Finally, we have the crossmember in and the lower suspension
arms in place. Oops. We found out that there's no room for
suspension adjustment on the upper arms with the old frame
still there. Next step is to cut out and rebox more of the
old frame. We probably would have been better off to chop
the frame off clean and build a whole new front frame on.
Oh, well. I did manage to get the motor cleaned up, painted,
and the nice chrome goodies bolted on. As soon as we get
the car sitting on all four wheels the engine will go in.
Here's the engine all bright and shiny.
OK, we chopped and reboxed the frame -- looks like it's going to work
out all right. Took a minute to look under the carpet. Uh-oh.
Seems that when the previous owner put the new carpet in, he put
it in right over the old nasty pad. Yuk. Tore it all out and
scraped it down to bare metal.
Finally got the suspension finished. God, this is taking longer
than I expected, almost six months so far. Here we have the front
end all bolted on and the brakes and rotors on.
Here's the rack and pinion power steering unit bolted in. This is a
1984 Mustang power steering rack bolted onto the crossmember
that the lower suspension arms are mounted to.
We are going to have to move the rack over to
the left of the car about two inches to clear the motor mounts.
You can see the strut sticking toward the center of the car. We have
to mount a bracket to the frame for the struts to bolt to.
There's plenty of engine clearance, luckily.
You can see our footprints on the front of the frame. That's from
us jumping up and down on it trying to get some spring action.
We thought that with the motor in it would sag down some, but it
didn't. We wound up cutting a coil out of each spring. Seems to
be close now. We did that after putting the engine in, so it
doesn't show up in these pictures.
Next....