The life and times of my 71 maverick

Valve Covers look nice. Looks like the battery is in the trunk. Only thing wrong is you need a Edelbrock carb.

 

thanks i really like these valve covers. yep battery is in the trunk. never will i put an edelbrock carb on one of my cars. it cant even come close to the performance of the holley hp carb.

 

Wondered about that car... Did Mo give up cars completely? Are you stilling running the G-Force gearbox?

 

i dont think he gave them up completely. just for a few years to concentrate on his career. i suspect he will be back with a vengeance. the car still has the g force t5.

 

What did he do w/ the Rat Rod he was building?

 

he sold it a month after he finished it. it scared the hell out of him on the freeway drive home when he finished it. he said it was fun for local street driving but the scariest thing hes ever encountered on the freeway.

 

today i installed the tcp upper and lower control arms and the wilwood disk brakes. it went smooth. these control arms are really nice.

i didnt get a before pic but its just stock control arms and disk brakes so no big deal. heres the everything removed pic.


heres some everyting installed pics.






again these are really nice control arms. some of you who followed mos build threads may remember when he installed the coil overs, that the bottom mount system broke right away. when we contacted chris alston, they gladly sent us new mounts at no cost but informed us that we had installed them wrong. the mounts are 2 pieces of aluminum that have all thread screwing them together. all the weight of that corner of the car is on this all thread. what they said we did wrong and they were right was over tighten the aluminum eye pieces on the all thread. this puts the all thread in tension and lowers its sheer load capacity. well we had installed the new stuff and thought all was well. so during disassembly this time i found this.

now the stock sheet metal control arms dont really provide stable support to the aluminum pieces. the mounts for these pieces on the tcp control arms are very ridged and would provide much more support against the sheer load on the all thread. i did notice that tcp now offers 3 different types of bottom mounting options for these coil overs and i will see if i can get them to give me one of the better options.


i just need to get the car aligned and then i can really see how well these control arms work. im taking an auto cross driving school next weekend so that will be my starting point for tuning and evaluating the suspension performance. the car has the regular addco front and rear swaybars on it now. i have the bigger adjustable group buy swaybars that i can install, but first i need to learn how to turn and evaluate suspension tuning. this car already has a ton of suspension tuning adjustments in it and i have no idea how well they are set up or off. its going to be a good learning experience.

 

i hope you'll share that with us - i'm sure i could learn a lot from just reading this.

 

ill do my best to convey what i learn with this.

 

Subscribed!! Boy o’ boy, don’t log in for a few weeks and the world changes! Looking forward to the progress on “your” Maverick!!!

 

today i took a scca autocross driving school. it was so much fun! i killed lots of cones! taking a 400 hp beast and trying to make it turn is tricky.
heres video of my first run.


that was so much fun

heres another video of a better run



im hooked. i need better tires. the scca has a class for muscle cars. i think im going to look into competing in that.

 

That is informative about what happened to your coil over mounts - I have coil overs with my MII suspension and, even though they are different than yours, I'll have to give my top and bottom mounts a second look now

 

im going to swap the drivers seat for sure. im not sure about the passenger seat. my wife hates the kirky seats so i may have on of those cars with a race seat for the drive and a sports car seat for the passenger.

 

I agree that function should be a priority with the spoiler, but I don't think it looks bad at all. I can vouch for the hood wanting to fly off of the car at anything over 110 mph.