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Originally Posted by sperry
Yeah, the T-Bird guys have ben swapping in Lightning MAFs with good success for a while now. That'll prolly give you 5-15hp, but most of it top end. You're still gonna need that gearing for autocross acceleration. Gearing will also help you to take advantage of the top end.
I'm surprised the rear-end costs $1000!? When I was looking for the T-Bird, a LSD was under $400, and installation supposedly is a breeze, like only an hour of work (at a shop)! Other T-Bird guy were getting them done for under $600... and if they did the swap themselves... for like half that!
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I know, I didn't think it would be anywhere near what I'm finding, but I'm getting quotes from different shops here in the bay for like 4-5 hrs worth of labor.. so it's not just one overpriced shop. So the ring & pinion gears themselves are like $140-180, a rebuild kit for bearings & seals ~ $180 (which is a good idea since it's got 95,000mi+ now and I don't think the rear end has ever been touched for maintenance), plus who knows how effective the limited-slip diff. still is, it probably needs to be rebuilt. The guys at Mike's shop were telling me that the Ford traction-lok diff. doesn't hold up very long under hard auto-x use, so if I take the rear-end apart it's a good idea to just replace it with an Eaton posi-trac, they hold up under hard use and are still fine for the street. So all the parts and labor would be around $1000. Suck. I still want to do it but I'll have to put that off for a while I think and hope my differential doesn't give out on me soon. It's holding up well for now at least, I can usually nail the gas coming out of corners and the rear end stays planted.
On the plus side, the dyno curves that I've seen for the C&L MAF units from multiple sources all look good, it's a fairly static torque/hp gain through the RPM range, no loss of torque down low even on stock 5.0s. I didn't think the MAF would make much of a difference at first glance, but you can't really argue with valid dyno numbers. 5hp here, 10hp there, pretty soon you're up near 300.