer to drive, but offer the owner a much more enjoyable driving experience. In Part 1, we gutted the 42-year-old interior and repaired some dash electrical issues, popped a nice stereo in the dash that he could connect his iPhone to (without looking out of place in a classic car), added new carpet, upgraded the factory belts to a more modern true three-point belt setup with shoulder belt retractors, and gave the doors and quarter trim panels all a fresh coat of paint. The big change, however, would be the seating.

Painting an automobile is probably the most labor-intensive thing you can do to a car, even more so than pulling and rebuilding a drivetrain. For a paintjob to be exceptional, a certain amount of finesse and excruciating attention to detail is required, along with a large amount of patience. Combine the mental requirements with the ever-increasing prices of refinishing products, and you can see that there is a sizeable investment in the endeavor. That being said, we wanted to share with you some tips that we gathered while working with Rusty and Brian Gillis at Gillis Performance Restorations (Port Richey, Florida) on our '66 Mustang fastback project. You may find that they save time, or probably more importantly, help you obtain a better end result.

One of the great things about vintage Mustangs and Fords is the detail work and the chrome trim that often adorns them. It brightens any paint color up, grabs your attention, and is a unique feature of the era that the OEMs have attempted to duplicate with plated plastic, but the result is never quite the same. With our project Colt of Personality '66 fastback, we've decided to make a great many changes to the car, but we plan to keep the majority of the chrome trim for that classic look. We did, however, decide to have the driprails removed for a slightly cleaner look. While the chrome trim on them looks nice, the driprails stick out a bit far, and would seem to be a bit overbuilt in this author's opinion. Most classic enthusiasts aren't driving their cars in the rain anyway. That said, we looked to Gillis Performance Restorations (Port Richey, Florida) to show us how it removes the driprails. Read on to see whether or not this mod is right for you. We loved the results.

Unless you are from the town of Bedrock, you probably want your rod to be fully equipped; running engine, working brakes, and floorpans. Every car must have these things; all of the other stuff is optional. A solid floor is not only attractive in a project, but also required for safety. Falling through the floor at 60 mph would not be pretty. While Fred and his crew can stop a car with their feet, the rest of us mere mortals need steel separating the pavement from our little piggys.

OK, we know it has been more than a year but we finally got around to Part 3 of Large and In Charge. Those with better-than-average memories will recall that we started out on this adventure with a stock 460 Ford (circa 1968) pulled from a wrecking yard. Step-by-step the big-block was upgraded with an intake and carb, roller rockers, mildly ported stock heads, and a small performance cam. The upgrades we showed you in the first part (May '11) pushed the power output from 349 hp and 492 lb-ft of torque to 437 hp and 507 lb-ft of torque. Part 2 stepped things up even further, with forged flat-top pistons, fully ported heads from MPG Heads and a custom solid flat-tappet cam from Cam Research Corp. These upgrades (June '11) combined with a single-plane intake and Holley carb allowed the 0.060-over 460 to exceed 600 hp, with peak numbers of 609 hp and 557 lb-ft of torque. This was a stout 460 to be sure, especially when you consider the use of iron heads, but we knew there was more power lurking within the 460 just waiting to be unleashed.

The term "full-floater" isn't widely known in street performance circles. However, it's a term that drag, off-road, and most prevalently, circle track racers are very familiar with. As auto enthusiasts continue to extract more and more performance out of their vehicles, both from a power level and a usage standpoint, the need for more heavy-duty support equipment is growing. Companies like Speedway Engineering, which normally exist to provide professional race teams the highest quality and most cutting-edge products, are filling the need of hard-core enthusiasts that are pushing their projects to the limit and beyond. The full-floater rearend is just such a component--one that has been showing up on a number of open track and autocross-capable machines.

With the price of gasoline creeping higher and higher at every commodity trader's whim, some owners may find it increasingly difficult to fill up their classic car, or take it on that weekend getaway simply because of the poor fuel economy. Shane Struthers of Tarpon Springs, Florida, experienced this firsthand when the majority of his vacation money went toward filling up the tank in his '73 Mach 1 Mustang.

Before the magic of movies made the '67 Mustang fastback a star with "Eleanor," the sexy sweeping body style was already a fan-favorite, due to that ingenious marketer and race car builder, the late Carroll Shelby, with his fleet of Shelby Mustang fastbacks. Of course, Lt. Frank Bullitt and his Highland Green fastback racing around San Francisco certainly hasn't hurt the fastback's image either. To this day, many of the Mustang coupe and convertible owners we know or have spoken with, while they love their cars, will often give us the "someday" speech about owning a fastback Mustang.

As we've slowly improved our High School Hauler '70 Mustang coupe project, we've kept a fairly narrow focus on dragstrip performance with the ability to maintain the car's streetability (no trailers here, just a nice 45-minute ride to the track, burn some tire, and then a 45-minute ride home). Over the last year, we've dropped the gear ratio, added stronger axles, sticky tires out back, full dual exhaust with long tube headers, a new transmission, front disc brakes, and gave the 302 a serious shot in the arm with a Summit top-end kit. The Mustang is more fun to drive, sounds better, stops better, and really moves out nicely now. The one last piece of the performance puzzle is the coupe's aging stock suspension.

When Ford was developing and racing its legendary 427 FE big-blocks back in the 1960s, it endured a tremendous learning curve that was proven out in dynamometer laboratories and racing venues worldwide. It was never easy for Ford to achieve this greatness because nothing worthwhile--especially in racing--has ever been easy. Burning the midnight oil, breaking prototype parts, and financing expenses are all key requirements for success. All of this was spurred by Henry Ford II's desire to hand Enzo Ferrari his jewels at Le Mans, the world's biggest motor racing stage. Not only did Ford do it once, it did it three consecutive times with exotic Ford GT40s. Ford proved it was dominant, global, and a force to be reckoned with.

Participating in a high-performance driving event is some of the best fun you can have on four wheels. If you're of the competitive mindset (and what gearhead worth his roll-a-way full of tools isn't), you'll soon find yourself skimming through suspension catalogs looking for that "edge" you need to get the power to the ground, transfer weight, keep your tires planted, and keep your classic Mustang or Ford flat and stable through the tightest of corners. While driver experience is certainly paramount to getting around a track, good driving ability is only going to take you so far. Once you've reached the limit of your Mustang's stock-style suspension, it's time to step up and use a suspension designed with the proper track-oriented geometry, using OE-level parts for durability and reliability. Now you can have all of that in the Roadster Shop's new Fast Track IFS kit for '65-'70 Mustangs.

Back in the first muscle car era, Ford offered all manner of performance hardware. Powered by high-winding small-blocks, canted-valve Clevelands, and Boss 429s, Ford products were right in the thick of muscle car mania. Though things looked bleak during the dreaded smog era of the '70s, the '80s brought back factory Ford performance machinery. The introduction of electronic fuel injection brought with it a renewed interest in factory forced induction. In a quest to balance power and mileage, Ford employed both turbocharging and supercharging, offering the four-cylinder Turbo T-birds and six-cylinder Super Coupes. Sharing an even more powerful version of the turbocharged four-cylinder was the SVO Mustang. These force-fed Fords offered the power of a V-8 with the weight and economy of a V-6 or inline four-cylinder. These early factory efforts eventually paved the way for such great products as the supercharged, F-150-based Lightning, the legendary '03-'04 Cobra and most recently, the 5.4/5.8-liter Shelby GT500. This proliferation of factory forced induction powerplants, coupled with a strong aftermarket offering similar means of pressurizing the intake charge, makes it easy for current Ford owners (both modern and vintage) to utilize these technologies for both performance and for show.