I guess out of sight and out of mind, eh? I've been pretty terrible updating this thread, I guess I assumed that anyone who wanted to see it has already seen it.
Picking up where I left off, after the sound deadening comes the headliner. This was my first attempt at something like this. A couple of wrinkles but overall it went pretty well.
After getting the whole car together (minus the back seat) I took it for the first drive.
I meant to install Craig's old rear seats to go along with his old front seats, but his car being a 2 door and mine being a 4 door, the seat bottom didn't fit. My 122 seat top was destroyed by the sun so I took some donor seat skins into an upholsterer at the Springbank airport & had him patch up the top. With it finally all together the family and I took it for our first road trip. Step one: meet the Canuck
Meeting an old friend after a facelift is a little weird for them at times, but Craig's 240 approved of the new look.
On a honeymoon cruise.
The following year (2021) didn't see a lot of wheel time due to some sketchy neighbors and I didn't want it parked on the street, so it hung out in the garage for the most part. I got some more miles on it in 2022 though. One of the things that had to get addressed were the front seats. The car can go around corners just fine but the leather 240 seats preferred straightaways, so I got some seat skins for a pair of power E36 sport seats that **fairly closely** match the rest of the original upholstery. They turned out really well and are nearly as comfy as the 240 seats but hold a guy in place a lot better!
The seats were done just in time for a track day at Strawberry Creek, a private road course up near Edmonton. The LSCC booked a day & I managed to tag along. No pix, but the car performed beautifully. A couple of issues cropped up though: Brakes are okay at first but quickly let the car down. The car enters the corner and holds on great through the mid corner, but exiting it refuses to put any power down. It spins the inside and either wheel hops or steps sideways - it needs an LSD. Power is terrible and the valves feel like they're floating above 5500 RPM or so.
Addressing two of those three issues is pretty easy: When Craig pulled his 122 apart for the renovation it's currently under I bought up a bunch of his parts, including the Wilwood front disc brake conversion and the 240 rear axle conversion. The front brakes are obviously much stronger and are ventilated enough that they'll never fade with this kind of horsepower, and they're lighter to boot. The rear axle brings along the 240 rear discs, which Craig redrilled to 5x4.5 pattern, and while he was rebuilding it he'd added the top of the line Detroit True-Trac limited slip diff. The downside is that the axle is a bit over 30mm wider than the 122 axle.
The Crown Vic wheels on the 122 axle were already rubbing the body, and adding the extra width from the 240 axle would have been catastrophic. Here are pix of the suspension fully compressed before I did anything else:
In addition to having too little offset, the Crown Vic wheels are terribly heavy. I'd always liked the Mustang V6 wheels from the '05-ish years, and I found a set in really nice shape for $200 so I picked them up. I got some cheap maple leaf center caps that almost fit (some mods required, not completed yet). The offset is +35 instead of the +10 (maybe?) of the cop car wheels, so even with the wider axle I've got more clearance to the fender lip. Along with the brakes and axle I also got some 13mm spacers that use the longer studs in the hubs that came with the brake kit, restoring most of the track width at the front.
Craig's rear axle used a hybrid of control arms to adapt it to his '66, which uses a different suspension from the '67+ cars. I much prefer the '67+ suspension as it uses bushings that are not relying on deformation to articulate In short, the '66 and earlier cars had one conventional bushing (the axis of the bushing is perpendicular to the arm, axial with the deflection of the arm), one bushing that wraps around the axle tube, and two where the bushing is in front and behind a tab & have to deform in order for the suspension to articulate, limiting travel and eventually binding.
So I did something silly and updated the rear suspension to '67+ status. I had a couple of axle brackets from another late axle so I chopped everything off Craig's 240 axle and welded the new pieces on. I used my 123GT as a reference.
Also using the GT as a reference, I measured up the chassis side of things and designed some parts for Send-Cut-Send to build.
Cutting out the old brackets is a royal pain, and I had a lot of repair to do to the box section. The sway bar body mounts got in the way too. I should have cut the whole thing off and rebuilt it rather than trying to drill all of those spot welds and patch things up later. But finish I did. I had to get the car out of the garage and get started on something else, so after a quick picture on the road in front of the house, I stored it back away in Mom's garage.
I'm not even going to bother insuring it this summer, we'll see if I can even get any miles on it next summer. Poor thing.
Frick yes! Love it!
