Not much is happening on this car until I can dig it out of storage, which probably won't be until late spring this year or so, but I'm still making some small measures of progress in the meantime. I've gone JY diving, for one:
What you see here are an esoteric collection of parts that may or may not work together. Some of you were aware that my plans for this car include a custom front suspension to escape a few disadvantages of staying stock. The plan was to build a custom upright around a modern hub/wheel bearing assembly and the geometry I'm looking for, and it still might come to that, but in the meantime I found these nifty pieces:
They're from a 2007 Ford Crown Victoria cop car. Cast alloy with beefy balljoints and a modern wheel bearing assembly, somewhat decent geometry, and not nearly as heavy as they look (still pretty heavy). They'll be basically bomb-proof under my little car. Speaking of bomb-proof, check out the lower arms from the same car:
They are designed to run with between 5.7 and 6.2 degrees of caster which will make the steering heavier at speed, but this will be offset somewhat by reducing the scrub radius by about 2 full inches, or taking it from 3.25" down to 1.25". This will reduce the tugging and pulling and the effect of tramlining, plus will reduce the parking lot effort. In order to get the scrub down the kingpin inclination angle is higher than the 122, but in the corners this is more than offset by the increase in caster.
The Crown Vic used a front-steer arrangement and rack & pinion, which is exactly what I want to do to get rid of that massive steering box and the wild swing of the cross link. I might be delusional or making bad decisions, but I don't want a power rack either. I do want something narrow, and with a reasonable ratio and a long enough throw to move the fairly long Crown Vic steering arms far enough to have a tight turning circle. The solution (?) comes from the '60s in the form of an MGB. The pinion shaft is far too long so I'll have to cut it down, but it's going to give me a reduction in turns lock-to-lock while still giving me a fairly tight turning circle.
The Crown Vic brakes are massive and heavy and gross, not something I want to run on this car. Two piston sliding cast iron calipers on a 12x1.1" rotor will stop a 4500 lb police car, but also weigh a ton themselves. They also wouldn't clear the wheels I plan to run. I have dug through the Wilwood catalogue and came up with a combination of parts that should work, provided I can build a hat and adapter to make them fit. I haven't gone this far yet, but I'll need to before I can lock down the design.
With the hub-to-hub dimension fixed, and with the steering rack setting the location of the lower control arm inner pivots, I can begin to design the upper arms and the custom crossmember.
Because simple isn't good enough for me, I'm not satisfied using the IPD rear sway bar on this car. Honestly, I don't think it'll be stiff enough, so something else was always going to be needed. My first pull was from a '99 Mercury Marquis with the handling package, and from an '00 Focus wagon.
Both will be stiffer than the IPD bar. The Marquis piece mounts on the axle and the arm ends are a little too far apart, but they can be bent inwards easily enough. The Focus bar is considerably narrower and I would mount it the other way: weld a crossmember onto the car just above the driveshaft tunnel and mount the sway bar to that, and link down to the rear axle. They're both arranged here in the configurations I'm describing. Problem is, the Focus bar is so stubby that it's much stiffer than I need, and until 2008 this was the smallest bar Ford installed on these cars (aside from no bar at all). I got lucky though, and found a 2013 in the JY.
The bar mounts almost exactly the same but is 2mm smaller in diameter, and would end up roughly the same stiffness as the Mercury bar but weighs less and contributes less to the (already too much) unsprung weight in the rear, plus I have options and if I want it stiffer I can run the older Focus bar.
(I believe the rear bar will need to be stiffer than the IPD because the roll center in the front will be raised up nearly 4 inches from where the IPD bars were intended to be used, and that will require more rear stiffness to keep the balance. I could be way off base, though... I guess we'll see.)
I'll be able to model up some parts now and will figure out if I can or can't use these things, and to come up with the crossmember design while I work on the 122. I'll want all of that in place so I can determine where the steering rack goes and what I have to do to the steering shaft to miss things like motor mounts.
I haven't completely forgotten about this car...
