Nice garage setup! I cud see spending a lot of time there. Im assuming u have heat to be working this of yr in Iowa. Following ur progress - vry interesting restoration.
Yea I installed a furnace last fall. But I only wish I had Ac for the summer. I still am waiting for the day I can buy my own place and build my dream garage.
Well it's been awhile sense I have given an update. I have gotten married and now have a 9 month old daughter. I have some updates for you guys. I finally got my cowl finished up. I decided to glue it on, beats welding it on. I got the torque box installed along with the floor pan on the drivers side. More updates to come.
Well for the other half of the updates. We ran into some issues with rust in the front frame rails, so we decided to cut the rails open and square tube them to strengthen them. When we built them we designed them to the exact shape of the original frame rails, and run the length of the front rails. Everything was stitched welded and plug welded in. After we finished the frame rails we order a full tilt mustang II cradle. There is pictures of the end result. Next project is my quarter panels. I am going to try to get better with my updates I apologize. Nate
Corbin much appreciated. I wish this project was going a little quicker but I got a nice Iowa car that was full of rust.
I thought your Mustang II cradle and hats looked familiar - Not sure yet but I think the Full Tilt top hats could be built too high so, before I weld everything solid on mine, I might look into dropping them down some - it would be the same concept as the "Shelby Drop", having your top A frames angle back towards the engine a bit more than what was designed so they begin to recover camber quicker - I'll know more when the car is on all 4 wheels and on the ground again - I also re-designed my top hats so I could use coil over springs/shocks - another one of those in progress engineering changes LOL! Also be very careful those front frame rails don't begin to buckle on you without any bracing now that the towers are gone - I'll be looking forward to seeing more photos of your progress
Thanks for the input. I will keep an eye out for some of your updates. I probably could go back in and change stuff if need be. When I get the money I would like to go to coil overs so your build will be a great reference for me. I got tired of the garage being held up by a maverick with no wheels. At least I can push it around, and am able to work on other cars in the garage. The plan is to build fender aprons out of sheet metal in place of the originals. The will be trial and error, someone else on the forum has done this and they turned out great. On the note about frame rails, that is one thing good about building those frame rails. All that tubing was built from 1/8" square tubing, anything has to be better than the thin gauged factory rails.
Did you buy Full Tilt's custom Ford lower A-frames that offset to the rear and you need no bracing? I installed them with a secondary frame bracket so nothing will break from stress. I needed that type in order to keep the rack as tight to the front of the cross member as I could so the rack & cross member would both fit up into the notch in the Canton oil pan on my Cleveland. I even had to make a rack drop bracket so the engine could mount lower than it was. Clay said this wouldn't work with a Cleveland
Well the plan is to buy them in the future. I had a oem mustang 2 cradle with control arms and springs, so I just used oem lowers and springs to set it down. I was running short on cash when I got to that point. What rack did you end up using. I know they list them through full tilt but they don't even give prices.
The nice thing about the lowers that I have is they fit right in the stock MII cradle - I found a chrome rack on Ebay and bought it - I think it is a Flaming River - they make them a little long so they fit many applications so I have to cut about a half inch off of each side but they leave you lots of threads to work with - the photos show my drop bracket, that I made, plus my adjustable Baer bump steer tie rod ends to re-level the rack
That's a lot of great info. And the brackets turned out great, hopefully I wont have to go down that road. The plan is a 302 for now. Do you have your steering column in, what did you use for that, and did you have any issues getting the steering shaft hooked up to the rack. I guess what I am asking if there is any clearance issues.
I am very close to everything but my engine is a 393 Cleveland and a 302 will have much more room. I still may have to put a slight notch in the frame rail. I used a flush mount firewall bearing for the 3/4 inch steel tubing to come through and made my column connection inside of the car. I had to cut the column and the outer tube back and make new notches for the bottom nylon bushing to mount up higher in the tube.
That is great work, your work never ends to amaze me. At least that gives me some idea of how to go about it. I am trying to get motivated to go out to the garage today. It was a -10 wind chill this morning, it will take a bit for the garage to heat up today.
