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So next, I skipped all the way to the back of the coupe to remove the old, 4-cyl rearend. Notice all the cobwebs in the picture!
Once the rear end was out, I noticed a lot of greasy filth on the underside of the car. I knew that I had a lot of work to do under there with all of my Maximum Motorsports suspension parts to install so I decided that the filth was going to have to be cleaned away. Here are some pictures of what I'm talking about:
Before I started with the K member alignment, I watched a couple of YouTube videos and read through the instructions a couple of times. The MM instructions are very thorough and the alignment isn’t all that hard. However, if you’ve never done it before, like me, it seems like it’s brain surgery! Once you get started, it all starts to come together. You’ll need at least one plumb bob. I’ve owned one for 20yrs but I purchased a second plumb bob just to make things easier and a little quicker.
You’ll notice that I have the car up on jack stands that are sitting on top of wheeled Harbor Freight dollies. I had the wheels locked and everything was secure and didn’t move one bit.
Once again, I did this all by myself. Hopefully anyone else would use a helper. It’s so time consuming to constantly go back and forth checking the position of the tape measure to make sure it’s still spot on.
This thread came at a perfect time! This spring I'll be swapping a Maximum Motorsports MMKM-1 and a bored alloy 5.3L into my '89 notch. Cheers! Subscribed.
Yes, Andrew. It's pretty much a rust free car. Only a couple of areas of surface rust. Nothing more.
The underside led a very easy life with the exception of the front, driver's side "subframe." The dreaded hydraulic jack used in the wrong place bent it up. It made it extra hard to weld in the MM SFCs. Passenger side, front subframe was like new.
The whole bottom side of the car cleaned up very well. I'll be posting the pictures.
This thread came at a perfect time! This spring I'll be swapping a Maximum Motorsports MMKM-1 and a bored alloy 5.3L into my '89 notch. Cheers! Subscribed.
Joe, by the time you get to working on your swap, this thread should be caught up to where I am at that time. It should give you a lot of information to help you or at least show you some options. I'm going to try to give a little more details on why I chose the components that I chose.
After seeing all of the greasy gunk on the bottom of the coupe, I knew that I didn't want to try to do all of my work with a filthy work area. The problem was that I knew a garden hose was going to be required and I didn't want to be spraying water under my car with the car in the garage. The coupe had no wheels on it at this time so moving the body was pretty much impossible.
I decided to use a roll of plastic sheeting to put down on the floor of the garage to create a sort of "river bed" that would channel all of the cleaned off greasy gunk, dirt and water out of my garage. In addition, if done right, it would limit water spray all in my garage.
How do you like my home built, wooden jackstands? Lots of online info on building them out of 2X4s. They're very sturdy and extremely stable. This car body is very light so I actually trust them more than I trust real jackstands.
You can see how I wrapped the plastic sheeting up the side of the car and held the plastic there with super strong, rare earth magnets.
G and Andrew, here are a couple of pictures showing the dimensions of my wooden jackstands. I made them this size because it would use up an 8 foot (96") 2X4. I'd cut up one 2X4 into three 17" pieces (51") and three 15" pieces (45") which is a total of 96". Obviously each piece of wood is slightly short by the width of the miter saw blade.
I had a 5lb box of galvanized, 4" long nails that I used to nail the boards together at each corner. I actually drilled pilot holes for these nails. Each of the 4" long nails would go through three boards since the boards' nominal thickness is 1.5".
I didn't trust that a single nail at each corner would stay tight over time so I purchased a caulk gun tube of "Liquid Nails" construction adhesive and applied it between the boards to glue it together and keep everything tight. I built these jackstands in the spring of 2020 and they're rock solid and tight as of January 2021.
I already had this 5lb box of galvanized nails so they were perfect for constructing these jackstands. I tried using some dacrotized deck screws that I had on hand but I kept snapping off the heads when trying to drive them in with my impact driver. The 4" nails are more "heavy duty." I staggered the nails to make sure that a subsequent nail wouldn't try to drive into a nail already in place below it.
Joe, by the time you get to working on your swap, this thread should be caught up to where I am at that time. It should give you a lot of information to help you or at least show you some options. I'm going to try to give a little more details on why I chose the components that I chose.
Hell yes, this is amazing. From the few posts of yours I've read, I'm loving the attention to detail and explanatory effort. It's a stark contrast to the poor-grammar non-searched quick-and-dirty questions and technical "information" these days on countless other forums and the ever-popular Facebook groups. You may have just inspired me to create a build thread for my Fox, however I have a feeling you'll be covering all the same details in the same informative detail... so mine might just be redundant haha.
Thank you for the nice words, Joe! I appreciate it very much. I try to explain clearly what I'm doing and in some cases, why. I'll also detail some of the difficulties that I've encountered as well. I want people to know what problems I've experienced so that if they encounter something similar, they won't immediately think that they made some kind of mistake.
One thing that I forgot to mention is that I put down large pieces of cardboard onto the garage floor before I put down the plastic sheeting. The cardboard kept me from wearing holes in the plastic and it just made it more comfortable for me as I slid around under the car as I did all of my scrubbing work.
I felt that if I was going to do this cleaning underneath the car, I was going to do it right and really clean it good. I knew I had a ton of suspension work as well as welding in subframe connectors. My work would be easier and, dare I say more enjoyable, without having to deal with grease and dirt. I used several brushes including toothbrushes along with concentrated cleaner such as "Super Clean" and "Purple Power." FYI, I've found the Super Clean to be a stronger degreaser than Purple Power. It costs more but it delivers more as well. I put the degreaser in a squirt bottle and while laying on my back under the car, I sprayed it up on the underside of the car. These degreasers are very powerful and they'll burn your bare skin not to mention your eyes. I wore a swimming mask over my eyes to protect me from all of the degreaser falling down from the underside of the car.
It was nasty work! I scrubbed, squirted more cleaner, scrubbed and squirted more cleaner. The decades old grease was quite stubborn but with a ton of grimy work, it came off. After I'd spent hours cleaning the underside of the car, I finally used the garden hose to spray away all of the grease, dirt and grime.
Looking under the car toward the back. You can see part of the K member in the upper right corner of the picture.
From the back of the car looking forward. You can see a cut up cardboard box underneath the plastic sheeting.
Thanks to the cardboard under the plastic, I didn't wear a single hole in it and all of the water flowed down from the rear of the car to the front. My garage floor is sloped slightly down toward the garage door so the water carrying the grime flowed well. Because of the way that I had the plastic go up the outside of my car as can be seen in previously posted pictures, I got very little water overspray in my garage
I have to tell you that I did this on a chilly day and I was soaking wet and shivering! I was under the car spraying the garden hose. Plan better than me and do this type of work when its warmer!
FYI to you and anyone reading this in the future, what took you hours could have been done in minutes with a hot water pressure washer. If you don't know anyone with one, lots of rental yards carry them. They are worth their weight in gold. It stripped the wax coating off the frame of my '05 Silvy in seconds. Any spec of oil or grease under the cab was blown off just as fast.
FYI to you and anyone reading this in the future, what took you hours could have been done in minutes with a hot water pressure washer. If you don't know anyone with one, lots of rental yards carry them. They are worth their weight in gold. It stripped the wax coating off the frame of my '05 Silvy in seconds. Any spec of oil or grease under the cab was blown off just as fast.
That's a great idea. If a person's car were outside and the car were up high enough to get that pressure washing wand under there, this would work better and much quicker than the way I did it.
At the height that my car was sitting and the fact that it was immobile in my garage, it would have been difficult to maneuver the spray wand and there is no way my plastic sheeting would've contained the high pressure water spray. My garage would've been soaked with water and blasted off grease and grime!
After cleaning up the bottom of the car, I decided to work on an area that didn't require that cleaning: the front suspension. Back in the 2007-2008 time frame, I converted over my '91 GT donor car to 5-lug, 4-wheel Cobra disc brakes. To do that, I sourced used '94-'95 front spindles from a local junkyard in the Jacksonville, FL area. In addition, those spindles gave me another inch of bump travel because the strut mounting ear is lower to the ground by about 1 inch vs a Fox Body spindle. Those '94-'95 spindles worked great on my donor car with the OEM K member for almost 10 yrs before I took the car off the road due to saltwater air rust damage.
Now with the Maximum Motorsports MMKM-1 K member, those spindles are no longer the best spindles to use. The 1996-2004 spindles are a better choice because the MM K member raises the pivot location of the front control arms. Stack up of the required bumpsteer spacers is about .96" less with the later model spindles resulting in less flexing of the steering arm, improving steering response. So I went out and purchased a pair of sprindles off of a 2001 Mustang from a local Mustang parts seller here in the north Houston area.
For adjusting bumpsteer, I'm using a Maximum Motorsports Adjustable Tie-Rod End kit. The kit required me to drill out the tapered holes in the 2001 spindles to 5/8". The MM instructions say to do this carefully on a milling machine (I wish I owned one!) or a very sturdy drill press. No hand drills and no wimpy drill presses like the bench-top model I own. I decided to try it anyway. Little did I know that I was about to climb Mount Everest!
I had purchased a set of large Silver and Deming drill bits a year earlier so I was going to put the brand new 5/8" bit to work. Here are a couple of pictures of me trying to drill out the hard spindle material:
The bit cut good for about 5 seconds and pretty much stopped cutting. I had my drill speed down as slow as it would go; 600 rpm. Too fast for a 5/8" drill bit.
I worked on it for at least a couple of hours and finally gave up in total frustration! I called everyone I knew to see if anyone owned a beefier drill press and finally found someone! My teenage daughter rides horses competitively (English) and her instructor's dad actually owns the horse ranch. He's also a car guy with a couple of cool project cars: a mid 60's Corvette and a 1968 Camaro. Obviously he has a lot of tools and equipment for the horse ranch and his cars. Richard has a very old (maybe 50 years old?) Craftsman floor standing drill press. I think it's made in the USA. He was able to pulley the speed down to 360 rpm and we tried to drill out those spindles. Again, no luck. The bit just wouldn't cut through the metal. I was really frustrated.
I didn't trust my drill bits because I believe I got ripped off by a company calling themselves "Drill Hog USA." I think I got taken and paid a lot of money for chinese junk. My wife took pity on me and looked on the internet to find a USA made cutting tool company. I wish I could remember their name but I think that they were up in the state of Minnesota. I called them and spoke with one of their engineers and he told me that I was using the wrong tool. Now we've all enlarged holes using bigger drill bits but really, drill bits are designed to cut from the center point outward. They don't cut real good on their outer edges is what he told me. He said that I needed to use is a cutting tool called a "reamer."
$54 later, this showed up at my house:
You can see that it says, "USA" on it!
Back to Richard's horse ranch I went with the reamer and both spindles. This time, success! The reamer cut through the OEM, smaller, tapered holes and they were now 5/8" ID all the way through. I'm not totally certain but I think that it took me 3 weeks to climb this Mount Everest !
I went to town on that 8.8 and completely wore out my Harbor Freight cupped, wire brush. I hate china made stuff so I looked on eBay and found some NOS, leftover made in USA cupped, wire brushes. They were almost as cheap as the china stuff from HF!
Those wires can launch out of the cup like little, needle missiles. Wear appropriate clothing and good eye protection!
01-09-2021, 11:04 AM
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