This week was another fairly productive week on the new car, although I didn't get done as much as I wanted to. I had been planning to get the driveshaft angles set and get the rear end components mounted and tacked into place this weekend, but on Monday when I ordered the driveshaft I decided that I'd rather have the driveshaft on hand and installed before I finalized the rear end configuration. So, instead I decided to move ahead with finishing up the chassis work at the front of the car, and then look at getting some tubing installed to tie the subframes together.

It turned out that the work on the front of the car took longer than I thought. One of the things I wanted to do at the front was to drop a tube down from the front roll cage extension tube to the factory frame rail, in order to support the frame where the front suspension load would be. As I was looking at this on Friday night, it became clear that the header pipes had to come straight through this area, and if I didn't put the tube in the correct spot it would interfere with the headers. So, before I could even start thinking about positioning the tube I had to know where the header pipes would be.

As a result, I spent Friday night and early Saturday morning fabbing up the first several inches of primary pipes and the header flange for each side. I was hoping to have at least six inches of straight pipe coming out of the head ports before turning the pipes towards the back of the car, but it appeared that this might be optimistic, based on the location of the exhaust ports and the stock frame rail. No way to tell for sure without actually mocking it up, though. On the heads I'm using the ports exit the casting at a 15 degree angle, so the pipes have to be welded onto the header flanges at this angle to keep the exhaust coming out of the port in a straight line. I dug out some 2 1/8" exhaust pipe for this task, because I was planning on using 2 1/8" to 2 1/4" to 2 3/8" stepped headers, just like what I had previously used for my Galaxie. This would allow me to re-use the collectors from those headers; since this car is getting the 585" SOHC from the Galaxie, I'm going to put my 510" engine back in the Gal, and I have a different set of headers for that engine.

On the topic of the Galaxie, I got an interesting call from my friend Joel this week (aka Captain Stabbin', also aka the Trunk Monkey). Joel suggested that I get the Galaxie ready for Drag Week in 2011 also. He offered to donate an 800 HP capable manual transmission and clutch setup so that the Galaxie would be a stick car, and he could drive the Galaxie this year, while I drove the Shelby clone. That's a pretty interesting idea that I'm still considering; it would be fun to have two cammer cars at Drag Week! Of course, I have a perfectly good C-4 and driveline for the Galaxie, and the car was already set up for that, so I wondered why Joel wanted to swap in the manual. He responded that he really didn't want to drive a car with "that oily, greasy, smelly fluid coupling behind the engine" LOL! But I'm not sure I'd want to run somebody else's transmission in the car, to say nothing of having two cars in the same class, and the extra expense of fielding two cars at Drag Week. I'm still thinking about this; no decision is required right away, and we will see how things play out this year. But it sure would be fun to have both cars at the event.

Back at the header flanges, I cut some 6" sections of the 2 1/8" tubing, cut off at a 15 degree angle, and welded the tubes into my header flanges. After getting done with this on Saturday morning, I installed one of the flanges on the driver's side to see how it would fit. Unfortunately, as I had expected, the six inch head pipes were not going to fit; at the back the flange wouldn't even bolt into place on the engine. Here's a photo:



It looked like if I cut the pipes down to 5" the flange might at least bolt onto the engine, and give me an idea of where the pipes came past the frame rail. Also from this mock up it appeared that the spot weld flange at the edge of the frame rail was going to be in the way of the primary pipes. As result I decided to cut this flange off the frame rail, and weld up the seam. After getting this done I cut an inch off all the driver's side primary pipes and was able to get the header flange mounted on the engine.



Sorry for the poor photo quality. With the pipes on the engine, I was able to determine where I had to put frame tube so that it would not interfere with the header pipes. I also took a mandrel bent section of 2 1/8" exhaust pipe and using this as a gauge, determined where I would have to cut the primary pipes off in order to get them past the frame rails. It looked like the straight section of pipe would be anywhere from 3 1/2" to 4" depending on the pipe's location. Not as long as I was hoping, but at least livable, and certainly a lot longer than the pipes would have been had I opted to go with a Boss 429 style engine compartment.

Shortly after this a couple friends of mine stopped over to ask some SOHC questions; one of them is in the business, and has a customer who would like to put an SOHC in a Cobra replica, so he wanted to take some measurements off one of the engines I have on an engine stand to see what kind of fitment issues he would be dealing with. While talking we were looking at the front end of my Shelby clone, and they suggested that I use some of the 1 1/4" chrome moly tubing I had on hand to triangulate the front roll cage extension. They suggested going from the junction welded at the front of the stock frame rail, up to the upper strut mount, and then back down to the stock frame rail at the firewall. I could still run my bar from the middle of the front roll cage extension down to the stock frame rail to support the suspension mounting point and engine mount area, but the other bars would triangulate the whole setup.

I really liked this idea. After my friends left I started working on this, but quickly came to the realization that this triangulation bar would cause a couple problems. One would be that it would limit my ability to remove the engine's valve covers, especially if I used studs to mount them. The second, and more serious issue was that by putting in a bar that ran down to the stock frame rail at the firewall, I would seriously limit the room for the headers to go through this area. The room on the driver's side was already limited by the steering linkage, and I figured I could only fit a couple of the header tubes through there as it was. Installing the bar meant that at least three of the tubes, and maybe all four, would have to wrap underneath the stock frame rail. This would lead to ground clearance issues that I didn't want to contend with, so after kicking it around a little I went back to my original plan, which was the bar down to the stock frame rail, a short support bar up to the upper strut mount, and a triangulation bar at the front of the roll cage extension tube, similar to what I'd seen on certain aftermarket roll cage kits.

By the end of the night Saturday I had the bars cut and tacked in on the driver's side. Sunday I spent most of the day on the equivalent passenger side tasks. Here's a couple of photos of the front of the car with these modifications:





I also got my new front wheels this week, and had the front tires mounted; Sunday afternoon I swapped them onto the car. Here's a photo:



I think those wheels look pretty good. I was really waffling between these Centerlines and Weld Wheels, and I liked the Weld's because they look good too and are probably a little lighter. However, the Welds were double the price of the Centerlines, and they are also not available in a 5 inch or 6 inch width. I didn't want to go with a really narrow rim in the front, because I don't like the way the cars handle with the 3 1/2" wide wheels, plus I've had some bad experiences with road hazards and the narrow wheels (pothole + 3 1/2" wheel = blown tire and bent rim). I've also seen this at Drag Week, in 2005 when one of the guys in my class hit a pothole and blew a tire. So I settled on the Centerlines because they were available in a 5" rim width.

Next I spent some time trial-installing the front seat in the interior, because I wanted to determine how I was going to mount it. I was thinking about installing the subframe connection bars so that they came through the floor behind the front seats, but I didn't want to do this without knowing first where the seats would be installed, in case there was some interference there. After I got the driver's side seat installed, I finally got a chance to sit in my new car. The seating position was good, and mounting the seat farther back from stock gave me plenty of leg room, which is sometimes a problem in early Mustangs. Here's a picture of the admittedly incomplete interior:



Finally, the last hour out in the shop today I spent the time laying under the car, and figuring out where I was going to run the tubes to connect the subframes, and also how I was going to make up the transmission mount. Based on the seat position I figured I'd be better off running the tubes completely under the car until I got right up to the rear subframe, and then just notch the floor a little and bend the pipe to come through and weld to the back half crossmember. I also figured out that I could notch the factory unit body crossmember that the transmission mount attaches to so that the header collector could come through up near the floor of the car, for maximum ground clearance, and then reinforce the notch to maintain the required strength for the mount.

At the beginning of the week I had been hoping that I would be able to get the subframe connections and transmission mount completed this weekend, in addition to the front end work, but obviously this will have to wait for next weekend. It is pretty obvious at this point that there is no way I'll be done with the chassis work by the end of this month as I was originally hoping, and with certain family commitments in March, it is probably realistic to assume that the chassis work won't be completed until the end of March. Hopefully this will still leave me enough time to get the car painted by mid-May, and on the road by the beginning of July. We will see...

After spending the last couple of weeks buried in website creation I finally got back to working on the car this week. I'd been busy with family stuff and book stuff all week, so I didn't get a chance to get back to the car until Saturday morning. First thing I did was to take some measurements off the manual rack so I could modify the bushings I got from Fatman to fit the manual rack. What I had to do turned out to be fairly straightforward, but how to do it was the problem. The rack bushings were made of plastic, and were split in two. Fixturing them so I could machine them in my mill was going to be a problem.

The first thing I had to do was make the hole through the middle of the bushing bigger, then on one side I had to change the profile of the hole from round to square. I started with enlarging the center hole by clamping the bushing halves together in the vise and running my boring bar through to make the hole bigger; see the photo below:


 
This part went reasonably well, after I got the pressure on the vise dialed in so that it would hold the bushing without distorting it. After I got the hole bored I thought I'd try an end mill to square up the hole in one side, but as soon as I started cutting the plastic bushing flipped out of the vise. I tried it a few more times with the same result, and then tried again with just one half of the bushing in place. This worked better, although when I tightened the half bushing in the vice it's half round shape made it distort. I did manage to get most of the milling done this way, but as I removed more and more material the bushing became less and less rigid, and started flipping out of the vise again. I ended up giving up on the mill in the end and finishing the bushing with a die grinder, but finally got it so it fit reasonably well on the passenger side of the rack.

As long as I had the bushing done, and the driver's side bushing was interchangeable with the power rack, I thought I would disassemble the manual rack and then put it in the car, to make sure the steering shaft linkage worked. However, when I disassembled the manual rack, I got another surprise. The tie rod ends for the manual and power racks were not the same. This wouldn't have been a problem, except that the kit used a rack extension on the passenger side, that screws in to where the original tie rod end goes. The passenger side tie rod end then screws into the extension. Obviously, with different size threads this extension would no longer fit. Here's a picture of the racks and their components, disassembled. The power rack is on the bottom:



Not only was the thread different, but the "polarity" was different; the power rack's tie rod ends thread onto a stud coming out of the rack, but on the manual rack the stud was was on the tie rod end. Another pic, with the manual rack tie rod end at the top:



Looked like I was going to have to make a new rack extension. I measured the threads on the manual rack tie rod ends, and sure enough they were metric, and an oddball size: 16mm X 1.0mm. I figured I could get a grade 8 bolt in this size, cut off the threads, then just machine a steel sleeve with 16mm X 1.0mm threads in each end. On the computer I went to McMaster Carr, which usually has a pretty good selection of fasteners, but unfortunately the only 16mm bolts they had were 1.5mm or 2.0mm pitch. Same at several other places I tried, so my bolt idea wouldn't work. Back at McMaster Carr at least they had the tap and die sizes I needed, so I ordered those along with a 16mm 4130 steel bar, plus a 1 1/4" 4130 bar for the sleeve. Next weekend I'll have to machine these parts so I can put the rack together.

In the meantime, though, I figured I could tape up the manual rack ends, and get it mounted. This process went along more or less according to plan, and the steering shaft linkage fit the manual rack with no modifications.

Next I decided to tackle the front suspension again. I'd been giving some thought to this during the week, and I wanted to make sure that the extended lower control arms would move the tires where I wanted them before I went forward. So I bolted the driver's side lower control arm in place, then bolted on the spindle and the wheel and tire. I set the car back down at ride height and used my camber gauge to make sure the wheel and tire were perfectly upright. Stepping back and taking a look, the car finally looked normal! Now I could proceed with a revamp of the front suspension, so I removed the front fenders for access and got to work.

During the week I'd realized that one advantage to lengthening the lower control arms was that the angle of the strut was now going back towards the normal position as designed by the kit. This meant that I might be able to use the struts as is, without the brackets I had built for the Lakewood struts. I bolted one of the Strange struts onto the spindle and it looked very promising. Looking more closely at the strut, it appeared that I could slot the upper bolt hole in the bracket to give me enough room to move the strut where I wanted it. I really wanted to use the Strange struts if possible, because they were adjustable, as opposed to the Lakewood struts which were not. I decided to chuck one of the Strange struts up in the mill and slot the opening to test this idea:



Bolting it back on the car, the extended top hole gave me plenty of room to put the top of the strut where I wanted it next to the front roll cage bar extension, and also appeared to allow plenty of plus and minus camber adjustment. I decided to go forward with this approach.

Next I needed to deal with the spring mounts and upper strut mount. The Fatman kit was really designed with road race style handling in mind, and with the included upper strut mount and coil spring mounts there was only about 4" of strut travel. I wanted more than that, to get around 5 inches of wheel drop from the normal ride height to aid in launching at the track. The complete strut travel was 6 1/2", so I had to modify the upper strut mount and spring mount to take advantage of this full travel. The first thing I looked at was the upper strut mount; this contained a bearing in a steel tube, welded onto the adjustment plate from the original kit. The bearing was sunk pretty bar down into the tube:


 
I couldn't use it buried in there like that, because the distance inside the tube ate up a good inch of the strut travel. I cut the flange off in my bandsaw, and then cut it even closer in the lathe. Here's a before and after picture:



Next I looked at the upper spring mount; this slides over the strut's shaft and supports the top of the coil spring. It had come with the kit with about a 2" tube welded onto it to keep it square with the shaft. Again this was taking up too much of the strut shaft, reducing the potential travel. Some bushings had come with the kit to go into the top bearing that the strut bolted into; I decided to modify the spring mount so that it welded directly onto this bushing. After cutting the tube off the spring mount and shortening the bushing somewhat, I clamped the bushing and the spring mount together for welding. This photo shows the modified assembly in the clamp, and the original parts from the passenger side below:



After TIG welding the bushing to the spring mount, I assembled the two struts, one with the modified components and one with the components as received with the kit for this photo:



The only downside I can see from this modification is that I'll probably have to get longer coil springs, but I was planning on getting different springs than the ones that came with the kit anyway, so this is no big deal.

With all the pieces finished up, I assembled the strut and components on the spindle, and built a plate to weld to the forward roll cage extension bar , and also to the steel tube around the top strut bearing. I cut the hole in the plate for the tube on the mill, and touched it up with a die grinder to allow the tube to come through at a little bit of an angle, as required. Finally, with my son Max helping me by holding the plate in position, I tacked it to the front roll cage bar, and also to the bearing tube in a few spots. The driver's side front suspension now looked like this:



From here I have to cut the tacks to the forward roll cage extension bar, remove the top strut bearing from the tube so I don't fry it by welding, and weld all the way around the tube and plate junction. Then I have to trim the plate to the shape I want, reweld the plate to the forward roll cage extension bar, and come up with some support brackets to keep the plate stable and strong so that it can take the force of coming down from all those wheelies!

I'll work on that next weekend, and now that I have the plan, hopefully I can get the passenger side done, and also finish up the modifications to the steering rack so that I can test out the steering. Shortly afterwards I should be able to pop in the engine and trans, and get the rear end brackets tacked in place once the driveshaft angles are set. I'm still hoping to be done with all the chassis work by the end of February; we will see. More next week - Jay

As expected I made very little progress this week on the Shelby clone, spending my spare time on building my web site (which went live this week). However, on Friday afternoon I got a call from Napa saying that they had my rack in stock. On Saturday I drove down to the store and sure enough, there it was. I had been a little concerned that the rack would not have the same steering u-joint attachment that the power rack had, which would have left me in need of a new U-joint, but sure enough it looked the same. Buying a new rack from Napa was expensive, but worth it to me because I just didn't like the extra tubing required for the power rack, even if I was going to run it manually.

Back at home, I took the time to pull the power rack out of the chassis, and swap the u-joint onto the new rack, just to be sure. Then I looked at the passenger side bushing that would allow the manual rack to fit into the brackets on the K member. I shouldn't have been surprised; it wasn't even close. I don't know what Fatman sent me first time around, but it sure wasn't a manual steering rack bushing. I guess I will have to fabricate the required bushing myself.

I expect that next week I will be just as busy on the web site and book stuff as this week, so again I don't expect to make much progress on the car. Hopefully things will get back to normal in February, and I can start making some progress again.

Monday this week on my lunch break I put in a call to Fatman Fabrications to ask about the issue with how the front struts I purchased fit on the spindles. Basically they told me that the kit was designed to be used with stock components, and that aftermarket components may not work properly with the kit. They singled out the Strange Engineering struts I had as a potential problem. This really didn't make any sense to me; if the original '79-'93 Mustang spindles had wider ears than the '94-'04 spindles, how could Strange offer a strut that fit a narrower set of ears? I suspected that maybe there had been a change to Mustang spindles somewhere in the mid 1980s that the guys at Fatman didn't know about, because my Strange struts were not specified for '79-'93 Mustangs, only from '87-'93. Unfortunately I was stuck with them, because they'd had to be modified slightly in order to fit the lower spring mount that came with the Fatman kit over the strut tube. I resigned myself to the fact that I had wasted my money on these struts. I didn't want to buy stock Ford struts for this car, because I wanted a 90/10 style strut for a drag race oriented suspension. On Monday night I went looking through the Summit web site, and found some Lakewood 90/10 struts for '79-'93 Mustangs. I went ahead and ordered these, figuring I could return them if they also had the mounting bracket for the narrower ears on the spindle.

Late in the evenings this week I continued to read up on web sites, so not a lot got done on the car project. Thursday my new Lakewood struts showed up from Summit, so I anxiously took them out of the box on Thursday night to see what they looked like. Sure enough, they came with the wider spacing between the brackets, so they would work as I wanted them to in my application. However, they also came with their own set of spacer plates, so that they would bolt onto the narrower ears of my spindle if the plates were used. Since these struts were specified for '79-'93 cars, I am now fairly certain that a change to the mounting ears on the spindles was made by Ford in 1987, making the ears narrower and causing my problem with the '87-'93 Strange struts.

Friday night around 9:00 I got back out to the shop to get going on the car project again. I started out making the adapter plates I needed to allow tilting the strut outboard from the original shock tower locations. Steve and Jerry were going to come over on Saturday night for another barn night, and I wanted to be able to put the whole front end together when they were here, so I needed to get these plates done. Here's a picture of one of the struts with the pair of plates installed:



I got one pair done on Friday night, and the other pair done on Saturday morning, and spent the rest of the day on Saturday afternoon finishing up the welding on the quarter panels, trunk drop downs, and outer wheelhouses on the passenger side of the car. I knew that if I didn't have that done by the time Steve and Jerry came over, they would be merciless in their verbal abuse of me.

When Steve and Jerry came over, I had finished the quarter panel and had started working on a patch panel that would go between the original stock floor of the car and the back half crossmember. I managed to finish fitting it up just after they arrived, so Jerry grabbed the wire feed and began welding it in place. Steve took over the TIG welder to finish some TIG welding that needed to be done on the front frame support bars and the back half area, while I started working on getting the struts installed with the spacer plates I had built earlier. Steve finished up with the TIG welding fairly quickly, and started trimming around the front area of the car, where we had used the plasma cutter to cut away the shock towers and inner fenders. He used a cutoff wheel to make those cuts nice and clean, and then built a T-shaped 1/8" steel plate to cap the shock tower area where we had cut it off with the plasma cutter. Meanwhile I had figured out how I wanted to mount the upper struts to the front frame support bars, and had used a combination of the brackets in the Fatman kit and my own custom brackets to get the upper struts positioned properly. Jerry finally finished up with the sheet metal welding on the floor (which was a lot of welding), and came up and tacked the upper strut mounts in place.

At the end of the night we slid the Wilwood brake hubs onto the front hubs, re-installed the four link, rear axle housing, and rear wheels and tires, and also bolted the front tires on the car. Finally, I took the car down off the jack stands and supported it at ride height so we could see how it all looked. Here's some pictures, starting with the sheet metal patch at the back of the floor:









Everything was starting to look pretty good! Jerry and Steve took off, and I had the afternoon on Sunday available, so I fell asleep thinking about what else I could do to the car on Sunday afternoon.

Sunday afternoon I was back out to the shop. I had decided that I wanted to put the front end fiberglass on the car to see how it looked. The Branda fiberglass had been leaning against the garage door for over a month, so I was anxious to see how it looked when installed.

As usual, the fiberglass parts presented some fitment issues. Wrestling the front fenders into place so that they would actually bolt up to the mounting points towards the back of the fender was rather challenging, but with a certain amount of convincing they eventually went into place. Getting both fenders installed and looking about right took a couple of hours. Next I started looking at installing the headlight buckets and the front fender trim, and it was clear that some trimming of the fiberglass pieces would be required. I got the passenter side parts installed, and then for fun I laid the hood in place on the car, and took this picture:



I was standing around enjoying how the car looked like this, when I noticed something rather disturbing. The front wheels were moved way, way inside the fenders! Standing back a little and looking at the wheel and tire position, the car looked like an old funny car, which was definitely NOT the look I was going for. I measured the distance from the fat part of the tire to the outer fender, and it was four inches! Here's a couple of photos:





I wondered if this was a wheel offset issue or a front suspension track width issue. Given all the issues I'd had with the Fatman kit, I was afraid I knew the answer. The car looked like crap with the wheel in this position, and I resigned myself to investigate this issue in the coming week. I left the shop tonight pretty disappointed; we will see what the next week brings.

Again this week I was not able to get much accomplished on the Shelby clone project. Despite having a couple of days off before Christmas, family responsibilities took over, and of course we had relatives over for the Christmas festivities. The small amount of time I had available during the week was spent on the book edit, which was still taking a lot longer than I though. Finally today I got several hours alone in the shop and finally got the manuscript finished to my satisfaction, so its off to the printer next week. I have taken Monday and Tuesday off work next week, so I'm looking forward to getting back on the car project tomorrow.

Progress on my 69 Shelby Clone was rather limited this week due to the return of my book manuscript from the editor. They'd had the manuscript for about a month, and when it came back I was expecting to be able to take a few evenings to make any corrections before I sent it off to the printer. When I got it back the corrections were indeed pretty minor, and the editor had made some nice complimentary remarks about my writing style that gave me a little more confidence about the book. (Of course, I had to pay the editing service for this work, so maybe they say that to everybody to encourage return business.) However, one suggestion they made caused me a lot of trouble. I had written the whole book in block paragraph style, which is how I write reports and proposals at work, and also how I'm writing this blog. This style does not indent the start of a paragraph, and leaves an entire blank line between each paragraph. The editor said I should use book paragraph style, which indents the first line of each paragraph and doesn't leave a blank space between them.

This would have been no big deal, except that I had laid the entire book out in Microsoft Word, rather than using a dedicated publication layout software like Quark Express. So, when I started changing the paragraph structure in my manuscript, the amount of text on each page started changing, and since all the pictures, tables, and graphs in the book were tied to the text, they all started moving around also. So, the entire layout of the book went out the window. As I went along making the paragraph changes, I had to take each and every graphic and reposition it on the page. This took a LONG time.

I worked on the book all weekend and still I'm not done. I took a few breaks along the way when the editing was driving me crazy, and spent and hour here and there on the car. I managed to get the front hoop bent up and tacked in place; this is the bar that goes forward from the top of the main hoop on the driver's side, up to the windshield, then bends to go along the front of the windshield, and bends again to go back to the main hoop on the passenger side. I notched this bar after I had it bent up, and held it in place by supporting it with a piece of wood between the transmission tunnel and the front of the bar while tacking it to the main hoop. I also managed to get one of the front upright support bars built, which goes from the front hoop forward along the roof for a few inches, then bends down to follow the windshield angle, and then bends again to go straight down to the floor and welds to one of the 6" X 6" plates. But other than that, no progress on the car.

I'm about 2/3 of the way through the book edits, so I should be able to finish up next week and get back to work on the car. My friends Steve and Jerry are going to come over and give me a hand next weekend, so I'm looking forward to describing a lot of progress in my next report.

The 69 Shelby clone project moved forward substantially this week, with what was essentially an extra day on the weekend to try to get some things done. Early in the week I was tied up with family activities, but on Tuesday my Currie axle housing finally arrived, so I was ready to move forward with getting the rear end tacked up and positioned under the car. I was disappointed when I called Discount Steel on Tuesday and they told me that they still didn't have the chrome moly roll cage tubing I had ordered, but they were fairly certain they would have it next week. And on Wednesday I picked up my case and gears from BradFORD, plus my Fatman Fabrications front strut conversion kit came, so between the rear end work and the Fatman kit I had plenty to do over the weekend.

Friday morning after Thanksgiving I got out to the shop to get started. I checked the overall length of the Currie axle housing and it seemed to be right on, so I bolted my jig case into the housing, and slid the 2 1/4" steel tube through the donuts in the case so that it was sticking out of both ends of the housing. Next I took the four link brackets and slid them onto the axle housing tubes; this had to be done now, because they wouldn't fit on over the housing ends. Then I took the Mark Williams housing ends and slid them over the steel tube with the donuts in place inside. They looked like they lined up perfectly with the axle housing, indicating everything was straight. Finally, I dug out my wire feed and tacked the housing ends into place.

I am always extremely cautious when welding on the rear end, because I want to be sure not to warp anything, so I basically put three button welds spaced 120 degrees apart on the housing end to axle housing joints. I welded one side first, and then the other, and then went back and forth with the button welds until I had a bead about an inch long in three places around each axle housing tube, tacking on the housing ends. I will finish weld this later, when I finish weld all the other components onto the axle housing, such as the back brace, four link brackets, rear sway bar brackets, etc.

Next I removed the jig tube and the aluminum donuts in the housing ends, and unbolted the jig case from the axle housing. Then I bolted in the Mark Williams case, and installed the forty spline axles into the housing. Thankfully, they seemed to be the correct length and fit perfectly. Then I horsed the rear axle assembly up onto a floor jack, and rolled it around to the back of the car and positioned it underneath the back half frame rails.

Next step was to add the four link bars to position the axle housing correctly with respect to the back half frame. I assembled the rod ends on the four bars and made sure that each bar was exactly the same length, then bolted them into the brackets on the back half frame, and then onto the brackets that were on the axle housing. Finally, I screwed the drive studs into the axle flanges on each side, slipped on the Wilwood disc brake hats, and bolted on the wheels and tires.

As the wheels and tires went on it was clear that the back half frame was positioned too far to the rear of the car. I had a floor jack supporting the front of the back half frame crossmember, and jack stands supporting the rear, and another floor jack supporting the center of the rear axle housing. I moved the floor jacks together to get the tires positioned directly under the wheelwells, and then jacked up the rear axle housing to get the tires positioned up in the wheelwells like they would be with the car sitting normally.

When I had the wheels and tires where I wanted them, and the four link setup assembled, I was finally able to position the back frame rails in the proper position side to side, and mark them so that I knew where to cut them off so that they would fit up into the trunk area and butt up against the 2X3 rectangular steel tube that I had already welded in place there. After marking I dropped the back half subframe off the jackstands in back, and cut the subframe rails off with a cutoff wheel in my grinder. Then I repositioned the back half subframe under the car, and moved it around until I had it in the final position. I cut the 1/8" steel plates to go against the rocker panels for the front crossmember to weld onto, and locked them in place with some vise grips. After double checking all the measurements to make sure that the back half subframe was straight and square in the car, I tacked it into place with the wire feed.

It was now getting towards the end of the day, but there was still one more thing I wanted to accomplish. I had purchased some 1" X 1" 16 gauge square steel tubing to kind of frame up the trunk area, and provide a reference for the tops of the trunk drop downs. I was able to add in this framework pretty quickly, again just tacking the pieces in place. Here are some photos of the back half subframe installed in the car:







On any car project there are milestones along the way, and this was certainly one of them for this car. I'd never installed a back half kit before (although I had built one from scratch, with help, back in the 1980s), and the installation hadn't been too difficult once I'd been able to clear out the back of the car to see where everything was going to go, and had all the pieces in hand for the mock-up of the rear frame in the car. I left the shop on Friday night feeling pretty good about how this project was shaping up.

Saturday morning I was anxious to get started on the front strut conversion. There was still a bunch of stock brackets and wiring in the engine compartment of the car, so I spent the morning pulling all that stuff out of there. The instructions for the kit suggested that I start with some of the smaller pieces, but I wanted to bolt the K member assembly in place and see how it fit, and how it looked. I was concerned about this because as unit body cars, the old Mustangs are notorious for imprecise assembly, and what fits one car may not fit another. Sure enough, as I got going on installing the K member this seemed to be the case with my car also. There was a lot of prying and convincing required to get the spacers that fit up into the lower control arm mounting brackets installed, and then more work was required to get the spacers installed outside the control arm mounting bracket and inside the brackets on the K member. Nevertheless after an hour or so of effort, I was able to get the K member installed, and the bolts in place through the lower control arm mounting holes.

At the front of the K member the kit provided two steel spacers, each of which extended from the K member up to the factory sway bar mount on each side, in order to provide some stability to the front of the K member. The spacers bolted into the K member through a slotted hole, probably provided to allow some adjustment and compensation for car to car variations in the chassis. But on my car even the most forward position in the slot would not allow the spacers to line up with the original sway bar bracket holes. So it looked like I would have to modify either the K member or the sway bar bracket hole to make the spacers fit. I decided to leave this task for later.

Next I thought I would concentrate on the steering. I had purchased a rebuilt power steering rack for a '94 Escort on ebay, and the instructions with the kit said the first thing I had to do was to remove the boots and take off the inner tie rod ends. I'd never done any work on a steering rack before, so this was going to be all new to me. The instructions said that after the boots were off to put a little heat from a propane torch onto the inner tie rod ends to loosen up the Loctite on the threads, and then unscrew the tie rod ends from the rack. However, after putting heat on the tie rod end for about 30 seconds, I started seeing some melted white plastic coming out of the end of the tie rod end. What the heck? It appeared that the tie rod end had some kind of a plastic liner around the ball, and that application of the heat had melted it!

Hmmmmm, they hadn't said anything about that in the instructions. Maybe not all of the tie rod ends had this, but mine sure did. I called BradFORD to see if he could shed any light on this. He told me that most of the rack inner tie rod ends he'd seen had this kind of a liner, and that applying heat was not necessary to remove the tie rod end. He thought that applying heat to the inner tie rod end was probably bad advice, but that I could get a replacement inner tie rod end, and they weren't too expensive. Great. I thanked Brad and went back to the rack. I put a wrench on the inner tie rod end that I had heated and with minimal effort it turned free and came off. Then I tried the other side that hadn't been heated, and it came off just as easily.

Figuring I could go out later to get a replacement tie rod end, I decided to proceed with the modification to the one that had come off with no heat. The instructions said to cut 4 1/2" off the threaded end of each tie rod end, and then rethread them with the die and die handle that had come with the kit. Easiest way for me to do this was to chuck the tie rod end up in the lathe, and cut and thread from there. This was kind of a time consuming operation, but it proceeded without any problems, except that the tie rod end I had taken off had a thicker cross section 4 1/2" back than it did at the original threads. So, in order to thread it, I also had to turn down the diameter a little bit to make the threads. This was no trouble for me, but I imagine that a guy in a shop with no lathe would have been hard pressed to complete this step. There was no mention of this issue in the instructions.

Next I looked at the next modification to the rack, which was to add some spacers at either end. On the passenger side there was a 4 3/4" long spacer that basically extended the rack. This screwed on in place of the original tie rod, and then the new tie rod was screwed onto the spacer. On the driver's side, there was a short spacer that also was a stop that screwed in place before the tie rod end was installed. Unfortunately, that short spacer appeared to be missing from the kit. I searched the box and all the bags that the components had come in, but no luck locating this piece. Finally I looked at the checklist of parts that was included with the kit. All the parts included in the kit had a check mark next them, but sure enough there was no check mark next to the spacer. So, it looked like I was stalled on re-assembling the rack.

So far the installation of the Fatman kit was not going well. I decided to try to install the rack on the K member, so that I could look at what would be required to adapt the rack to my factory steering column. The kit had come with two steering universal joints, one that was a straight DD to DD shaft u-joint, and a second one that was DD on one side and had the correct hole for the V-shaped input shaft coming out of the rack. The instructions said that the u-joint was a very tight fit on the rack, and boy they weren't kidding! I ended up taking a file to smooth the edges of the input shaft, and driving a wedge into the split in the u-joint before I finally was able to work the u-joint onto the rack's input shaft. But I got it in the end, and installed the bolt clamping the u-joint into place.

Next I went to bolt the rack onto the K member. The K member had two U-shaped brackets welded to it that the rack fit down into, bushed by a couple of large nylon bushings. The two nylon bushings were each split in half and fit around the rack, and then the assembly fit down into the U-shaped brackets. Two more U-shaped brackets were provided to clamp over the top of the brackets welded to the K member, to keep the rack in place.

Again with this assembly, I ran into problems. The split nylon bushings fit correctly around the driver's side of the rack, but on the passenger side, the nylon bushings weren't even close to fitting. At first I thought this was an access issue, so I pulled the K member back out of the car to fit the rack into it (it came out a lot easier than it went in). But it turned out to be the bushing. Here are a couple photos showing the rack and the associated U-shaped brackets on the K member, and the nylon bushings:





After this last disappointment, I called it a day in the shop. No way I was going to resolve the issue of the missing spacer and the incorrect rack bushing without calling the manufacturer, so I sure wasn't going to be able to get this setup installed over the weekend. I went in the house and adjusted the schedule on my spreadsheet to reflect this reality, and hoped for a better day on Sunday.

Sunday morning I ran off to Napa to get a replacement inner tie rod end. At the parts counter they offered me two different versions, the cheap lower quality one and the expensive higher quality one. I had them bring both of them to the counter so I could look at them. Sure enough, the more expensive one had a thicker shaft and would need to be turned down before threading after it was shortened 4 1/2" per the instructions. Obviously the kit had assumed that the cheaper tie rod ends were on the rack, or maybe the factory Ford tie rod ends also had the smaller diameter. In any case, since it was no problem for me to turn down the thicker tie rod end, and since I had already done that for the other side, I spent the extra $10 on the more expensive one. I also picked up the outer tie rod ends I needed for the steering linkage, which I had not yet acquired.

Back at home I repeated the process of cutting, turning down, and rethreading the new tie rod end, and then took the time to assemble the passenger side of the rack, since I had the extension that went on the rack on that side. With half the rack done I was now waiting for parts, so I decided to move on to the modifications to the '94-'04 Mustang spindles. This was fairly straightforward, involving cutting the steering arm off these spindles (which is not used by the kit), and then grinding the area at the bottom of the spindle where the ball joint stud comes through to allow for the required up and down control arm travel. This took me an hour or so, and then the spindles were ready to go.

Finally I reinstalled the K member (it went on easier this time), installed the lower control arms with the bolts loose, and put the spindles on the ball joints, just to get an idea of how the suspension was shaping up. Everything looked fine, but I am now officially stalled on the project, needing the chrome moly tubing in order to start the roll cage contruction, and the missing/correct parts from Fatman to continue with the front suspension work. We will see what the next week brings.