After attending twice Team Trigonia are full-on Challenge addicts now. Our goals for the 2022 are too lofty to be testing at the last minute. No time like the day after to start the next build while the motivation is fresh 
Day 1. 4pm. Drag it out of Trigonia Project Vehicle Deep Storage Containment Unit, start the tube-front conversion and begin engine/trans location.
Of course it started pouring rain as soon as we started working so we put up some tents and kept going.
Here's some background on the car before it got to us.
Purchase price of car and parts from Jonathan: $1500. In a attempt at 100% transparency, here's some notable nice/expensive parts that came on the car:
-Tubular K
-Flaming river manual rack
-tubular arms
-Strange Pro Series coilovers and upper spherical mounting
-SN95 spindles
-Fiberglass hood, fiberglass passenger door, drag wing, extra front clip in really nice shape, air dam
-Full set of autometer gauges
-nicely done 8.50 style cage
-nice rear links, bushings all dry rotted out, brand unknown at this time
-Strange rear shocks (feel like they might need a rebuild)
-35-spline spooled trussed 9" with Strange brakes and shafts (sold/traded for $550 and Explorer 8.8)
-really nice hurst PG shifter
-nice seats
-Dash already gutted and AC/heat blocked off
-Welds front and rear, looks like 3.5" fronts and 10" rears.
-battery box, 12 ft cable, really nice Moroso disconnect
-fuel cell with fittings
-really serious transmission cooler and lines
notable items included with the car:
-two complete 2JZ longblocks with accessories
- decent looking ebay-style stainless 2JZ turbo manifold
-new MS2 and flying lead harness
-Th400, mystery FTI converter, and Calvin Nelson-made adapter plate
-fuel cell with fittings
-really good radiator
some pictures of the car/parts as they first came to us
Goals; For those that have seen the BMW, this will be a serious departure from that in terms of finish quality. That car was a joke to see how quick and ugly we could build a 10 second car. We would like to show that we can build something nicely.
As for performance we would like this car to go 9's on the $2K budget and and put a ton of road miles on it. It will be registered and insured. Our big goal is to drive it to the 2022 event with no support vehicle 
Awww yes! Good starting point. Buying someone else's incomplete or abandoned project car is a great Challenge budget strategy. Everyone always wants to start a project car from scratch, but you can score some serious deals on basket cases like this.
cruisermatt said:Our big goal is to drive it to the 2022 event with no support vehicle
Whew. Big goal. Good luck!
Love it, can't wait to see it take shape.
Really great talking to you Matt, I think you guys have the talent and ability.
Looking forward to progress on this. So glad this is finally happening.
Good luck guys, can't wait to see this come together!
Awesome awesome awesome!!!
Unlike the last build this one is getting posted in real time.
This is our goal of projects to tackle before the end of the year
-motor mounts (looking like we are going with Corvette mounts)
-adapt 4L80e converter to 2JZ flex plate
-tube front end done including radiator and intercooler mounting (looking like we'll be using handicap bathroom rails for all of this)
-adapt the narrowed Explorer rear to the mustang 4-link and coils (this is the black cloud project)
2JZ!
No E36 M3?
This will decimate all, after we put about $1500 worth of parts into it. If we have to we'll overnight parts from Amazon
This comment helps me follow this thread. Which I am very excited to do.
Does it run yet? 9s and driven to the event 
In reply to cruisermatt :
Are you going to use the adapter plate calvin made when i was going to do this? if not ill take that back with the spare 2j yall have. dale said i could get the spare motor :)
In reply to surfshibby07 :
Yes we are definitely using it.
as for the engines we are going to determine which one is better to run initially and clean that one up while we use the other for mockup/fab. Then swap and clean up the other for a spare.
why build your own 2JZ mustang when you can just drive this one!
In reply to cruisermatt :
Will gladly take the wheel.
it will be fun to do ford vs chevy 2jz swapped cars. My malibu swap should be done by this summer.
little progress update. Dale got the motor and transmission mounts done last weekend. This weekend inwas over there and got started mocking up the "cooling unit". I welded lower brackets to the radiator that will hang on the tube front end. Then the AC condenser, intercooler bolt to that so its all a big sub assembly.
Radiator is 240sx and was in the county land fill (seriously)
condenser and radiator fans came from Ford Focus we parted out and recouped
intercooler from BMW build. cheaper now that it has a giant hole in it i need to fix. Lol
we finally got Jonathan's cage done so now we can focus on our own mustang build now LOL
Keeping the A/C condenser mounted there? Or just there while it's getting mocked up?
In reply to AWSX1686 (Forum Supporter) :
I'm glad you asked... why yes there will be a AC condenser there. as well as a compressor on the engine, and a complete SN95 central AC system behind the dash (free from Jonathan's mustang)
In reply to cruisermatt :
Dang! I guess living in Florida makes that pretty desirable. That's awesome.
The hope is that it will be the only serious race car there that has AC and thus net us some concourse points. Plus it will just be awesome to have AC.
I spent the day at Trigona on the notch today. I got the whole plenum built, would have it completely finished but ran out of argon. I will try to weld it up at my shop during the week, and hopefully look into Trailblazer fuel rail, plan is to run dual rails with 12 decap LS flex injectors.
Anyways, plenum. Material used is aluminum angle from scraped boat trailer, one 90 degee intercooler pipe, and some scrap 1/8" plate. Throttle is normal gen 3 LS cable style and welded straight to intake. Be careful as the throttle blade is actually aluminum.
I did a shave job on the runners/lower plenum and knocked all the little bracing/clip mounts off. Welded the plate around the runners and then did some port-matching. You should know we're serious if we are actually port matching something...
Dale got the transmission crossmember/mount finished today and it came out great, i missed pics though. We have a solid plan to finish the tube nose involing a leftover door bar from the Bmw so look forward to that next weekend.
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