Some of you may have seen this car years ago or passed by it on Lake Street where it's sat for the last 5 years or so. Anyhow, here's the quick rundown on it. Bought it with a carb'd 302 and t5 trans swapped into it, was in decent shape, started up with a jump, carb was bad(still need to rebuild it). Overall condition of the car was decent.

Here's what's been done:
*Motor:
-Bored .030 making it an effective 306, roughly 10:1 compression
-Mild roller cam
-Edelbrock Performer Aluminum heads with 2.02 valves
-Ford Motorsport 1.6 Roller rockers
-Weiand Stealth high rise dual plane intake
-Edelbrock 600 carb(for now, still needs the rebuild)
-BBK shorty unequal length headers
-Moroso low profile racing filter
-2.5" exhaust with X-pipe kit(not sure what mufflers I'm going with right now)

*Suspension:
-Full Poly bushing setup in the front
-In the rear, poly beam mounts, aluminum poly rear diff mount, nylon semi-trailing arm bushings
-18mm rear sway bar
-Front strut bar
-Custom rear strut bar
-650 lb/in rear springs
-Koni yellow rear shocks
-Ford Focus SVT 17"x7" rims

*Brakes:
-Rear disc conversion
-EBC Green stuff discs all the around
-Big front brake upgrade, piecing it together now

*Body:
-Cosworth style front grille

Still need to get the Eurpean front headlamps, Falken Azenis-615's and I'm looking at a Holly 600 Performer street carb. Hopefully over the summer I'll have the money saved up to do the front coilover conversion with koni yellows all around. Everything is coming together pretty smooth, started up the motor sans accessories and open headers tonight, check out the video! You can definitely see the carb needs to be rebuilt bad, lol. Here's a bunch of pics and the video

When I first got it:







How it sits now, more or less, lol:



Parts coming in:







And finally the video of it starting:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r53XMYUaWY8

What an odd looking Mustang...

good luck with that t5....

XR4Ti.

No turbo, no 4-cylinder?

Ewwww.

-Richard-

yeah you took the interesting part out of the car (for me at least).

now it's just ANOTHER V8 swapped car...boring.

Yeah I wasn't going to say anything since I thought I'd be in the minority on this one, but John pretty much summed it up. Now it's just a goofier-looking version of a foxbody.

It may have its most interesting part taken out, but when you see and hear it, it sure messes with your mind. Even as hard core XR guy as I am (in case no one noticed) I still like the Ford V8 swaps, especially when they are done "right". This swap started out kinda shady, but Jason will do it correctly this time. Now a Chevy V8 in a Merk is just plain wrong. When you guys do finally see this car, it is CA-LEAN!!! Cleaner than any of mine I think. And by the way, you will be Battle Creek's most favorite Merkur. I'm holding on to Kalamazoo though.

I'm split on whether the white/blue one or the taxi cab is my favorite.

As a slight hijack, any of you Merkur guys interested in this paper weight?

That's so 80's. We have ours in searchable PDF now. But I'm sure I could find someone that'd gladly take it.

Haha, well, I've always wanted a v8 car and I love Xr's so when this deal came along, it was too good to pass up on. I've still got the silver 88 Xr with the turbo-4 in it

I'm hoping to get this 302Xr to Gingerman at least once this year before I move to Atlanta. If I do make it to Gingerman, it should give me a good idea of want I may or may not need to change on the suspension. I definitely plan on hitting up Road Atlanta a few times next year with the car

I really dont know how i should feel on this one its kinda like someone putting a V8 in a rotary car but atleast its a ford motor going into a ford. So i cant complain too much.