Some Progress on 2.9L Performance Parts
Granted, this work and news is about 20 years late, but a few pals and I who road race Ford Capris have been conspiring with a few vendors to make some go-faster parts. Oddly, our sanctioning body allows us to use the 2.9L V6 in addition to the 2.6L and 2.8L, though the 2.9L never showed up in a U.S. market Capri.
We now have new rocker shaft assemblies, complete from the head up, including a cradle that holds the smaller diameter rocker shaft and keeps the roller rocker arms in place, and steel pedestals. The only thing you have to provide are the allen head cap screws that secure the assembly to the head, and modify the middle cap screw to mimic the stock bolts for allowing oil to pass from head to shaft. With luck, there are a few pics here of this assembly.
We also had some very nice one-piece stainless steel valves made up, after working with a head porter to grind on a sacrificial head to determine the optimum valve head sizes. We settled on 1.825" intakes, and stayed with the stock exhaust valve diameter. Using these valves only makes sense if a fair amount of head porting is done. I can post stock and post-port flow numbers at 0.010" increments, up to 0.600" if there is interest here.
These mods are not cheap, and for most folks it makes no sense to go this route (so please spare us the "You're a moron for spending that kind of $$$!" advice since for us in our particular class, it does make sense).
If there's interest, I / we can post more info on our adventure.
Like I know it's an older vehichles and I read alot on the 2.9 engines saying there basically isn't much to improve upon because they made little or no high end parts. Half of me wants to drop that 4.0 because lots of people say that's when you can do a very nice tune up on it. The other half wants to get a little turbo diesel like a newer jetta engine or something along those lines because they have great torque and horsepower plus then I would get some great mpg. But then I would have to replace the transmission or I would be flying through those gears. I just love the older cars because I know this has like 90% less plastic than any new cars. I was looking at the ranger t6 and boy wouldn't that be nice if it made it to the states! Anywho like is there any fuel systems that are better? Would getting new values do anything? Or would I get god results from that only if I put in new cams in there as well. I also tossed around the idea of a turbo charger but there are few articles about all these modifications and I have no idea if they would be worth it