Time to buckle down

So, right before I sat down to write this blog I took a nice long drive in the mustang. The weather here in the pacific northwest has, really been amazing lately.

So much has been done in the last week, i'm pretty amazed! We’ve really been taking every opportunity we have had to work on the truck. and a lot has been accomplished!

Last post I talked about sanding down the engine bay, and priming it. Well, this week the engine bay got painted!

it really looks amazing! Along with the engine bay being black we also painted the engine black. I had to pay some homage to ford, many guys paint their lower block either blue for Ford or orange for Chevy. I decided to switch it up a bit, and paint the air intake blue. I think it came out great!

After the paint was done drying (we gave it several days) we were able to get back into the rear end. There was some serious work needed in the rear. We needed to drop the stance of the rear end by dropping it two and a half inches to match the front. Also we needed to remove the rear end that came in the truck - which was a ford 8.8 rear end. Once that rear end was removed we needed to install the rear end out of the 1987 donor crown vic, which is also an 8.8. So yeah, we put in some hours these past two weeks.

First we started by disassembling the rear end by unbolting the two U bolts on either side of the axle. We are very grateful that the truck was/is a west coast truck. There is so very little rust, and (*Knock on wood*) we haven't had any bolts break due to rust. So disassembly tends to go quite quickly.

Once the rear end was unbolted from the truck we got it out of our way. Now the tricky part of installing a rear end from another car isn't getting the axle into place, its the measuring that is the most important. I suppose that if the measurements were off a bit, the truck would still travel down the road, it just wouldn't look like it was traveling in a straight line. / /

But, before we did anything with the axle we decided it would be a good idea to change the stance of the rear end. By moving the leaf-springs up it creates more downward pressure which in turn rides lower - which is what we want.

First we had to measure from multiple fixed points to establish where the leaf springs were originally affixed. Once we established where the leaf springs were, we could grind down the rivets. Once the leaf spring perch was free, we were able to move it upward, about one and a half inches, to give it the stance we wanted. We did this on all four corners of the leaf springs to give us an overall drop of two and a half inches. Once the leaf spring perch was where we needed it to be, to got welded into place.

Now that the leaf springs were where we wanted them, we could move the crown vic donor 8.8 rear end into place. We needed to make many measurements before we could bolt the rear end into place. We picked a stationary point on the frame and made several measurements until the axle was exactly centered.

In this picture to the right, you can see the different points where we measured from to get the correct height.

Also in the picture you can see the upside down U bolts, on on either side of the leaf spring. All four bolts are then fed through an eighth inch thick plate of steel and bolted down.

We were also able to fabricate the new shock mounts and weld them on to the axle.

Until Next Time -