front suspension test fit

Got back to work on the coupe this Thursday. The two things we accomplished were a basic test fit of the front suspension and marking up more aluminum body panels.

First, the chassis code that Factory Five put on the frame:

F5R1000420CP

Marc got started on putting together the front suspension. The coupe (and the roadster, I believe) convert the Mustang's MacPherson set up into a double A-arm suspension. They normally provide just the new upper A arm, but you can also option a tubular lower arm to replace the donor part from the Mustang. CG opted to order that option.


2 things to note with using this part:
- the sweet F5 logo cut into the corner of the arm
- to save money, F5R designed the arm to be symmetrical, so it can be used as a left or right arm. It seems that the original Mustang piece has different length pivot shafts, with the rear shaft being slightly longer. To compensate for the gap, you need to place washers:

Note how F5R doesn't give you much clearance for the bolt. As is typical with the sparse documentation, we don't have info on whether loctite is needed and where. But I'm sure we'll figure the details out later.

Marc also assembled the front coil-over. It wasn't 100% obvious how to do it, but you had to remove a snap ring in the spring hat and place the bump stop into it and then replace the snap ring. Otherwise the hat wouldn't retain the bump stop. I think this is because CG got the upgraded Konis and the documentation is for whatever the base strut is. In the end everything fits only one way, but it sure is disconcerting that Lego toys have better instructions than for a kit car.

With the upper and lower control arms attached to the frame, we had to attach the spindle via an adapter bracket. The original Mustang spindle's geometry is for the MacP suspension, so the bracket is simply to sit the spindle more or less upright with the new geometry. The bracket has 2 pairs of holes, 1 pair for 87-93 spindles, and 1 pair for 94-04 spindles. Even though CG's is a 90 car, his spindles wouldn't work using those bolting locations. I suggested that maybe it's because he got the spindles as part of his upgrading to 95 Cobra R brakes. Here's a pic of the stamp codes on the spindle:

Anyone know where I can look up what this part is from? We just want to confirm it's a 94-04 spindle.

The finished front suspension assembly:

- there's nut missing for one of the bolts attaching the spindle bracket to the spindle. Thanks to our wonderful lack of organization, we haven't found it yet.
- the coilover is mounted with the threads up, for whatever reason. It seems like it'd be harder to adjust height this way, but the manual did specify this way
- the beige thing at the bottom of the coilover is the bump stop.

Another shot:

- note the adjustments available on the top control arm.
- the top of the strut is missing spacers to fully locate it in its mount. The kit provided a bag of different sized spacers that we assume are for this job, but there's no documentation on it.
- moving right along on the no documentation express, the spindle is mounted backwards here. We saw another picture in a totally different part of the assembly that shows the steering rack mounted facing forward, not backwards like in this pic, which is the only implicit instruction thereof. Thanks to the symmetry of everything, either spindle would fit.

Fortunately, this is just a test fit / learning process, and we'll assemble everything and torque to spec once we have clarifications on what we don't know.


Back to marking up the aluminum. Nothing surprising here. It consisted of me marking up hole locations for the rivets. Everything on the internet says to take all the panels off, mark, drill, and then fit back onto the body, and finish drilling from the holes into the frame. The warning being that without fitting all the panels on together, you'll start propagating fitment errors from one panel to the next. The kit gives you enough screws to hold everything in place. In these next 2 shots, I've unscrewed all of them off the footwell areas:


As you can tell from the holes, the panelwork needs to be installed before you start wiring stuff to and from the engine.

One thing that remains entirely unclear to me is how to install the seats. Following the install order in the manual, the seats should be installed long after the floor panel has been riveted in place. But once that is done, it'll be very hard to locate the steel beneath the panel.

Here's what I've done to mark up the floor panel, on the driver's side:


And here's the frame under the driver's seat:


I suppose I could mark more rivets for the bottom half of the X to make it more easy to locate that mounting plate, but still, everything is too vague in the manual. to complicate everything, CG got the upgraded racing seats, which have slightly different hardware.


The car as it sits now:

pretty much the only changes are the front suspension mocked up on the right, and the aluminum panels off or dangling on the car. The shelf in the back is the first step toward some organization and better access to all the parts we need.

One more thing --
http://mustangtek.com/FordDateDecoding.html
The inspector would probably want receipts for the engine and to confirm the year on it. The MA law would require us to run year-specific emissions equipment and possibly fuel injection systems, which is pretty depressing and something we don't want to think about now.

diff adventures, panel work begins

Marc and Ben decided to crack open the diff to see if it needed servicing.



Check out Ben's high school robotic team jumpsuit.



After popping off some C-clips, you can draw out the half shafts.





Then you unbolt each side's bearing cap. One is undone here:





The crown gear is stock and looks is great shape.





You can see the clutch discs of the LSD toward the bottom.





With the shafts out and the caps off, you can pull out the diff. Little oopsie on letting the outer race of the bearing fall off.





This wad of gum looking and feeling thing was sitting in the axle housing, just past where the diff sat.



What the hell could it be?



We brought out the diff and sat it up. Is that ok on the bearing?



Gotta keep things organized so we can remember how to put it back together.


You can seen the pinion gear in the murky bottom of the diff housing.


So after extracting all that, we realized we had screwed up a bit, as far as complete disassembly of the diff goes. The pinion gear is held through the outside of the diff housing by a big nut, which we couldn't get off with nothing holding the pinion gear in place. We put everything back together only to realize how hard holding the rear axle still was while cranking on the bolt. We'll try again later with an impact wrench. Are there other good ways to do it once the axle is free of the car?

Next post details the other work we did.


We're finally getting into the kit car phase, where all the fiddly parts come out and we take on the challenge of putting together a car from scratch. With the old car out of the way, there's a real buzz hanging in the air. It's like Christmas opening up all the new parts boxes.

Recap of the car. This vantage point is nice. Maybe I'll bring my GoPro out next time and set it up to take time lapse video.


Placing the rear trunk panel. Here's where the kit-carness really sets in. The tolerances on these panels is good, but not perfect. I'll bet it's not much better in factory cars. The only difference is that the workers have tons of experience placing and fitting things just the right way. And that they're not placing things straight onto a space frame.


The trunk consists of 4 pieces: the floor, the rear, and the 2 walls. The kit comes from the factory with every panel in place, to help you memorize their relative placement.

All the writing has been done by us. The matching arrows are annotated with O/U. O being the panel that sits [b]over[/b], and U being the panel or lip that sits [b]under[/b]. The concentric rings you see on the trunk floor panel are from huge suction cups Factory Five uses to move these panels around.

A sample of my incredible markup work. This is the passenger side trunk side wall.

The panels and spaceframe have been designed with each other in mind, so where possible the edge of a panel is folded to sit on a square bar. In other places, you have to mark lines for the bar. Here you can see that fitment can get quite sloppy. I'm using a small x over a line that is to be disregarded. The lines to the left are from where we thought a bar would be flush with the panel, but actually ended up angling away. The small o's are where we'll drill and rivet. The kit comes with enough rivets for one every 3". And I think that's fence post style, so if there's a span of 6" that needs to be riveted, we can use 3 rivets. Just in case that's not the case, I'm trying to be conservative and save a rivet here or there. I only got the 2 trunk side panels done.

As you can see, we're not taking the utmost care with the panels and marking. At the end of the day, this is a track car, so if the rivets are 1/16" off the center line or not aesthetically evenly spaced, that's not the end of the world. We'll do our best to clean off the aluminum after we're done marking up the panels. But most of it is supposed to be covered by the provided carpet. For looks CG suggested just clearcoating the trunk panels and leaving off the carpet.

Here's where I let yall down again. I was in a hurry to leave, and didn't take pictures of tons of neat parts. We were reconciling the packing list box by box, just to make sure the factory gave us everything we needed.

Radiator, fan, belts, stuff:


Lighting, plastic covers, etc.:


Shifter handle and boot:

The two bolts on the shifter handle line up vertically when bolted to the shifter, so the whole thing is angled extremely forward when in the car. This is because the engine and trans sit much closer toward the middle of the car.

Back on track!

Time to dust off the project:


To recap, the Mustang was gone as of a month ago. This is the space left behind:


One thing we wanted to set up right away was better lighting. We set up 2 4' racks of 3 bulbs each.


hey guys wirenuts are ok for automotive projects, right?

Inspired by LloydDobler's project, I used a ziptie to prevent the electric cord from sliding out the hole.

Done. It's a bit crude and roughshod, but it's bright as hell.


Now we had to reorient the frame from the center spot to be under the light.

After some clearing out all the cruft piled aruond it, and huffing and puffing, we rotated the frame and reset the jackstands under the frame.


todos:
- set up work bench
- send engine off to get worked on
- put new diff gears into diff
- install rear end

Wiring harnesses: out!

After getting rejected for the Fiesta Movement, I was all bummed out. The cure was to work on the car yeahhhhhhhh.
With the weather warming up in New England, it's much more pleasant to work in the garage. Pics from last time:

The engine on its stand. It's upside down.


The oil pan off and the bottom end exposed. The oil pan gasket is pretty ratty.

The valve covers and the intake manifold. I'm not exactly clear on the terminology, but the other piece was attached to the

throttle body, while this one is the one that directs air to the 8 cylinders.


The heads and waterpump.


Marc mentioned that these look almost new, which sort of blunted his desire for a crate engine :)


Unfortunately, 2 of the bolts holding on an exhaust header snapped off. There's enough material that they seem to be poking

above the plane of the head. We'll have to be careful in getting them out.


The exhaust header is quite light. Maybe 4 or 5 lbs.


LOL PUSHRODS


The transmission looks tiny when the bellhousing is off. We're thinking of tearing it down and rebuilding it ourselves.


Bellhousing and clutch and pressure plate. I'm missing a pic of the flywheel.


The damned starter.


Spark plugs and engine mounts.


The rusty driveshaft. We need to find a shop to shorten it per the assembly instructions.




And this session.

CG and Marc got the quad shocks unhooked in the back.

They also got off one front spindle, as a proof of concept. The other one should come off, but we didn't have enough time for it.

I finally manned up and crawled under the dash console to see what was left to do with the wiring harness. The floor of the Mustang was littered with loose parts and the racing seat brackets, and it wasn't that flat to begin with. Working down there was the epitomy of uncomfortable. After taking 10 minutes working with my forearms through holes in the dash (the only way they'd fit) to unhook a connector, I decided to investigate taking the dash off. That was the definitely the right approach:
1) unscrew the 4 torx screws that hold on the gauge cluster. We pulled the unhooked tach cable through from the firewall, but I assume you could unplug it from the back of the cluster as well.
2) unclip the 3 tabs that hold on the windshield defrost vent. Lift it off.
3) unscrew the 5 torx screws that were previously covered by the vent.

At this point a stock Foxbody's dash should be clear to remove. In our case, CG had an aftermarket tach that was threaded through a heat vent, and aftermarket oil/water temp gauge cluster mounted where the radio would be. The cage wasn't a problem because the cage builder did a really tidy job of cutting holes in just the right place to make the dash easy to take out and put back. I was able to follow the wires leading from the tach and detach them from their splicing into the harness. That got the tach clear. For the gauge cluster (I forgot a pic for this), the oil pressure gauge used a metal line that I managed to unbolt, but I couldn't figure out how to detach the oil temp and water temp lines. So Marc helped me push those lines (which terminated in temperature plug sensors) through the firewall. The cluster is still on the dash, which we hauled out wholesale. I have a theory on how to take it off. Will do next time.

With the dash out, it was trivial to cut zipties and unhook remaining connectors. And by trivial, I mean a bastard. I cut my finger on something in the process. The passenger side half of the harness has the big ECU plug on it. But the firewall hole is conveniently large enough to push it out. IIRC, there were 2 connectors from this half to the driver side. The driver's side is the bulk of the harness. There's tons and tons of unusued connectors in this car, which I assume can be trimmed off. The fusebox and airbag processer also hooks up to this side, so no way is it going through the firewall. Instead, we pulled everything from the engine bay into the interior. Everything came loose and we boxed it up.


Sorry, I didn't have the patience to take more pics of the thing all spread apart and ugly looking. The whole mess probably weighs about 20 lbs. I will strongly lobby for sending the entire set off to be trimmed by a professional. In fact, I'll look on the Cobra forums now to see who the guy is.

And now the dash is virtually gutted. The plugs you need at the bottom are all to the rear wiring harness. Which will be a snap to take out.


The empty engine bay.



Todo:
- remove fuel lines. CG will work on this on his own when he has time
- take off driver side spindle
- take off front lower control arms. The kit comes with tubular LCAs, but might as well take them off for completeness.
- remove aftermarket gauges from dash console.


Notes to self:
- need to put fuseblock back on mount. Just in case. 4 torx screws on driver side floor
- 5 long torx screws for dash are on floor
- 4 brass torx for gauge cluster on floor
- I handed CG the electric fan manual switch and neutral safety switch. Need to find those.
- there were 2 plugs into the airbag processor
- there were 3 or 4 plugs between the front wiring harness and the rear. Should label them