• Welcome to the Contour Enthusiasts Group, the best resource for the Ford Contour and Mercury Mystique.

    You can register to join the community.

The Sketchy SVTC Build Log

JKRSVT

New CEG'er
Joined
Feb 26, 2017
Messages
10
Location
Wisconsin
Where to begin? Well as some of you may have seen #1902 was up for sale recently and I decided to take the plunge and pick it up. So on a nice February Saturday a friend Jake and I hoped in his truck and with the trailer ended up treking the 4 hour drive to Iowa to go take a look at the car. On the way down I was a bit nervous the shell has a metric load of miles on it and from what I had learned the transmission was blown. I figured the car would have some rust and need a decent amount of work to get it up and running again. This however was not going to stop me from purchasing this car. See the reason I wanted this car was simple. I have been around friends that have had these for quite a few years. The first car I ever saw was Project BLKOUT2 of Josh's over at PRT and from that day I was hooked. I have loved these cars but never went out and bought one instead I had a ZX4 Focus then after that car was in a accident I sold it off and bought a 02 SVT Focus. I loved the SVTF but still wanted something with a slightly bigger motor that did not have a cast iron block in it with a wonky transmission from what I had read. So after working out a deal with Josh I ended up trading my SVTF for a 00 Roush Cougar. I really liked the car and thought it was great but then I stumbled on to a BMW 325XI that I had purchased and one thing led to another with medical bills and such that I sadly had to sell the Roush. I sold the car and not long after the person I sold it to crashed the car for the first time. After that he fixed the minor damage sold it off to another kid whom then sold it to another whom then sold it to another and on this last owner it sadly met its demise in the form of a accident. I am trying to find the current owner and buy the car back so I can either repair it or strip the motor trans and diff out of it. I will keep you updated on that situation. After the Roush I stuck with the BMW for a while and then after it started to nickle and dime me to death I decided to sell it and take a break from the car scene. I expected this to be a short break however it ended up turning into a 3 or 4 year break, until one day Jake sends me a link to the car and with a bit of coaxing we were on our way to pick it up. When we arrived the car was at a shop with a spare tire stuffed under it to keep it from rolling (parking break cable is broken and trans or diff is shot) I hoped out and started giving it the once over. Parts of the car were in worse shape than I had thought. There is surface rust in spots that with pictures I was not able to see. The rockers like a good chunk of the CSVT's are rusted and will need to be replaced. The thing I was most worried about was the under side of the car. After crawling around we noticed that the underside is fairly clean so that was a huge plus. So I paid the previous owner and 20 minutes later the car was loaded and on its way to Wisconsin. So where are we at now? Well we have determined that the diff is what is actually blown and not the transmission. Jake has a spare sitting around that will be getting replaced starting in about 2 or so hours. The surface rust is exactly that and will be getting repaired along with the rockers and the entire car will be getting a respray. I have not quite decided on what color I am going to go with but that will come. It needs new front fenders which we have and will be replacing soon. Exhaust has a leak that needs to be fixed which will be getting done at the same time as the transmission. The car has a misfire which is being caused by plugs which I am replacing tonight. Previous owner stated that there was a coolant leak I will dig more into this however from initial checking I have found no leak to be spoken of. Parking break cable needs to be replaced. I have the part and will be swapping out soon. As of now that is all I can think of for this post I will be doing a second one of what we have found when we got the car into the shop. Pictures of are when we were bringing the car home. This is one of those cases where sadly I do not think this car was almost ever washed. The outside is caked with dirt, mud, dust and all kinds of crap as well as dust covering the trunk. That will be changing.
 

Attachments

  • photo17565.JPG
    photo17565.JPG
    2.9 MB · Views: 0
  • photo17566.JPG
    photo17566.JPG
    3 MB · Views: 0
  • photo17567.JPG
    photo17567.JPG
    2.8 MB · Views: 0
  • photo17568.JPG
    photo17568.JPG
    2.9 MB · Views: 0
Last edited by a moderator:
No Title

So instead of doing multiple little updates I am just going to do one large one. So after we got the car picked up we ended up getting it into the shop where it sat for about a week. Parts were ordered and ready to go just needed to get in and start the work which we did on a Friday evening. Started tearing the car down and called it a night. Late Saturday morning we were in and started to pull the motor out. When we were doing so we noticed a few things with the car. First that the Transmission front left roll resistor was snapped. That is kind of a scary thought with knowing that at some point in the recent past someone had been driving the car and looked like they had attempted to rally it with how much dirt, dust, and limestone is attached to the car. After searching for a while locally I had found one locally but as we were looking around the shop we ended up finding a spare which was awesome saved some money on that one. We also found out that the AC was in fact not charged again no big deal as we are removing it and going to an undersized belt anyways. So we ended up getting the motor out and we had drained that transmission. When doing so we noticed that there was a very large amount of metal shavings in the fluid which again no worries as this is the whole point we are pulling the heart out to replace it. We separate the Trans and before looking at anything else we notice a rather large gouge in the bell housing. I have no idea what happened here at some point and I am sure that I do not want to. (Sadly at this time I have not gotten a picture of this but will post one in the future.) At this point I am just starting to get nervous. I was informed the clutch should be good but when we started looking at it before pulling it from the motor I knew it was smoked. Jake was pulling material out of it in larger amounts than I had ever seen before. We separated it and holy crap I have never seen a clutch in such bad shape. The Friction Disc was worn down so bad on one side that the rivets were starting to be ground down. The pressure plate has gouges in it and the flywheel is the same. There is a good flywheel laying around so I ordered a new pressure plate and friction disc but sadly it cut the weekend short and showed that I was not going to get the car back on the road by Monday which had been my main goal.


After taking a short break I decided I was going to just start to dig into the car a bit more to figure out what else it needed that I truly didn’t quite know about. I started by cleaning some of the interior on the car which was in rough shape had dust all over the place and needed to be cleaned up worse than you can imagine. At some point the kick panels and such had been removed which I am assuming was for subwoofer wiring or something. With this being done they were never reinstalled properly so all of the dirt and dust has made its way into that I will start to pull those off in the near future to truly clean them and then put them back in properly. The carpet needs some work which is not the end of the world and is kind of to be expected. I will probably remove this at some point and replace it or remove it shampoo and clean it fully and then return it to the car unless I decide to go ahead and do a full track prep on the car. The rear seat needs the leather replaced as does the driver front. I have skins for the driver front and am in the process of sourcing the rears. I moved to the trunk which was caked in crap almost as bad as the outside of the car. I ripped all of the carpet and side panels out and will be cleaning those thoroughly. The main reason I pulled all of this is to see what rust was in the trunk as I knew with a lot of vehicles this tends to be an issue. I was surprised as there was less rust than I had expected but all the same there was enough that it warranted me to dig into it further. By doing so I decided to start taking and grinding the rust off to see if there was any metal left and to my surprise there is quite a fair amount left so I am in the process of removing it and then will be repainting it to seal it. The trunk is also where I found out that the car had been wired for subs as I found a remote wire and RC cables run that a previous owner must have decided was not worth his time to remove. So as of Wednesday 3/8/17 this is where the car currently sits. I have received the belt that was on order and it would appear that here in a bit when FED-EX arrives at my shop my clutch should be in as well.

Saturday of this week as well as possibly Sunday Jake and I will be working to get the clutch installed, Trans remounted, and the motor back in the car as well as the parking break cable installed. Hopefully by next Monday we will be able to get the car up and running. Overall I am not to upset with the car at the moment but have been delayed none the less. As of now there is a spare 2.5 sitting around that has been rebuilt with upgraded pistons and rods and other little goodies sitting at Jakes shop which will be going in the car soon. However I have opted to wait on putting it in this time because my plan is to start picking up new parts such as alternator, headers, starter, and other things and put those in with the new motor along with some other upgrades such as solid sub frame bushings, a PRT Optimized Throttle Body (When PRT is fully back up and running), and some other little suspension tweaks. I would love to do this right now but have to put some money away before I do this as this car has placed me a bit over the original budget which was to be expected. So that is where I am at and I will have many more updates coming in the near future. Below I have attached some pictures for you to be able to see some of the progress of where I am at.
 

Attachments

  • photo17593.JPG
    photo17593.JPG
    1.1 MB · Views: 0
  • photo17595.JPG
    photo17595.JPG
    1.5 MB · Views: 0
  • photo17597.JPG
    photo17597.JPG
    1.6 MB · Views: 0
  • photo17598.JPG
    photo17598.JPG
    1.4 MB · Views: 0
  • photo17599.JPG
    photo17599.JPG
    1.3 MB · Views: 0
No Title

Update 2 for today. FedEx delivered the belt to my office earlier without a problem however I got a notice that apparently the same address that was delivered to 5 hours ago is not a valid address from the same driver. Things like this frustrate me. I called and the driver will now have to redeliver tomorrow. This is frustrating and reminds me why I only ship stuff with UPS. There is no excuse for that especially when you were here earlier in the day to deliver something. Oh well we will see what tomorrow holds.
 

Attachments

  • photo17601.PNG
    photo17601.PNG
    159.8 KB · Views: 0
Man, that thing is rough. I hope you don't find anymore problems.
It looks roughy but actually is not as bad as had been expected. Minimal rust and just some small bumps but at the end of the day it is to be expected.
 
wish i lived near someone that had auto body skills that i could pay in booze and food to teach me along the way (if i got another svt).
 
wish i lived near someone that had auto body skills that i could pay in booze and food to teach me along the way (if i got another svt).

In PA southeast Area??? I'd be happy to take you up on this offer for free... I am currently redoing a friends Mx-5, then my SVT :)

That SVT doesn't look to horrible, lol. You making great time on it man :( **** wish the rest of us could move at those speeds and have the access to tools/shop that you guys do!! lol My SVT has been sitting dead for more than a year now, Im just amassing parts for it aswell, similiar to what your doing.

I noticed you snipped AC lines. or u gonna keep it or deleting it? as well as pwr steering?? (maybe I missed it,read it wrong??)

that clutch looks fine!! it's got at-least another 200miles before it explodes, into a nightmare..

I read you guys swapped a Diff in 2hours??? did I read that correctly?? if so how in the holy f did u do that??

P.S. PLEASE PRT get up and running again I need some of your stuff!!! like filled mounts, bugzuki plates, other misc stuff!!! lol Im gonna be tearing into my SVT VERY soon..
 
Back
Top