I didn't really get into Mustangs until the mid 80's... Through my youth I was mostly interested in GTO's, early Camaros and Trans Ams. A buddy of mine borrowed his girlfriends 84 GT for the day, took me for a spin and that really got me thinking about buying a new Mustang to replace my aging and worn '76 Trans Am. So on October 22nd, 1986 I bought my first Mustang GT. I bought it new off the lot with 2.3 miles on it. I drove it daily for the next 9 years. With a third child and a long commute to work I needed something more comfortable for the family and so I ended up replacing the Mustang with a '94 V8 Thunderbird.
One of the things that helped me kick off this project is the fact that I essentially had an '89 Mustang LX 5.0 parts bin. I bought the entire drive train and suspension package from a wrecked '89 for $500 back in '92. The intent was to use those parts as spares for my aging '86, but when I sold the '86 I just kept all the '89 parts in my garage waiting for another project.
I started this build when my eldest son was 11 years old. I had figured I could fix the body up a little, get the EFI 5.0 / T5 installed, and then drive it for a couple years before turning it over to him... Well as I got into it, I began to realize that this car was going to take more than I had originally anticipated. I also developed a common restorers disease called "while-im-at-it-itis" and the 2 year project took me more like just over 5 to get it road worthy. This picture depicts what I was going after. I wanted a low slung coupe with the stock '86 aluminum GT 10 hole wheels. The original color combo was going to be silver with a black vinyl top.
The original plan...
From an undercarriage perspective, the first objective was to retrofit the '89 K member, strut suspension, and entire drive-train. That proved to be a worthless effort since virtually every piece of metal on the '68 was severely damaged. The frame members and firewall amongst other parts were junk. At this point I should have scrapped the car and bought a more solid car but my ambition pushed me into doing what I always wanted to do which was build a street rod chassis from scratch... At the time, I was also pretty interested in Winston Cup Racing so I wanted to pick up on that theme a little too. I have always been especially interested in the chassis and fabrication work, and have always wanted to build a street rod from the ground up, so given the poor state of the Mustang I figured the front clip was my opportunity to do something custom.
After doing a bunch of research I got a whole bunch of 2x3 steel tubing and started mocking up the front clip. I did a lot of measuring, 2D Auto-Sketching, more mocking up. Parts hunting and fabricating kept me busy for some time. The drawback to doing this sort of project is that you spend a lot of time just staring and thinking about how everything will fit together. In my mind, function and fit comes before form. So even though it's not a traditional build, just about everything was done to serve a functional purpose and had to fit within my short budget and workspace constraints (1 car garage) and also be possible with the tools I had.
Anyway... as I continued to work on it over the following years, I thought it would be pretty cool to try and blend in more of the elements from the '86 that I really liked.
So here goes...
The first order of business was to figure out what to do with the front suspension. After a lot of fooling with the '89 K member and struts, I determined it would look like a kluge of parts and just decided to build a chassis from scratch. I originally wanted to do a full length frame, but determined that would be impossible to do with just a 1 car garage so I decided to do a bolt on front clip and a bolt on rear sub frame for the rear end too. The reason for bolt on is if I indeed screw it up, it would likely be a lot easier to fab up another clip to accommodate whatever changes might be required. For the rear, I wanted the ability to easily swap in an IRS so a bolt in sub frame made more sense. I think the foresight on this was a good idea, but so far I have no reason to change a thing... it handles quite well.
From a design perspective, I felt it would be better to build a perimeter style frame as opposed to a ladder frame running down the center of the car as I didn't want to lose floor space or sacrifice ground clearance for frame members. For the perimeter portion, it was quite easy as I installed convertible inner rockers and all the related pieces to serve as anchor points for the sub frames and also serve as chassis stiffeners. There are 28 bolts connecting the front frame to the beefed up unibody. 8 bolts tie the down bars to the framing on the cowl sides, 6 bolts for the stubs that slide into the inner rocker rails, 10 bolts tie the long lower runners to the lower seat bases, and 4 bolts to the beefed up toe boards, and then two struts that tie the cowl to the frame. The areas where bolts pass through sheetmetal have all been reinforced.
Those large ears coming off the top frame are street rod shock mounts that were given to me from a local supplier who treated me pretty well and so I felt obligated to use them. They look a little large, but were necessary to provide adequate clearance for the brake master cylinder. The frame itself as shown weighs 180 pounds.
The side bars shown here are welded to layered stiffeners welded to the door pillar. There are two bolts that tie it to the cowl sides. On a typical mustang this is just a single piece of sheet metal. On mine, I've built a very sturdy corner brace that connects to tubing that runs across the firewall to form a rigid side to side connection. The top of the fire wall is primarily made up of 1/8" thick stiffeners, and the firewall itself is .093" thick. Almost 3 times thicker than a stock firewall.
The Front suspension is mostly aftermarket parts, some custom parts and some modified.
The lower control arms are QA1 tubular arms made for Fox bodied Mustangs using struts. I welded on shock mounts and tubular brace to stiffen up the arm a bit. The upper arms are made by Pole Position and are typically used on the older Factory 5 kit cars. The upper ball joints are Chrysler K772 screw in ball joints that are mated up to my custom made spindle adapters that connect the '01 Mustang GT spindles. The shocks are QA1 Alumatics... I think I'll eventually step up to shocks that I can control the dampening on, but these seem to be doing ok for me so far. The springs are QA1 450 lb.
I had started off with Factory 5 spindle to control arm adapters, but they were designed such that they pitched the spindle rearward thus raising the steering arm way too high to accommodate the low steering rack. The F5 adapters are designed for their 427 Cobra kit car that places the rack in a raised position in front of the engine. On mine the rack needed to go under the harmonic balancer. This meant that I needed to tilt my spindle forward a bit to lower the steering arms. It wasn't worth the aggravation to try and rework the factory five parts, so I designed a new mount, and salvaged the tapered spindle block from the F-5 adapters. As much as I trust my welding, I had a friend who has all sorts of welding certifications weld these together for me.
This is the model that I made to verify the design before I sent the drawings off for the pieces to be laser cut. The part drawn in orange represents the one piece salvaged from the F-5 adapters. The cool thing about the laser cut pieces is that I designed it such that all the pieces basically snap together via the keyed holes. This made it very easy to maintain the registration of each part so that I could basically go right to welding. If you've ever seen the Factory five pieces, you can tell that these parts were very much overbuilt. Not shown on the model is the top cover piece and a couple other small braces that I added after these were fitted to the spindles. The models is made with 1/4" masonite, the real adapters use both 1/4" and 5/16" thick steel plate.
Once I got the finalized spindle adapters installed it was time to fine tune the steering rack for bump steer. I made an intermediate plate that goes between the rack and the frame. This was done so that if I have any problems with the rack placement, then all's I need to do is make up another intermediate plate and bolt it in. So far so good... Funny how when you plan for Plan B, you never need to go to Plan B....
The steering rack is a remanufactured '89 Mustang GT rack with 15 to 1 ratio and 2.25 turns lock to lock. The one that I originally had also had a bent tie rod as it was part of the crashed car, so I didn't want to risk using that one. The sway bar is from an '89 Trans Am. I reworked the ends to use hiem joints, but honestly haven't had the time or strong desire to make end links since it handles exceptionally well with just a rear sway bar hooked up.
Oil filter placement was a pain in the arse... Even the remote filter kits gave me trouble routing lines and finding a good clean place to mount the filter. I ended up just getting the Ford Motorsport 90 degree mount and have the filter mounted as shown. I'm using the short filter because of the proximity to the lower radiator hose. So far I've only been using NAPA gold filters.
One of the things that helped me kick off this project is the fact that I essentially had an '89 Mustang LX 5.0 parts bin. I bought the entire drive train and suspension package from a wrecked '89 for $500 back in '92. The intent was to use those parts as spares for my aging '86, but when I sold the '86 I just kept all the '89 parts in my garage waiting for another project.
I started this build when my eldest son was 11 years old. I had figured I could fix the body up a little, get the EFI 5.0 / T5 installed, and then drive it for a couple years before turning it over to him... Well as I got into it, I began to realize that this car was going to take more than I had originally anticipated. I also developed a common restorers disease called "while-im-at-it-itis" and the 2 year project took me more like just over 5 to get it road worthy. This picture depicts what I was going after. I wanted a low slung coupe with the stock '86 aluminum GT 10 hole wheels. The original color combo was going to be silver with a black vinyl top.
The original plan...
From an undercarriage perspective, the first objective was to retrofit the '89 K member, strut suspension, and entire drive-train. That proved to be a worthless effort since virtually every piece of metal on the '68 was severely damaged. The frame members and firewall amongst other parts were junk. At this point I should have scrapped the car and bought a more solid car but my ambition pushed me into doing what I always wanted to do which was build a street rod chassis from scratch... At the time, I was also pretty interested in Winston Cup Racing so I wanted to pick up on that theme a little too. I have always been especially interested in the chassis and fabrication work, and have always wanted to build a street rod from the ground up, so given the poor state of the Mustang I figured the front clip was my opportunity to do something custom.
After doing a bunch of research I got a whole bunch of 2x3 steel tubing and started mocking up the front clip. I did a lot of measuring, 2D Auto-Sketching, more mocking up. Parts hunting and fabricating kept me busy for some time. The drawback to doing this sort of project is that you spend a lot of time just staring and thinking about how everything will fit together. In my mind, function and fit comes before form. So even though it's not a traditional build, just about everything was done to serve a functional purpose and had to fit within my short budget and workspace constraints (1 car garage) and also be possible with the tools I had.
Anyway... as I continued to work on it over the following years, I thought it would be pretty cool to try and blend in more of the elements from the '86 that I really liked.
So here goes...
The first order of business was to figure out what to do with the front suspension. After a lot of fooling with the '89 K member and struts, I determined it would look like a kluge of parts and just decided to build a chassis from scratch. I originally wanted to do a full length frame, but determined that would be impossible to do with just a 1 car garage so I decided to do a bolt on front clip and a bolt on rear sub frame for the rear end too. The reason for bolt on is if I indeed screw it up, it would likely be a lot easier to fab up another clip to accommodate whatever changes might be required. For the rear, I wanted the ability to easily swap in an IRS so a bolt in sub frame made more sense. I think the foresight on this was a good idea, but so far I have no reason to change a thing... it handles quite well.
From a design perspective, I felt it would be better to build a perimeter style frame as opposed to a ladder frame running down the center of the car as I didn't want to lose floor space or sacrifice ground clearance for frame members. For the perimeter portion, it was quite easy as I installed convertible inner rockers and all the related pieces to serve as anchor points for the sub frames and also serve as chassis stiffeners. There are 28 bolts connecting the front frame to the beefed up unibody. 8 bolts tie the down bars to the framing on the cowl sides, 6 bolts for the stubs that slide into the inner rocker rails, 10 bolts tie the long lower runners to the lower seat bases, and 4 bolts to the beefed up toe boards, and then two struts that tie the cowl to the frame. The areas where bolts pass through sheetmetal have all been reinforced.
Those large ears coming off the top frame are street rod shock mounts that were given to me from a local supplier who treated me pretty well and so I felt obligated to use them. They look a little large, but were necessary to provide adequate clearance for the brake master cylinder. The frame itself as shown weighs 180 pounds.
The side bars shown here are welded to layered stiffeners welded to the door pillar. There are two bolts that tie it to the cowl sides. On a typical mustang this is just a single piece of sheet metal. On mine, I've built a very sturdy corner brace that connects to tubing that runs across the firewall to form a rigid side to side connection. The top of the fire wall is primarily made up of 1/8" thick stiffeners, and the firewall itself is .093" thick. Almost 3 times thicker than a stock firewall.
The Front suspension is mostly aftermarket parts, some custom parts and some modified.
The lower control arms are QA1 tubular arms made for Fox bodied Mustangs using struts. I welded on shock mounts and tubular brace to stiffen up the arm a bit. The upper arms are made by Pole Position and are typically used on the older Factory 5 kit cars. The upper ball joints are Chrysler K772 screw in ball joints that are mated up to my custom made spindle adapters that connect the '01 Mustang GT spindles. The shocks are QA1 Alumatics... I think I'll eventually step up to shocks that I can control the dampening on, but these seem to be doing ok for me so far. The springs are QA1 450 lb.
I had started off with Factory 5 spindle to control arm adapters, but they were designed such that they pitched the spindle rearward thus raising the steering arm way too high to accommodate the low steering rack. The F5 adapters are designed for their 427 Cobra kit car that places the rack in a raised position in front of the engine. On mine the rack needed to go under the harmonic balancer. This meant that I needed to tilt my spindle forward a bit to lower the steering arms. It wasn't worth the aggravation to try and rework the factory five parts, so I designed a new mount, and salvaged the tapered spindle block from the F-5 adapters. As much as I trust my welding, I had a friend who has all sorts of welding certifications weld these together for me.
This is the model that I made to verify the design before I sent the drawings off for the pieces to be laser cut. The part drawn in orange represents the one piece salvaged from the F-5 adapters. The cool thing about the laser cut pieces is that I designed it such that all the pieces basically snap together via the keyed holes. This made it very easy to maintain the registration of each part so that I could basically go right to welding. If you've ever seen the Factory five pieces, you can tell that these parts were very much overbuilt. Not shown on the model is the top cover piece and a couple other small braces that I added after these were fitted to the spindles. The models is made with 1/4" masonite, the real adapters use both 1/4" and 5/16" thick steel plate.
Once I got the finalized spindle adapters installed it was time to fine tune the steering rack for bump steer. I made an intermediate plate that goes between the rack and the frame. This was done so that if I have any problems with the rack placement, then all's I need to do is make up another intermediate plate and bolt it in. So far so good... Funny how when you plan for Plan B, you never need to go to Plan B....
The steering rack is a remanufactured '89 Mustang GT rack with 15 to 1 ratio and 2.25 turns lock to lock. The one that I originally had also had a bent tie rod as it was part of the crashed car, so I didn't want to risk using that one. The sway bar is from an '89 Trans Am. I reworked the ends to use hiem joints, but honestly haven't had the time or strong desire to make end links since it handles exceptionally well with just a rear sway bar hooked up.
Oil filter placement was a pain in the arse... Even the remote filter kits gave me trouble routing lines and finding a good clean place to mount the filter. I ended up just getting the Ford Motorsport 90 degree mount and have the filter mounted as shown. I'm using the short filter because of the proximity to the lower radiator hose. So far I've only been using NAPA gold filters.
