Started on the Ford 9" housing out of a 70's pickup. Cut the brackets off and ground them down. Also cleaned up the main section of the housing. I'll be narrowing this thing up once the 18" Fikse's show up so I can measure. I also picked up a Posi center section with 3.50 gears at the Puyallup swap meet that I'll be rebuilding and throwing in there. The center section out of the truck is in good shape but it's an open diff.
Now that the quarters on welded on in the proper place I took the doors back off so i could rebuild the hinges and clean up the surface rust. These things took what seemed like half a day but man it was worth it. I tighted the gaps between brackets so they are smooth and tight on the car. No slop at all. I can't believe these had all plastic bushings except a single bronze from the factory. These doors seem too heavy for plastic bushings. I replaced all of them with bronze and new springs and tension rollers.
I need to take a final picture. Here they are as they're coming apart
Media blasting seems to get everywhere but doesn't take care of the hidden areas so I'm glad I'm pulling the seat pans to replace the floor halves. The floor pans fit ok but they are about 1/4" too narrow (for my car anyway). I had to hammer and dolly the entire edge that gets plug welded to the rocker. I got the passenger floor panel in place and screwed it down along the toe board in the front and rear seat area and a couple places along the tunnel. Once I had it where I wanted, I scribed the tunnel line, removed the floor, and cut and reinstalled for final fit and welding. The beads that were stamped in the floor were off. The radius was way too small to match up to the factory metal. Seems like It took every round punch and radius'd hammer and dolly I could find to rework them. I would have had the same issue with the Classic trunk floor patch panel except I installed a suspension crossmember which broke it up. The cross member is in between the beads in the patch and the beads in the original floor.
I took the opportunity to figure out my subframe connectors while the floor was out. Measuring it out, a 5 degree angle was what I needed to keep the connectors as tight as possible to the floor. I decided to make the bend at the same location as the floor bend. I don't have a tubing bender so I cut a small pie (not much more than a 1/16 cutoff wheel) ouf of 3 sides and tacked it to verify fit. I was able to notch the tubing to fit around the torque box and meet up with the rear frame rails. The frame rails are narrower than the 2x3 tubing so I'll shape the end to match up later. Same on the subframe side but opposite. I'll have to add material on to the connectors to make it as wide as the subframe. Since I got it to fit I welded up my 3 seams and set them aside for final install after the floor is finished.
Tucked up pretty well underneath. This picture isn't reflective of the final install. I matched the top of the connector with the top of the sub frame. 1/2" below the floor based on 1/2" DSE body mount bushings.
Started laying out the 4-link. Took me some time to get things packaged as I wanted as there's not a lot of room to work with retaining the rear seat floor and utilizing the front leaf spring mounts.
I was originally going to run a bushing end on the car side and a heim on the rear end but I found 5/8 hole 3/4 shank heim ends with teflon/kevlar liner so they hopefully don't rattle. I'm going to build aluminum bushings to center the link in the brackets so I can change to the poly bushing style link if it doesn't work out.
I'm held up a little waiting on the wheels. I need to mock this up with real parts to double check my measurements before I cut the 4-link brackets and narrow the rear end. I want to make sure I have the anti-squat and ride height I'm looking for when its said and done.
It's looking like I won't be able to re-spline the 31 spline axle's on the rearend due to the offset center section. Based on my measurements I have to narrow the rear end 4" or more each side to safely re-spline. Not a problem on one side but might not work out on the other. Ordered 18x11 wheels with 5-1/8 BS so we'll see when they arrive. I designed the suspension around a 4" stroke Ridetech coilover. My dad offered up some 6" stroke coilovers off his vette but I can't seem to get them to fit in redesigned brackets with proper stroke centering.
BTW if you're looking for CAD software Draftsight is free and awesome! The 2D stuff is a lot like AutoCAD. I haven't done any extrusions/3D modeling with it but 2D works great. I imagine they steer the 3D stuff towards products like Solidworks. (Same company). I haven't used AutoCAD for years and wasn't looking forward to the cost of buying new software to run on my Macbook.
While working on the floor I realized something wasn't right on the subframe. The seat pan frame bolt was off center with the floor section. I decided to pull the sub off and measure it all out. It came out within spec's but had some cosmetic damage due to a previous accident. Turned out the subframe was sitting crooked in the car. (Probably from the impact). My father and I straightened out the core support and the subframe to make it look cosmetically better in line with the rest of the car. I'm not 100% sold on it yet as I still have work to do on it. If it doesn't look great by the time I'm ready to do the coil-overs I'll look for another. It just has minor surface rust so it's worth messing with compared to what I've been seeing for sale in the local area.
Some of the damage is hard to see in the pictures. We tack'd a bolt to various points on the crossmember and used blocking and a bar to run a nut up against. We tightened the nut down pulling out the dent and hammered the bottom flange flat as we went. This 1/8 stuff took some time to move compared to 18ga. We also fixed the front crossmember that had a rise in the flange. I cut off the formed tie between the two crossmembers. This piece had the most damage. While discussing how to fix the formed piece my buddy Ron came up with a great idea of running a piece of 2x3 tubing between the two. It shouldn't look out of place with fabbed coilover mounts and some of the other work on the car. Hopefully I'll have some "after" pics to post soon.
I found some rust across the front flange of the inner seat pan structure. (The piece that the subframe bolts to). I cut off the rust, treated and primed the rest of it and built a crossmember to run between both rockers to give the seat pan a good support to weld to and stiffen up the car. The gap in the crossmember fab pic is the bad lighting and cell phone camera. I chamfered the edges of all the pieces before I welded them.
Since the floor was in I permanently installed the passenger side connector, seat pan inner, and outer.
The crossmember fits great at the same height as the finished seat pan and sits about 1/4" below the floor on the bottom side of the car. I don't like how high it sits in the middle but wanted to error on the side of clearance for a t56 hopefully in the future. After looking at it in the car I'm going to slice the center section and lower it about 1/2 to 3/4". The bottom will stay in the same location but the tube will be about 1 1/2 or 1 1/4"x3 instead of 2x3. This should look better and still be high enough on the front side for the new higher transmission tunnel when the time comes.
Ryan, glad you posted... as I said many of us enjoy reading the back-stories about projects and family stuff. Yours was fun to read. Working on dad's race car in grade school.... priceless.
He knows me just enough now to maybe get himself in trouble.
Hey Dave. Good to see you on here. Nice to see Jody give you a hard time. Sarcasm goes a long way with buddies! I posted a few pics. Almost caught up to what I'm currently working on.
Brian Hobaugh SCCA National Tour June 2014
First Hemi 'Cuda Convertible Ever Built
Short clips: Goodguys Pleasanton autocross and pit videos
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