2006 Crown Vic front suspension

You may recall Thomas Hackman's bronze Maverick which was built using front and rear Jag suspension

 

I have idea, and it will sound crazy. I am thinking about turning the control arms around so that the rear points forward. That would also allow me to put the rack & pinion aft of the crossmember. it would make things easier and practical.

 

Thank you. so many questions lol and i'll try to answer them all. I'll start by letting everyone know that I have more pics but I don't understand how to upload. besides that, I am in the process of building upper control arm brackets. That will wrap everything in. I just sort of threw the spring in and nothing is in place. I just mocked up the brackets and its not the final product. I was telling Mav 1970 that I am thinking about turning the control arms around and that would solve small issue.

 

That would probably mess up the Ackerman measurements and cause it to be hard to steer.

 

Yes, that is crazy. Your rack is based on steering arms, not a-frame location. If you try to flip the spindles side to side to get the arms at the back Ackerman will be a mess. You could also end up with pro-dive in the lower control arms instead of anti-dive as designed.

Moving all these things around, changing the track width, changing a-frame locations and now looking at rotating a-frames and rack location. Have you computed your roll center location after these changes? How about the migration of the roll center? What are you going to do for a rack? You can't just move it to the back, it will steer the wrong way then, you need a completely different rack. What narrower rack are you going to use and how will you fix Ackerman with the steering in the back? What about moving the inner control arm mounting points vs the rack width, have you looked at bump steer issues? What oil pan clear all this?

I admire your enthusiasm but really question the end result you will have. You are going to end up with a scary driving car from what I'm seeing.

SPark

 

lol.. ackerman hell.. the castor will go severely negative and that thing will handle like crap.. not to mention be dangerous as hell even at highway speeds.

Personally.. I think ythe OP needs to stick with the original plan but also come to realize that there WILL be additional costs involved with custom one-off components required to make all this stuff work in this chassis. Welcome to chassis building... and now you know why most don't try to reengineer these sorts of things.

And I still think you'll need to allow for some moderate engine setback to even squish a little 302 in there too. Nothing wrong with reaching for the stars.. as long as you have enough fuel in the tank to make it.

 

A couple of thing I can see not being a problem - if you swap lowers from side to side, as long as the static mounting plane doesn't change, which in this case would have to be a level starting point, the arc straight up and down would not change - after the lower side to side swap, you could just keep the spindles on their original sides to retain the correct stock rack operation that is if the spindles can still turn all the way left and right and the rack still mounts where it belongs with the lower cast pieces being reversed - level lowers would still allow you to build the anti-dive into the uppers control arms as originally designed - the Mustang II style cross member looks home made but not much different than an R/C unit so a rear sump Bronco pan should fit if he is using a 302 - now the roll centers and Ackerman, it's too early in the day on New Years for me to get my brain to go into that

 

Took a minute to wrap my head around this as usual but you are right, that would really screw things up. As I read what you wrote I instantly went to the GM A-bodies and early F-bodies that used the same spindles but one was front steer and the other rear. It took a second for me to remember that they used different bolt on steering arms. And to think, I was in bed at 10 and sober last night.....:16suspect

 

Back in the early 90's I began using old early 60's full size Chevrolet spindles on my early 80's Metric GM stock cars to create a dropped spindle - these were the ones with the un-boltable arms and were originally rear steer cars - since Metric cars were front steer, I would turn the steering arms around and notice right away that the arms were way out of wack when now aimed towards the front - at first we heated them to bend them down (not advisable on a street driven car) and later just had the correct aimed arm machined for our purpose - why we used these spindles were simple - we were stuck with our rule book saying that we had to use "stock" non-aluminum suspension parts(otherwise I would have used Corvette parts which were almost identical) but it didn't say they had to match the chassis - these early 60's spindles were designed, with their bored tapers, to use ball joints that went "down" from the lower control arm - I would then bore them "up" with a larger ream to accept tall screw in Mopar joints (also "stock") - that would lift the pin in the spindle at least 2 inches up from the stock lower control arm making it a dropped spindle - I had to do all sorts of corrections to the upper control arm also but when set up properly, this set up knocked a half a second off lap times but there are a lot of things that I might talk about here pertaining to circle track that I might not want to do on a street car - just giving examples to show that there are a lot of things that can be changed and corrected if you have the ability to do so

 

Im going to check out that FB page...

 

I want to say thank you all for the info, especially about the Ackerman. I didn't even think about that and I will be sur e to get measurements. I did see what it looks likes with lowers turned around. here's a few pics and an fyi the upper control bracket is not near finish product.



Now that I think of it, even if I turn the spindle around the rack wouldn't fit. well I'm glad I posted on here and I still have plenty work to do.

 

You still have to engineer it with the spindles turned around though to get the rack to work right and keep it a front steer car - is the problem being the rack is too wide?

 

I'm going to over look everything and make sure the ackerman dimension is correct. it's tough.

 

You have a lot of great question and concerns. I can address some right now and thanks to you and others I have been able to act on those problem areas. So my track width is the original to the Maverick 56 +/- 1.5. I still am big on rotating the lower, and no matter which way I go with it, the ackerman is completely off, by about 2 in. I can't even adjust that until it's on the ground aligned. but with it flipped to the rear, it would be easier to build an extension. I have looked all around to find out what other people do, and haven't found squat. I imagine it being a problem even with a mustang II, maybe ppl don't care. If you know of any solutions please chime in any time, but I do have a awesome bracket idea to extend the point for the tie rod. I knew the rack would have been junk same for the sway bar once I shorten everything. The sway bar may have to be custom, but I'm not concerned until I get there and play around. I know they have racks for forward and rear steering and I'll find a doner car soon enough, just been busy with getting the big stuff handled. The oil pan will be rear sump for my 428, that easy. The bump steer can be calculated once I put the rack in. I saw a comment about it having negative caster when I flip control arms. not true. I haven't put the upper control brackets in and that will control the caster. The lower arm is adjustable. not sure how I want to do the upper. I'd like there to be a way to adjust that as well.
The other two concerns; anti-dive and the roll center. these are as important as any other part of this project and I don't have an answer. Hope it works out, right?

I appreciate everything and can use all the knowledge everyone has to offer, Thanks.

 

Now that I see the latest pics a few posts above this one.. the required rearward offset of the upper a-arms balljoint doesn't look all that bad. I really just assumed they had much more rearward offset designed into the arm from the factory. Once you lean that thing back and mount it up solid.. it shouldn't be hard at all to achieve 4 degrees or more if you wanted.