Hopefully some of you guys can help me out. I want my truck be able to smoke the heck out of the tires and be able to smoke other trucks off the start. I'm tired of gettin left by my other buddies with their 5.4. All I have on my truck right now is a Volant cold air intake and a flowmaster muffler. I don't want to spend but around $500 so any sugguestions?

 

I'm new to the forum, but from what I've been reading, the X Cal II with a custom tune from Troyer Performance is the way to go...

I have one on order as well...

 

Custom tuning via the XCal2 will get you the biggest increase in hp, torque and drivability

 

What does Troyer do to the X-cal that makes it so different than just buying one off ebay and installing it?

 

Gears....Gears....Gears.

No mail order programer will give you the feel of a new set of gears.

If you currently have the 3.55's move up to 4.10's and believe me the difference will be ALOT more than a tuner would give you.

Secondly, while not having any experience with mail order tunes and or chips, I do on the other hand have alot of experience with custom dyno tunes. I would stray away from any mail order tune, unless you are making dyno pulls and sending the data log info and hp;tq; & a/f sheets back to the tunner and he is changing it and sending it back, in essence getting a dyno tune via e-mail. While what may work great on truck A might not work all that good on truck B and could cause a serious problem in truck C. Granted Troyer has a great track record with mail order tunes so not knocking his system in any way but I am sure even they would agree that inorder to make their tunes safe for all trucks and be somewhat "Generic" they are leaving some performance on the table that could be picked up from a custom dyno session.

 

You need a tuner to correct the speedo anyway. I have a 4.6 and the xcal2 and it really woke up my truck.I would also recommend gears but to me it makes more since to get the tuner 1st so when you get gears you can correct the speedo right away.

 

For $500 you can't have both....so you could just call Dallas Mustang and get a speedcal box that will recalibrate the speedo etc for a gear/tire swap for alot less $$$ than a tuner.

So I guess you really don't need a tuner to correct for the gears.

 

true you can do that but now the question is 4.10s ,4.30s,or 4.56s

 

Well I take it you are trying to be fast, so by that assumption I am guessing you aren't swapping out to 35" tires or anything. I would say 4.10's.

Here is my logic, you want to be faster out of the hole which is understandable...you aren't going to be too fast if you just sit there spinning the tires. I have 4.30's in my car which has ALOT better weight transfer and gets ALOT better traction than a truck will. I have a hard time keeping drag radials planted on the streets, so I would hate to try and launch a truck with no rear weight, 4.30's, and street tires.

If you were willing to fix up the suspension to help it hook and get a set of sticy tires then I would say go for the 4.56's. Otherwise more is not always better because you can have all the power in the world if you can't get the car to hook it dosen't help much.

 

gears sound like their just what i'm looking for. but are there any drawbacks to changing my gears?

 

The only draw backs our the speedo but like 01trublugt said its a easy fix,if you get 4.56s your top speed gets lowered but that shouldnt be a concern, also if you get 4.56s you probably will need traction bars so you wont get any wheel hop.

 

I think most of these trucks are under-geared from the facotry, so in most cases shorter gears helps a LOT.

IMHO there are no drawbacks to re-gearing.
I went from 3.31 to 4.10 on street tires (so it's 20% shorter). MPG didn't change, but I drive mostly in-town.

At 80+mph, I think there'd be an MPG hit of a few percent, but at high speeds these trucks aren't very efficient anyways. So it would be the equivalent of going from "bad" to "slightly worse than bad".

At speeds under around 80 or so, there's minimal penalty, if any at all. Plus, the truck has plenty of power for most uphill grades now, with little need for downshifting.

 

I know the question was what will improve the takeoff, and I understand that gears will help a lot...Going up in gears will reduce your top end...about how mush reduction with 4.10s?

 

Depends on where you start.
Assuming everything stays the same but you just change gears:
- take the smaller ratio, divide it by the larger ratio
- multiply by 100.
- subtract this from 100
This will give yo the change as a percentage.

Im my case:
Started with 3.31
Went to 4.10

Doing the calcuation, I get 19.3. That is the percent change in gear reduction. And that is also the percentage incrase in RPM at any given speed.

I even verified the calculations with my new gears in my truck. It was spot-on.

So if I was turning 2000 rpm at 70mph before, I'd turn 2386 rpm after the change.

 

Well this issue has come up more times than I can think of on different Mustang boards of sorts. You aren't loosing top end so to speak, in reality it will pull harder at hwy speeds than the factory gearing. I used to have to shift to 4th to pass cars doing 80 or so with 3.55's now with 4.30's I can keep it in 5th and have pick-up.

What you are loosing is top speed, to show how silly this is lets just say the stock truck can "theoreticly" do 225mph before it hits redline in top gear. Swapping a stock 3.55 gear to a 4.56 gear you might reduce your top speed to oh say 165mph before you tach out top gear. Thoes numbers were just an exammple so don't quote me on it just showing that the top speed you loose you will never get to anyways so its no big deal. It isn't like you are going to reduce your top speed to 80mph or anything lol.