In case you have not seen or heard the recent rumblings in the Ford Mustang news sector, the team here at StangNet has been hard at work on another project, following closely on the heels of the Shelby GT500 Glassback Project.  The latest & greatest is dubbed ‘Built to Cruise’ and it involves mating the new 2011 Ford Mustang GT’s power plant into a Fox-body Mustang coupe.  Project Built to Cruise has been in the works since the spring of 2010.  The initial months were mostly a lot of R&D for fitment of the new 2011 5.0 engine offered by Ford Racing to fit in the early Fox.  We also had to plan and obtain parts for a modular swap, which has become quite common the past few years, and with the addition of the Control Pak kits offered by Ford Racing, the swaps have been even easier.  The StangNet team has also been posting tidbits of our progress via the Mustang Forums and our dedicated update blog which you can see on our homepage as well as at blog.fox50swap.com.  In mid-September, we received the Control Pak from Ford Racing and a new K-member from J&M; just a week prior,  we got the car back from paint.  It’s go time!  So here we are, presenting you with an official update to give you a synopsis of our progress and break it down into some detail.  Follow the jump to get all the juicy details.

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We test fitted the newly designed K-member from J&M today in the BTC
project. They designed this new K-member to function/work in 79-04
Mustangs. It comes with 2 LCA arm positions and with or without
spring perches (for coil overs) and you will be able to use your own
stock LCAs, and I believe they will be making their own J&M LCAs as
well. This will also work for other 4.6L engines and they will be
fitting pushrod mounts as well for the setup.

The design is radical for sure. No tubing used which actually carries
less material if you were to compare to tubing metal content.

The engine went in like a charm and we noted some simple changes we
think would benefit the setup and will be going over these with them
soon and getting another one built to spec. We wanna tweak the engine
mount platforms to give more room for header clearance and some box
strength for the platform.

This piece is solid. They put a lot of time in the engineering of this
thing for sure! The K-member is much lighter compared to stock and we
will get an official weight soon.

There are changes to this new 5.0 motor with the oil pan and some room
had to be made in the design of a K-member to accept. The engine is
sitting at stock height and to our jubilee the FOX stock hood will
work just fine!! The rack mount locations are a little lower (on
purpose) and will require a bump steer kit to get the perfect
alignment.

I'll keep you posted on this one, but we are excited to see this piece
from J&M and appreciate their hard work on getting something built to
fill this new market.

She is back at StangNet headquarters. Tomorrow we start test fitting some parts.  Stay tuned!

Paint is on!  The plan from the beginning was a 'suede' or semi flat paint job.  I think we got it just right. Paintcode:  Ford UJ (2010 Sterling Grey Metallic). Some better outside pics soon.  We start bolting her together next week.  Stay tuned!!

Getting close to paint.  There has been a lag in progress obviously but we had a lot of R&D and body work to be done.  Check out the LX Mustang Grille Bar Eliminator (http://goo.gl/RCpC) from Classic Design Concepts.  Gonna be a nice addition to the project!  Next week we will be starting assembly with rapid updates.  Stay tuned!!