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Rear IRS and new wheels..
Moving right along.. been a busy week. Our goal was to have the car ready to go on the ground by the end of March. We were working right up until 12:00 and baraly finished most everthing. Just need to finish up the rotisserie and it can go back on the ground for the first time.
Drilled out the frame for crush tubes and welded those into the frame so the brackets can be safely bolted to the frame structure. Once those were done, it was time to weld the tubes at all 4 corners of the assembly. We pulled the entire IRS out and finished all of the welds up. It kinda looks like the tubes came that way from the factory :).
Also may be changing the wheels up a bit. We got a couple of set of Roush forged 18×10 wheels (scratch and ding models) and decided we may like these better. As luck may have it, the offsets were very close front and rear. Only problem is that an 18×10 won’t like the front clearances, so we are going to have to get the fronts narrowed since there is no such thing as an 18×9 in this model. Not the hugest fan of chrome, but it is growing on me.
Frame Repair and Rear Suspension Continued..
When we removed the shock towers the steel was flaking away a bit, but I thought it was nothing out of the oridinary. The more I picked away at it.. the bigger it got. Have to attack this before the towers go back in. Should last a couple more years now. This also brings up the question – how the heck do you get at this area if the stock towers are still in the car? Most people do not have the novelty we do by not having them in the way. Still have to fix the underside where the rest of the water went and rotted things away.
Since the front suspension is finishing up, time to move back to the rear once again. Had a lot of time to think about this one now, so time to put it in action. Biggest issue with designing anything in the rear is the tire clearance. Fitting the 315’s back there requires lots of room. Couple of constraints here – the outer fender lip since the tire will sit within it, the springs and the shocks. We went back and forth on coil over shocks, but in the end they are expensive and take up precious tire clearance. They also do not provide the most desirable load path as the shock mounting holes are outboard of the frame rail (many of the aftermarket kits out there use single shear mounts on the outside of the frame rail which we are not big fans of). The shocks even without the coil-overs will require notching the frame, although very minimally. The result here.. the springs and shocks will mount in separate locations like the stock Mustang.
In the end, this is how we decided to mount the spring. We are using the stock spring pocket on the lower control arm, but using a much smaller spring. We started with 2 u-bends as you can see, and turned them into a doughnut. This way we maximize surface area to distribute the load. Just need to add a flat plate in the middle and a small wedge to angle the spring as required. Then we simply add a mount to the frame rail. Notice we are also adding an adjustable sleeve for fine tuning the ride height. Since we are running fairly stiff springs all around, we will be using helper springs (very low stiffness) to keep the springs in place when the suspension goes into full rebound.
Body Work and Tires..
Got the cruise control module bracket fabbed up and temporarily stuck on the car. Module mounts up great and also started to get the wiring organized and in place.
Also found a set of rear tires for the car with only 10 miles on them. You can still see the stickers and glue on the treads. Lucked out on this one. Size is 315/30ZR18. They should give us some added traction :).
Bridgeport Purchase..
Getting lots more done on the car.. but most of it is behind the scenes sheetmetal work and nothing that is overly photogenic.
We did manage to stumble upon this beast which is a welcomed addition to the shop. Have been wanting one of these since I saw my first one in action. Did not really “need” it, but the price was waay lower than they usually are as the place was closing down. Needs a bit of work and a good cleaning but other than that should be productive in the coming weeks. It is a Bridgeport Series 1 mill (All 1800 lbs of it). Now just need to get the phase convertor up and running to get 3 phase in the garage. Have most of the parts and pieces to make a 5 hp rotary converter as I have been collecting off Ebay/Craiglist for a couple of weeks. I have a friend who got one of these machines last year and it came with a dolly.. he was about to send it to the scrapyard.. so I put it to good use.
Subframe Connector Clearance
I think we are going to end up making a custom hump – gives us an excuse to brush up on english wheel skills. I may try to use parts of the original – we’ll see. Mustang one won’t work that well as it is set up for a car with a complete console (as they all have consoles). It is somewhat square/box shaped and will not work well with stock carpet. That is my only concern at the moment is fitting carpet over this as I am not using a console. Want to make the front of the interior very simple. Stock dash, Sparco seats, somewhat period looking shifter/handle and that is it.
In order to get the lines perfectly straight – we ended up making a custom guide on the sheet metal brake and cut reliefs in it to go up and down contours. Worked like a charm. You just rest the tip of the plasma cutter against the guides and cut away. There is now very little gap on both sides. Took more time that I had wanted to get right.. but it was worth it.
