my66
a little restoration story
Tighter and stronger
With stronger and shorter springs, new front-end components and modified attachment positions, the handling improved quite a bit.
The way it looked
The front-end was in dire need of an overhaul. | ||
Removing the springs was scary business. | ||
With the springs and spindle assembly removed, there was much more room to work in. And yes, for this job you absolutely should rent a pickle-fork. They give you your deposit back if you return the set to Autozone within 30 days, so it is basically free. | ||
Here are the upper control arm, the old drum brakes still on the spindle, the (compressed) old and new coil springs and the old tie-rod assembly. | ||
The uncompressed old coil spring was about 1" longer than the new 620lb spring. As I bought the shortened, harder springs to replace the stock springs, it looked like the old ones did not sag at all. | ||
I removed the spindles and cleaned them up, so that I could mount my new disc brakes to them. |
Mounting the control arms and springs
After removing the old control arms, sway bar, tie-rod's and the steering links, I decided to modify the attachment points of the upper control arm using this template. If you Google 'Shelby drop', you will find tons of information on this (even though the modification should be credited to a German engineer named Klaus Arning...but hey, we did not get too much credit for flying some people to the moon, either). | ||
The new front-end components in place. I went all out and got a solid 1 1/8" sway bar as well. | ||
The tightened spring in place... try not to breathe. | ||
Solid. |
Alignment
In order to make it to a professional alignment shop, I had to roughly adjust the camber and the toe-in. Here you see my set up in order to measure the toe. | ||
After spray painting the tire, I spun the wheel and used a nail to mark the center. This allowed me to measure the distance between the wheels in front and behind the hub. | ||
It worked surprisingly well for the ride to the shop, but paying a pro to do the fine adjustments was money well spent. |
