We’ve been promising you this teardown for a few months now, and it’s finally here. For a quick recap, Project Retro 5.0 started life as a 1993 Ford Thunderbird engine, with the idea to build it up just like they did back in the ‘90s, but with modern technology and parts. We freshened up the bottom-end with some Clevite coated bearings, a set of Icon 2618 flat-top pistons from UEM, a $138 set of Black Friday stock-style connecting rods, the stock crankshaft, and a Moroso main girdle.
Up top, we rebuilt the E7 heads with all new stock-replacement components from Melling, and found an old E7 intake manifold on eBay for way too much money. That was fitted with a BBK 75mm throttle body and EGR plate, along with a short-ram intake tube. The combination was run on a Holley Terminator X Fox Body plug-and-play ECU system on KPE Racing‘s engine dyno, and came in at 260 horsepower and 327 lb-ft of torque, not bad for the tiny T-bird cam and running accessories.
Once baselined, we ripped the top end off of it while on the dyno and swapped on Trick Flow’s 170cc 11R Top End kit on it, along with a classic Holley SysteMAX intake manifold. A simple heads/cam/intake (H/C/I in ‘90s parlance) gave us over 150 horsepower above the stock parts, and about 50 more horsepower than we would have typically expected from these parts back in the 1990s and early 2000s. The dyno’s final reading was 411 horsepower and 399 lb-ft of torque.
That would make for a killer street car engine as-is, that we would expect to live a long, healthy life backed up by our SN95’s Tremec TKX. But, we always want more. So, the next logical step was to do the same thing that everyone did to Fox Bodies back then — throw a Vortech on it. Back in the day, it would be an S-trim blower in the bolt-on Fox kit. These days, that same kit exists, but the head unit has been replaced by a more modern Si-Trim supercharger.
After our baseline dyno session with Retro 5.0, we knew we were going to have a stout performer on our hands.
Bring On The Blower
The supercharger itself is listed at a maximum horsepower rating of 775, so we assumed that we would have plenty of headroom to carry out a number of tests on the supercharged mill, down the line. With a super-safe tuneup in the Holley, the first pull saw 630 horsepower pop up on the dyno graph. With evil smiles all around, we knew it was game time (did I mention we were the only…
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