It takes a bit of madness
Posted on February 6, 2010 by Guest Author in In the Garage, On the Road
This is a guest post from Nodus, who shares many of my projects and vice versa. He lives right up the street from me and owns all the tools I wish I owned, so it works out great on my end.
Lets face it, to go through what we do for our cars, we are crazy. Mad as a hatter. For the money I have in my Falcon I could have bought a used wrx and popped a down pipe and a boost gauge on there, and had something faster and easier to drive.
But I wouldn’t love it. It wouldn’t feel like it was mine.
Ask me why I do this and I will just smile like a madman.
And so we come to what I have been going through for the last few months. Basically I found out many shortcuts were taken, by one of the previous owners, to build a drag car.
Basically the same brakes as the 66 shelby.
First, drum brakes are a Pain In The A$$ to maintain, and getting them to not make the car pull to one side is a exercise in frustration. So I bought the summit 4 piston kit for a 65 mustang, which, wonder of wonders, fits. It is basically the kelsey hayes 4 pistons from a 65 shelby, rotors and brackets to hold the brakes in place, as well as all the hardware to replace the wheel hubs and brake lines.
You try welding flux core with ~1/2 inch of room damn it.
Second, my car was afflicted by one of the main problems with this family of automobile; the upper control arm mount tore right through the strut tower. It had already happened on the drivers side and had been repaired with a 1/8 steel patch welded in. It seems to have held up fine, so I planned on replicating this as well as welding up the original part.
Third, the car is not a original v8, its date code makes the engine a june 64 casting. meaning it probably came from a early 65 car. I don’t care about the providence of the engine. a 64 casting means its probably a 289, which is just fine with me. The biggest problem I have with the engine is that it is a 5 bolt bell housing, which keeps me from using a overdrive transmission without invensting a considerable amount of money for a expensive after market bell housing that really gains me nothing. So I scored a 89 351w in need of some love of a friend, as well as an automatic aod transmission from a 87 bronco.
inline 6 steering stuff made me angry
Finally, while some of the parts have been converted over to v8 spec, others have been left alone. This means that my tie rods are one offs, welded together from a inline 6 and v8 tie rod. They are also bent. This means that when I bought bump steer adjusters, to accommodate a 1 inch drop without incurring poor steering geometry, the included alu tie rod didn’t fit. Information on how to tell what you have is hard to come by in the early falcon community, and so I ended up going to the store and looking at the proper tie rods before I realized exactly what the problem is. The inline 6 stuff isn’t even supposed to fit around the oil pan of a v8, and yet here I am. And so I could either scrounge up proper v8 parts of unknown quality, or I could just throw money at it and buy a rack and pinion. I did the latter. And the parts have just arrived.
Expect write ups on each part every friday over the next month. Which is fucking crazy, because I work full time god damn it. Fucking christ, I am on call right now! If your looking for a investment tip: buy stock in Icy Hot. Lord knows I will.
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