Monday, October 15, 2012

GoodMark Quarter Panel Installation

Time to start mocking in the rear quarter panels!

After cutting a heavy inch below the top body line, I started fitting the quarter panels.

I started by just lining up the larger holes in the tail with the body lines in the front.  The panel did take some trimming and bending around the edges in front and on the bottom ahead of the wheel well.

So - after an initial fit, I removed it and started prepping the area behind the final resting place of the fender.   Here I got back out my trusty Rust Encapsulator from Eastood Co.
 
I do  think that all cleaned up and painted black it looked really nice.  I gave it two heavy coats - its never going to see the light of day again so lets do it right this time.
 
 
Here it is again with the blue tape removed and mocked in again with everything put into place behind the scenes.
 
Now it was time to start permanently putting the panel in place.  I decided to use cleco style fasteners and flanging the top edge of the quarter to create some overlap.  Drilling holes into both the edge of the mustang quarter and the quarter itself was VERY time consuming.  But - going slowly paid off.  I was able to make sure the fit and the body lines were matched up nicely.  
 
Really - it helped tremendously to have each clip holding the steel in place.  I spaced each clip every two to three inches.  Here's another view....
 

 
Now just a lot of tack welds and then its on to the other side....
 

 

Monday, September 24, 2012

The Hoopty!

I've been going back and forth on how I wanted to plan and run the target state for my powertrain in the mustang.  I've always thought about going with something fuel injected...so one can glean modern fuel efficiency and driveability.

I had been looking at mid-late 90's 351 setups - mostly out of Bronco's and F150's.  Dad turned me on to the Lincoln Mark VIII's... indicating they had the same engine setup (less the forged crank) as his '97 Mustang Cobra.

Story is - Ford outsourced block sourcing to the Teksid foundry in Italy.  This foundry is also the same source for engine block tech for Ferrari.... Well - on top of it- Dad's car runs immensely well... so ...

Here's a view of the car in the driveway. 


Now - time to sell the 302 and other parts to make room for the 'new to me' parts....

Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Time to start carving the quarter panel!

Margery "What the hell are you doing cutting up a perfectly good car?"
 


After cutting out the spot welds - and taking the panel out in pieces... this is what I was left with.


Here's whats left underneath - lots of surface rust and some holes around the front and rear of the outer wheelhouse.  Need to fill in those spots and cut out the original outer wheelhouse.

Following that, paint all teh interior structure so it never has a chance to rust again.


As a strange update after the fact - found a piece of a tree in the rocker panel when I opened it up.  The diameter of it was that of a quarter... so I've got no clue how it got in there originally.

Who knows.

Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Mocking Up the Tail Pan

So Dad's been doing a GREAT job of hooking me up with pieces of sheet metal for birthdays and holidays.  Next on the agenda is fitting up the tail pan.

So - with the old pan removed, it was time to start fitting the new piece.

I dug out the caps for the tail of the car - just to really see how it finished things off.  Really makes it look like a car again.

Now - time to tack in the tail pan - and then move onto the quarter panels.


Thursday, March 1, 2012

Auto Body Dolly - Yes, the rotisserie wasn't enough 'gear'

Yes -I too thought that the rotisserie would be the last piece of garage gear that would be required to work the car.  The big issue though - the rotisserie is tied fairly rigidly to the front and rear of the car... so if the rotisserie was to roll across fairly uneven ground... I could run the risk of twisting (or worse) the car while its suspended.

I went out looking at a number of different designs, and really liked the one that I believe is made by Auto-Twirler and resold by Eastwood.  Its pretty conventional, four posts, with sliding inner/outer runners between posts.

Of course, no piece of garage gear would be complete without a set of casters.  I was able to reuse ones from a crate of old casters I bought two or three years ago in Cedar Rapids.


Here's a mockup of one post almost completed.  You'll notice the smaller sized square tubing on one side and larger on the other.  I think the dimensions on it was 1.5 and 2.0 inch with just enough play for each piece to fit into the other.

I added the nut and 1 inch threaded rod to the design, because my car for certain wasn't deisgned underneath to be level across the board.   Adjustabiltiy is a nice trait to have.


Above is a picture of the posts and runners mocked together.  At this point I hadn't affixed the nuts and bolts which were used to provide the squeeze keeping the runners from slipping outward or inward.
They are however seen below.

Here's the completed picture.  In the end, I think I did make the cart a smidge too wide, as the front frame rails on the Mustang don't sit in the cart when they're at their thinnest point.  But - I didn't want the car to be prone to tipping either... so I left it as is.

Now the car is sitting on it fairly nicely.  Next step is to slide the car back into the driveway and do some more sand blasting in the trunk area.   After pulling the tail pan, I found some corrosion that I can't get off easily with my airtools, so time to get dusty!


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As an aside, I rode with my buddy Greg from work out to York, Nebraska to deliver his Duster to a guy who will do a heavy 'freshen up' exercise on it.  While en-route we stopped by an old yard known as Utica Bills.  I snapped a few shots of the cars in the lot... but the few pictures I did take don't do it justice.  It sounded like this was 20% of his collection.  All the more desirable stuff is in closed/covered storage somewhere else.



Something about this hood spoke to me - I think I'll crop it and use it as the background on my phone.


This old race car was neat to see.  Even more neat was when I got closer to the engine and saw an old hemi sitting under the hood!



 As an aside to an aside of the above, I had done a fair amount of reading the Mustang boards and found some guys who had taken explorer rear axles and put them under their classic Mustangs as the overall width was within a half inch I believe (on the larger side) of what the stock 8 inch was from the factory... at least for my car in 1969.

Ford Explorer rear axles come in several varieties... posi and non-posi, with numerous gear ratios... and centered/offset.

Here's what I've been able to pick up in my head - Mid-90's Ford Explorers in the 2WD variety have a centered pumpkin.... there's a downside though... its also non-posi.

4WD is posi.  AND it has higher spline axles by default.  The hitch is -- because the 4WD unit has the transfer case, which offsets the rear driveshaft from center.  Thus, the rear pumpkin is offset by two inches.

It turns out - one can narrow the housing (the longer end) by two inches to recenter the housing.

From there you just need the short axle shaft out of another 4WD Explorer to match up both sides and you're off and running.

A visit to the local Wrench and Go found me plenty of doner vehicles.  the D4 Axle  noted in the picture below would be tho most idea in my opinion because its got a 3.73 gear ratio and Posi versus 4.10 or something crazy like 3.1 or 3.2 (I can't remember specifically).






Thursday, February 23, 2012

February 2012 - Time for a little metal work

I've known since I blasted the car initially that some work (sh*tty work) was done to replace part of the tail pan where the tail lights came through on the passenger side. 

Thanks to Dad and the good folks at Keystone Automotive in West Des Moines, I had a nice full tail pan to replace the 40+ year old one.


This ended up being a pretty long job for a guy who has a smattering of minutes/hour or two to work on the task.  There were easly 40-50 spot welds I had to drill out.

One discovery though - when trying to set the spot for the drilling I couldn't get a good point my Blair cutter to work, so I got out my drill and drilled very small pilot holes (not all the way through mind you) which allowed the spot weld cutter to stay centered.  Its a huge pain when that sucker wants to dance everywhere. 


You can see the bronze around the horrible previous fix on this.  Spot welds are about every three inches around the seam.    In the end I did some of the cutting of the inner steel out first... which left me with just freeing the steel around the edges.  That made things easier.  It was an evolution to say the least to get this sucker out.

Oh - and the bumper brackets needed to be cut out as well to get to all the spot welds.  Took me way too long to figure that out... and lots of staring.



The other thing that I did as a precautionary measure - A piece of angle iron (its your friend) tacked across the trunk opening to make sure all my lines and such aren't moved when I removed the tail pan structure.




Wednesday, February 15, 2012

January and February - A Gift!

I have been trying to determine what rear end combination I wanted to put under the car for some time.  Do I do a Ford 9 inch?  (which I already have a case for)... do I go a beefier Dana 60 unit?  How about the Ford 8.8 they've been putting in all the newer cars/SUV's lately?

My buddy Greg bought a Dana 60 on Craigslist for 125 bucks and decided to go another direction - i.e. took the guesswork out completely and likely will build one custom for his Duster via Currie or Moser.  Thus - he didn't need the Dana he purchased anymore.

So - he gave it to me.  What a find!


First things first - it had huge drums on it and truck/military axles.  They were completely frozen.  So - after heat and lots of lubricant didn't work, out came the cutting tools.  Bye bye drums!



When I got the drums off, I tried to spin the pinion... it wouldn't budge.  No hammering or brute force would budge it.  So I investigated further.  Upon taking the cover off, I immediately was able to tell what was freezing it up - there had been more water than lube in this case for some time.



Drum brake backing plates and shoes in the trash.  They were locked up yes... but the diff (as you'll see, had issues of its own.


The top and below photos are only different in that I used a flash on one and not on the other.  In the end- there was some pretty good sludge on the gears.  I was able to scrub quite a bit of it off the ring gear, but decided I didn't want to go deeper and free the spiders.  The decision was based on the following:  The only thing I would keep out of the whole rig would be the case.  I didn't want to run 4.10 gears and would need to get disc brakes, new axles, posi... almost everything.

In the end, too many dollars for this guy.   Back on Craigslist - free to any taker.  Hopefully the guy that got it will really enjoy the 4.10's in his jeep project.