It feels like it has been 10,000 days since our Gen 1 Coyote rebuild began…and we hope it is worth the wait. Off and on, Project Grabbr has been on Ford Muscle for 11 years now. And after its last hiatus, life got in the way of finishing up our Gen 1 Coyote rebuild. This 2011 Mustang GT has had a pampered life, though it has been put through its paces on more than one occasion – often enough, in fact, that its owner got tired of dealing with inconsistent drag times and actually swapped the MT82 for a 6R80. In the old days a manual was faster, but those days are long gone.
Rewinding for a second, the last part of our story began when upgrading the oil pump gears in the ProCharged GT. A bad install proved catastrophic — cut to: L&M re-sleeving the block, adding Manley forged pistons, rods, and ARP hardware. In what is, essentially, Part 2 of our Gen 1 Coyote rebuild, we will take our short-block to a long-block and get this puppy on the chassis dyno to examine its capabilities.

We covered the short-block on Part 1 of our Gen 1 Coyote rebuild. (Photo Credit: Jason Reiss)
KISSing the Top End
While this may have been a great time to swap to Gen 2 Coyote heads or even some 5.2-liter heads, a ProCharger provides all the power we need for the most part. Keeping it simple was the decided plan, so we reached out to COMP Cams for a spring and retainer kit (PN 26113CY-KIT), who also sent us a quartet CR231/233 cams (PN 191630) to spin the Gen 1 up to 7,200 rpm. With .514/.516-inch lift, 231/233 degrees of duration, and a lobe-separation angle of 124 degrees , this cam required phaser limiters to prevent untimely piston-to-valve clearance issues that would potentially add to our history of violence. The spring kit accommodates camshafts with up to .550-inch lift with 93 pounds at 1.57-inch seat pressure (coil bind occurs at .952-inch). These beehive-style springs are complemented by chromoly retainers, seats, seals, and valve locks. This kit works on all Coyote and Boss engines. We also used the opportunity to upgrade to COMP’s Hi-Tech timing chains (PN 3041CPG) to replace the worn stock chains.

The heads are upgraded with COMP Cams’ beehive-style springs, chromoly retainers, seats, seals, and valve locks.
There are many different directions you can go on the cams, including staying stock or using the Boss cams for a slight upgrade. Some even just upgrade the intake cams. But we worked closely with Billy Godbold who told us this would be the ticket for our combo to give us a nice, healthy sounding idle too. Truth be told, the cams are the most expensive part of our top-end refresh since we need four of them. On a Gen 1, they have proven worth the hassle and expense in our opinion.
COMP’s CR 231/233 hydraulic-roller camshafts got the nod for our build.
Come Together
When we arrived at L&M they already reconditioned our Gen 1 heads, which included cleaning, resurfacing, and adding our COMP Cams spring kit. They also degreased and inspected the timing cover, rear seal housing, COMP timing chains, guides, tensioners, rockers, lifters, and all the valvetrain and long-block hardware. They had also added Modular 5.0 Coyote oil squirter block-offs.
To get started on assembling the long-block, L&M dropped on a set of Cometic head gaskets. Since we weren’t running big boost these were ideal to give us the reliability to fire up the Grabber Blue Mustang any time we want to head to Cars and Coffee. The reconditioned heads were dropped on top of the gaskets and deck surface.
Cometic multi-layer steel head gaskets seal the revamped heads to the short-block.
To clamp the heads to the block, we used ARP’s 12mm head studs (PN 256-4702), made from proprietary ARP2000 material. The company’s extensive research in metallurgy is what has made them the gold standard in fasteners. ARP2000 was originally developed for steam power plants, and demonstrates superior notch toughness to 4130 and 8740 chromoly. If you are wondering what that mumbo-jumbo means, basically in the presence of a flaw like a notch or crack, ARP2000 material can still absorb energy instead of breaking. Depending on where the material is used that can be the difference between a catastrophic failure and a simple loss in performance.
L&M hand-tightened the studs into the block and then, using the supplied Ultra Torque lube, torqued the nuts to 35 lb-ft on the first pass, 70 on the second, and finally 100 lb-ft on the third pass. The COMP cams were laid into the lubricated bores and torqued to factory spec. Once the phasers are bolted up, the tedious process of timing an engine with four cams begins (We think this is why they say “more chains than brains.”).
ARP head studs ensure our freshened heads are held fast to the short-block.
If you’ve never seen a phaser limiter before, it’s an ingeniously simple contraption. It’s literally a block of metal that you jam into the phaser to prevent it from rotating. Knowing how big and what shape (and what metal to use), though, is the hard part. COMP’s limiters come with directions for disassembling and reassembling the phasers. The factory cam phasers actuate via oil pressure to control the cam timing to optimize the power curve. That’s why they are so much better than your old Two-Valve that only made power between 6,000 to 7,000 RPM.
COMP Cams phaser limiters for the Gen 1 Coyote rein in cam phasing to a maximum of 20 crank degrees to ensure proper piston-to-valve clearance with our more aggressive cams.
Timing the Coyote engine is a lengthy process, and well worth paying the experts at L&M. Building a Coyote typically requires a specialty builder familiar with the platform for a few reasons, and one of them is this assembly process which is crucial for a successful build. It’s tempting to use your local machine shop, but that could bite you if they are not familiar with the process.
Timing Coyote engines can be tricky for those not well-versed in this platform.
Once the engine is timed, installing the tensioners, tensioner arms, and sensors wrapped up the heads. And we are just about ready to button her up! They paid careful attention to the pickup tube clearance before bolting up the oil pan and coil covers.
This is a little known or discussed step in Coyote assembly: double-checking the oil pickup tube clearance. If the screen is too close to the oil pan, there will be no flow (or oil pressure). Conversely, if it’s too high it will be sucking air every time you mash the throttle and the weight transfers rearward.
Timing is Everything
Our beautiful new bullet was all buttoned up, so there was only one thing left to do. Bolt it into Project Grabbr and get to work at tuning this beast. The BMR tubular K-member made the job a lot easier along with this homemade cart to scoot the cradle, engine, and transmission under the chassis. Driven break-in oil was used initially dyno session at C&D Autotech in New Castle, Delaware, while Palm Beach Dyno helped work their magic on the Gen 1 Coyote tune for our initial session.
Using Standard correction, our horsepower jumped to 653.7 at 7,250 rpm with the same ProCharger pulleys. Not bad for 93-octane pump gas. While the jump was not huge from our last dyno session years prior (on a different dyno), we previously peaked at 7,350 rpm with stock cams, indicating there is more left in the tune or we may need to swap intake manifolds. We also decided to get the blower refreshed and will be upgrading to a P-1X in the process. 700 horsepower is just right around the corner, and now that we have a solid foundation, we can keep pushing our combination.

On the surface, this may seem like a lot of money and hassle for the power gain, but we had to rebuild the engine and this is not the end — there’s more left in the tune and the blower. Now that we have a solid foundation, we can push this engine as hard as we want.