I maybe buying a 96-97 mustang.........
 

My next door neighbor has a very clean 96-97 mustang with about 90K miles on it. I would be interested in just buying the car for daily driving. Its an automatic thats the only bad thing, but heck if i am stuck in traffic i dont have to worry about pushing the clutch in. Any pros and cons on this model mustang. My neighbor wants 4500 but i could probably get it for 4k or less. This would be my first mod motor and I have no plans of racing it , just put a good exh. system on it and some cobra R's.

thanks

nothing really to look out for, they are fun cars. I like they Vert in those years better than any other mustang vert. the only thing to look for is a leaking intake that has a recall. If this one does not work out I will have a 98 GT Vert for sale very soon.

BTW for my taste, X pipe and non-flows are the way to go on a mod car

I like the BBK X pipe and dynomax ultra flows:metal:

no pun intended, but i hate convertibles, thank you for the info though. They had plastic intakes didnt they?

Yeah that plastic intakes cracking was about the only problem with them. That sounds like a good price for it to.

http://i190.photobucket.com/albums/z...nvertible3.jpg

that is a good looking car

good lookin cruiser....'cept mines a pushrod with '96 taillights..

Yeah the intake thing was the biggest problem.

Well, other than them being one of the slowest. They were non-PI cars so they were very weak. I think it was the 98's maybe that had the PI intake and better performance.

PI started in 99

the 98s were ~10 hp more than the 96, I think due to tune

96-97 came with a whooping 215hp which came to 189 at the wheels.98 had a increase to 225hp for the wild at heart.....

:rofl:

You will also have to look out at the radiator. in 97 Ford changed the radiator design because the stock 96 radiator was inadequate. I had cooling issues this past summer whenever I would run my AC in my car. Replaced it with an all aluminum 2 row radiator and have yet to have a problem. If you swap the NPI intake and cams for the PI intake and and PI cams you can see healthy increase in horsepower. Pretty close to what the PI motors from 99 up had.

or swap the heads and get more than a PI

Full PI swap is definitely better if you are keeping it stock. Ported NPI heads perform just as well as ported PI heads though. The increase in power you get from STOCK PI heads is maybe 10 HP and that is due to the compression increase you get.

NPI heads do not flow bad at all. Just PI cams and PI intake swap you will pick up close to 40 HP and your power curve is MUCH better. Where the NPI intake chokes off around 4500 rpm's, the PI intake will pull all the way to 6500 rpm's no problem.

or do like me and do a 5.4 swap........

I know where a set of PT heads are but they need to be cleaned up. If you are interested I can get em to start the work on them. They came off of a 4.6 that got the 5.0 Cammer treatment with Patriot Heads.