The Crazy Taxi - Fg F6 / Tr6060 Powered Ba Futura

[luke187]

Hi all, thought I'd start my build thread as the car is just over a week away from coming off the road and the build finally getting underway. Its a bit of a read but it has been an on-going story for a while now and is going to be a pretty big build. All the work will be done by myself and my old man, Steve. He has been a mechanic well before I was born, as was my grandpa, and as was my great grandpa. I raced bikes for 16 years so have helped work on them, did the efi through a motec m4 however ive loved cars that little bit more. Ive owned a couple of quick 180s back in 2002 - one of which would still show up some cars on these forums :D. This build is by far the biggest mechanical project ive undertaken, and in addition to the build itself I'll be doing doing all the tuning via VCM suite.

The car im using is an '04 BA Futura I picked up for $800. The car had done 280,000km and the poor ole girl was suffering from "mechanical issues". It was idling really rough and stalled frequently, sounded like it may have been running on 5 cylinders, would ping if you blipped the throttle, the diff was noisy, the bonnet didnt open, door locks werent working properly (ford OK items), hood lining was saggy, and was pretty dusty. I had different plans for the car so I didnt really mind what was wrong with it aside of what was visible, the car is Harvest Green and pretty good condition all round thought it was a winner. Futura's come with power rear windows, crusie, 16" alloys which I sold for a couple hundred $, power seat, colour coded etc so its a great starting point plus I believe they "only" weigh in around 1650kg.

As soon as I got it back, I did a quick ecu reset which promptly fixed the rough idle and stalling, popped the throttle body off and gave it a clean, re-connected the BBM as the actuator line was disconnected and the car ran great. Engine was super quiet and I was driving it that afternoon without a hitch. The bonnet latch just needed a good yank and got all the door lock actuators I needed off the donor car. I put on the turbo airbox and panel filter to gain 0.02kw and have ran it for the last 4 months like this.The car actually has a full service history and was a genuine 2 owner car, all but the last 18 months of its life the car was owned by the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Brisbane so its not likely to have been doing burnouts in Ipswich for half of its life. Best part of this is if I get pulled over I can officially say "Im on a mission from God". The car has been running perfectly for the last 6 months bar a set of coils failing which I borrowed off the turbo engine. Profit

I fitted the bilsteins from the donor car and picked up a set of 19" Speedy Cheetahs cheap off a guy on the Ford Forums. Have a friend with a steel fabrication business so I cleaned the wheels up and got them powder coated in satin black and went to cleaning up the car. I hit the engine bay with CT18, washed and clay barred the car, then spent a couple of days polishing and waxing, fitted the wheels, plastidipped the rear badge, bumper strips, and chrome bezel under the tail lights to get it looking somewhat ok. I have a bunch of other costmetic things ive been collecting and will add them once it comes off the road and in april I picked up a set of personalised plates:

Fairly happy how it looks a bunch of stuff to do which will make it look more aggressive including a set of 9.5" rears which are on the way already. Unfortunately the polish didnt last too well so I'll have to re-do it. The colour looks amazing though and quite like the look with black. Will look great once its all done.

The first and main donor car is a 103,000km BA Mk2 XR6 Turbo, factory t56. Its my mates old car and was super clean, he sold it a few weeks earlier and the new owner promptly wrapped the car around a tree in the wet. We had worked on the car a few times before one of which was just before it was sold so we knew the mods it had, the condition it was in, and its history. I'll effectively be re-shelling the xr6 into the futura, rear diff cradle and suspension, tailshaft, all front suspension, steering rack, column, front and rear seats, dash and everything behind it, wiring looms forward of front seats, abs module, all the engine gear oviously, bcm & icc, mixer, steering wheel, coloumn, ignition, door locks, keys, anything moving mechanical part, plus whatever else I wanted upgraded . We had put a freshly reconditioned mal wood opt3 clutch in just before he sold it (its for sale PM me if interested), plus it had .7 front housing done by Mr. Turbo, 42lb dekas, bigger cooler, atomic valve springs, SMB 4" dump & 4" cat, twin 2.5" exhaust, new slotted rotors that we fitted up, bilsteins/king springs, and a set of 19s. The car was making roughly 300rwkw on ~11psi as that's all my mate wanted. It should easily make more with a few mroe psi + proper cooler piping, plus we found it had a lot of the original 2.25" exhaust which has been replaced.

The car took a big hit in the B-Pillar, and during dis-assembly of the car we could see that even the trans tunnel was crushed. Good news was everything bar the passenger seat, passenger side door card cards and center console were re-usable. The plan was never to build a fake xr6 so the front and rear of the body was sold off and decided to pickup a different set of 19s.

The second donor car was a BA XR6 turbo, manual but sitting proud in the engine bay was an FG F6 engine and process west plenum. The car was in really bad shape and wasnt too interested in picking up another donor car when it was this damaged as its too easy to end up with little or nothing. I did a bit of research on the particular car and thought that even a worse case scenario it would work out ok so decided to buy it. I wont post pics of this one just out of respect to someone who lost a car they put a lot of work into but damage wise it was up there with the worst ive seen, everyone did the HOLY sh*t when they saw it. Every panel was destroyed aside from the boot, roof crushed and folded over on itself, passenger side torn open then banana'd around a tree to top it off. Testament to the strength of Falcons, the drivers door was fully functioning.. handle actuationg, opening/closing the whole lot, and the drivers compartment was totally uncomprimised. I can honestly say I definately feel a lot more comfortable about driving a quick BA than a quick mid 90s japanese car or something from the 80s

A few months later I bought a 27mm whiteline sway bar off ebay and it turned out to be the guy whos car it originally was. I had a good talk with him and found out about the car and what actually happened. He lived obviously, but had multiple breaks in his neck in a place where people dont typically survive. He's a mature guy and not doing anything most of us wouldnt do when we jump in the car, he just got unlucky. Its definitely a stark reminder how much respect these cars need despite how easy it is to pull big numbers from them these days.

The strip down of the car was better than expected. I could see it had a t56, but looked like it might have snapped the exension housing, the block may have been damaged somewhere at the back or the sides from tearing the mounts off, it had fg f6 seats but airbags were blown out and passenger seat totally crushed. Turns out the car was only recently rebuilt and tuned a few days earlier before it was crashed. It came with a complete process west 3.4 kit (cooler and piping was destroyed), id1000 injectors, new walbro 400lph e85 pump, fresh turbo built with 6+6 billet ~64mm 56 trim compressor wheel, MTA turbo 0.7A/R 4" inlet housing, big flapper valve/ported housing on a ba exhaust manifold, new oil feed lines with kinugawa oil filter, 4" xforce dump w/3.5" cat (sold) and twin 2.5" xforce stainless exhaust (cut it off after the diff and can all be re-used). Once stripped down I could see the t56 was ok and had been worked on by mal wood, so gave him a quick call and it turned out to be a late model GT500 TR6060. This box is actually better than the FG box as it has much larger input shaft as well as (from memory) some small differences with bearings and synchros. The box was also recently rebuilt using a close ratio oem gearset 2.66, 1,78, 1.3, 1.0, 0.80, 0.63 so nice and tall first should be great, and mal said it would just be under the 700ft/lb rating of the t56 magnum box (t56s were rated as 450ft/lb and FG tr6060 600). This is what im actually most excited about, its the first quick turbo car ive had where the box wasnt the weak point, I broke 5 or 6 in my RB & SR 180s, so I wont buy a car with a weak box ever again. In addition to all that the car also had a brand new mal wood option 5 twin plate clutch (used for 2-3 days), hardy spicer tailshaft, and the diff was just rebuilt using bits im still yet to find out. All of this stuff was undamaged, even the tail shaft. Interior wise the car had A-TEK alcantara wheel, 3 or 4 gauges, DVD player, reverse camera, ipod connectivity, speakers, and a sh*t-tonne of other electric gear inside. It did have a colour screen 6 stack icc but was destroyed but I had already picked one up off ebay for $120 a few months earlier. This car was making something like 540rwhp on 98 and 580rwhp on e85, it was crashed running on unleaded so I'll be able to pull the tune off the ecu using vcm suite to use as a starting point.

As I said earlier, the car is staying "falcon", I like different looking cars and it'll attract less attention from the PO PO plus theres more than enough XRs/FPVs getting around. Im going to murder the car out aside from the green paint obviously, so everything is going black. Black wheels, few shades tinted tail lights, black side indicators, got oem black headlights, black windows, black strips under tail lights, black boot lip, black front lip, black badges, and the most unique thing... black tyres. We will also be doing the hood lining in black along with anything else that touches it.

Im still waiting for a few parts to come before I can finally pull the first part off so until then its just a bit of a waiting game. The plan is to start next monday.

[Ralph Wiggum]

So Goot

["Captain Retard"]

I like sleepers.

[MattyP]

Sleeper spec ftw

[luke187]

Thanks fellas. Looking forward to driving it more than anything else. Went into the city and picked up some porn today...

The car already had a basically brand new mal wood option 5 clutch which are a great clutch and proven pieces of gear - but since the car will see quite a bit of strip duties I decided to go with a lighter clutch that also had ceramic plates. Organic plates dont like heat, and I dont want to have to launch the car by side-stepping the clutch.

I did a bit of shopping around and decided to go with direct clutch's beast as it met all the requirements I had, and will handle far more abuse than I'll ever dream of giving it. They can set them up to run over 2000hp through them as is, and Its the exact same clutch Maatouks use in VL GOD which has run 6.90@209, however they use sintered iron plates. So goodbye replacing clutches and gearboxes, hello blown diffs, tailshafits, and driveshafts. The icing on the cake is its priced well, just over $2000 for the lot.

Its an 8" billet twin plate ceramic clutch with a billet flywheel. Being smaller than the previous 11" clutch it has quite a lot lower rotating mass, and its also weighs less so theres less inertia again (ill put it on the scales tomorrow). The option 5 + flywheel weighed just under 25kg on my scales. They could have pulled more weight out of the flywheel but it would retain less heat and therefore overheat the clutch quicker, and id rather swap to a lighter one later so I can compare them back to back and see if there is any real world difference on a heavy high torque turbo car.

They have a few plates to choose from, but my choices were betwen the 8 or 5 ceramic puck plates. The 8 puck is heavier due to the extra material but is more street friendly as it doesnt bite as much. The 5 puck is lighter but was told it was harsher and would shudder a bit, but since I was reducing the rotating mass already I figured I'd go with the 5 puck as the aggressive clutch is a bit of a positive for me... gives the car some personality! The lighter plates apparently are easier on the synchros which will be moot when I bash the first gear through, but also helps with quicker changes and reduces the initial bog that can happen when you get back on the throttle after a shift. To be honest I think the difference between the 2 plates on the street will probably be negligible but im excited to see how it turns out.

Edited 15/07/14 07:46 AM by luke187

[FiftyOne]

Subscribed

[genuine honest person]

lol and I just about finished mine .there is a lot of work ahead of you but at least you have the know how ,which I was laking .I like sleeper cars nothing better than them .might have to come for a drive down when I have the tray back on and compliance plates .would love to have a look at it .saw the wrecked car on gumtree .

[luke187]

Yeah mate not wrong, im hoping it wont take more than a few weeks but im also doing things like rebuilding the brakes, all new ball joints/tie rod end/lots of new bushes to drop in as well.

Sometimes I look at all the parts on the ground and think oh dear, but you've just gotta tackle it one section at a time. Ive done it all bar the ba electrics before just never all in the same build. I have someone who'll write out the compliance plate so have that sorted thankfully.

Electrics side is where im feeling a little unconfident lol. As far as I know ive gotten every piece needed off the donor car. When the car starts up for the first time it'll think its the xr6 and hopefully not need to be fla$hed from ford. Just hope I havent done one of my specialties - misplaced the keys!

[arronm]

I have ceramic plates in my AP twin plate. Gets sticky in traffic. Shuddered for about 1000ks and then settled down. Doesnt like to be slipped much. I didnt really read your whole post, will this be driven much , Daily??

Edited 19/07/14 11:07 PM by Dagabond

[luke187]

Yeah daily. Have had unsprung ceramic clutches in dailies before and never had an issue with how they are. They recommended I use the 8 puck ceramic for its smooth/shudder free take up, but like I said wanted something lighter. If it gets too much the guys at direct clutch have already said they'll swap me back to an 8 puck which is unlikely to happen. Regardless I cant say enough about the guys there from this and past dealings with them.

I got it for the extra heat its able to handle, can hold it on the line preloaded againsed the line lock which an organic plate isnt able to handle. From there its the sintered iron plates which can be slipped for as long as you need, same cost but they wear too fast on the street. Not keen on dropping the gearbox every 6 months like they said would be the case.

Picking up my wheels tomorrow

Edited 17/07/14 02:54 AM by luke187