Front Suspension & Brakes

After receiving my car, the first order of business was getting a good inventory done. I inventoried every nut, bolt and part. FFR did a great job and sent everything they were suppose to. There are a few items back ordered, but I expect to have those parts in a few weeks. I found that the third leg of my roll bar had a scratch in the powdercoat. I called FFR and they promised to send another one. It took two evenings after work for me to get the inventory completed. I now have boxes of car parts in the attic, in the garage, in the closet and out in the storage shed. I hope I remember where I put everything!



This past weekend I started working on the front suspension of the car. The above photo kind of gives you an idea of the sort of minor obstacles that tend to slow me down. Not that it's all that hard to enlarge a hole, but everytime I run into something like this it makes me go running for the computer so that I can do research, to make sure I'm not screwing something up

I first started with cleaning up and painting the donor spindles. I sprayed them with a Rustoleum Hammered Black paint. I think they turned out really nice looking.



After getting the spindles, coil-over shocks and upper A-arms installed, I last step was to install the tubular lower control arms. Factory Five has had my tubular lower front control arms on back order for the past 4 weeks. I hadn't really planned on buying the FFR control arms since they are a $480 option, but I ended up getting them with my kit as a part of the Factory Five Winter Sale. http://parts.factoryfive.com/newcatalog/chassis/frontlower.htm I've now decided to use the donor Mustang lower control arms and sell the FFR tubular LCAs when they arrive. I'm thinking that I can get $400+ for them by advertising on the ffrog.com Classified area of the board. The LCAs really aren't visible once the car is built and the handling performance gain is minimal at best, especially since I have no racing plans for the car.




The Mustang LCAs only require minor modification in order to use them on the FFR Cobra. Basically a little notch needs to be cut into the LCA in order to get the shock mount some clearance. You really can't see the notch I made in the photo above, but it's right behind where the shock mounts to the LCA.

The donor Mustang used 4 lug wheels, but I decided to convert to 5 lugs since the wheel selection is much greater and generally less expensive. There is lots of information available on the Internet that explains how to go about doing the conversion. The two links below are a couple of the best ones I found.

http://www.stangnet.com/tech/lug.html
http://sn95brakes.cjb.net/

Since my donor is a Fox Body 89 Mustang, the conversion only consists of using 5 lug front rotors from a mid 80's Lincoln Continental, Lincoln Mark VII (85-91), or '84-'86 SVO. In order to convert the rear wheels I needed to find '83-'92 Ranger/Bronco II Left (driver) side axle (29-5/32") from a 4cyl or 3.0L V-6 with the 7.5" rear end, or '86-'97 Aerostar RIGHT side axles (29-5/32"). They are the same rear axles, the center section is just on the opposite side when you compare the rear ends. The pumpkins are also off center unlike the Mustangs, so I had to find two vehicles to pull axles from! I will need the drums from either of these vehicles also since I'm staying with rear 9" drums. The 7.5 axle Rangers & Aerostars use 9" drums. These parts are direct 5 lug replacements for the stock 9" rear drums on the 79-93 Mustangs. I will just buy new drums and use the donor Mustang 4 lug drums to swap out for the core charge!

I went to a U-Pull It Salvage Yard in Grand Prairie and found the above mentioned axles. I got both axles for $30.00!

I had planned on buying the 5 lug front rotors from the auto parts store but I got lucky and found someone on www.dfwstangs.net that was selling brand new "still in the box" rotors. The person was planning on doing his own 5 lug conversion, but later decided that he wanted the more expensive Cobra brakes which use a larger rotor. He sold the brand new rotors to me for $35.00, so I think I came out pretty good on that deal too!




A big part of this weekend was also spent cleaning up and rebuilding the donor Mustang brakes.




I used some DupliColor caliper paint and painted them red. I'm very happy with the way they turned out! The front suspension and brakes are now DONE!

I ran across this web page for Hot Rod Magazine. It has a couple of magazine articles online that talk about the Factory Five car that I'm building. Take a look and see what I have to look forward to!

http://hotrod.com/projectbuild/hdrp_ffr_cobra_kit_car_project_build/


The wheels for the car have been purchased and are now in the garage! I got 17X9s for the front and 17X10.5's for the rear. Discount Tire Online Direct http://www.discounttiredirect.com/ had a sale a short time ago. They advertised on the www.ffrog.com discussion board and they sold out in a day or two.. Not bad for $105.00 per wheel! I managed to get their very last set.




So that's it for another BLOG post on my FFR MKIII Cobra Build. It will probably be a week or two before I make another BLOG entry. The next couple of weeks will involve installing the 3-link rear suspension. Based on what I've read on the discussion board, it's a pretty straight forward installation. I need to decide in the next few days if I'm going to keep the stock Mustang 2.73 rear diff. gears or upgrade to something like a 3.55 gear ratio. The FFR manual says the upgraded gear set really "wakes the engine up.." hmmmm.. how awake do I need my engine? The gears can be purchased for less than $200, but I would probably have to pay a shop to install them. I've heard that it's real easy to mess up getting it shimmed the correct way. I guess I'll be doing a little more research and come to a decision soon.

Delivery (D-Day) of the Kit

As is the case with most BLOGS, to read everything in chronological order, start at the bottom of the page with the BLOG entry named "The Beginning." The newest entry is always at the top of the page. Click on photos for full size versions!

April 12, 2006 is the day! At about 5 P.M. I received a phone call from the Stewart Transport drivers and they said they were passing through Greenville, Texas and should be at my house within the next two hours. So it was now time to run out to the garage and start getting things ready.



I moved the GoldWing out of the way and position the jack stands which will be the new home of the Roadster for the next 4-6 months. The wooden structure out on the driveway is something called a body buck. I built the body buck to hold and support the fiberglass body of the car. The body will sit on top of the body buck and the chassis of the car will sit on the jack stands below the body buck. When I want to work on the car I will be able to roll the body buck (w/body) out of the garage and into the driveway. At the end of the day the body buck will be rolled back in the garage and be stored over the work in progress.

A short time later Cheryl was outside and yelled into the garage, "I think I hear them coming!" Seconds later they pulled up in front of my house and started unloading. As the body of the car was off loaded, I received my first compliment on my car. Some guy slowed down and stopped and said, "that's a nice Cobra" and then drove off.





My car was the last car to be delivered by Stewart Transport on this trip, so it's sitting all alone on the truck.





First all of the boxes were off loaded. I'm going to have to get creative with finding places to put all of the boxes. My garage is already pretty full!



Last but not least, the body comes off. Pretty neat winch/crane type of set up used by Stewart Transport.



I almost asked if I could sit in the car while he pushed it up the driveway, but Cheryl said it wouldn't be a good idea.. Oh well...



Car safe and sound in MY garage. I'm now the proud owner of Factory Five MKIII Roadster #5392!



The next day my friend Chris came over and helped me take the body off of the chassis. In this photo I have already mocked up the steering rack position.



So that's it for this week. Next week I'll hopefully get some time to start working on the car.