Well, according to my original radiator, which was in my car until recently when I upgraded to handle the heat of southern summers... over 50 years! It was working just fine when I took it out. Just figured it wouldn't do such a hot job of dealing with the extra accessories (PS / AC) as well as the extra heat (NC / TX summer) so I swapped it out.

Well, I used a very scientific measurement... first, I put the car in 2nd gear with the shift lever as far back as it goes. Then I sat in the seat and put my arm down like I was leaning on the armrest and figured out where the armrest needed to be. Then I chopped the hole rearward of the furthest back throw on the shifter and just slightly forward of where the front of the armrest should have been.

I wouldn't hesitate to use bolts only for this system, as the transmission tunnel is really quite strong at this point due to the curve in it. But mine is welded in, because my body guy got on a welding kick and welded everything to the floor one day for unknown reasons I'm sure that will annoy me at some point in time way down the line when he's long dead and his ghost will laugh at me one last time.

If you want, I can measure the exact distance on mine from the back of the shifter hole to the front of the shift lever. It is pretty perfectly mounted.

Sure, here's the build thread over on "that other forum"

http://forums.vintage-mustang.com/vintage-mustang-forum/653231-check-out-custom-console-we-re-building.html

Funny that I should see this thread - I was just thinking yesterday about how neat it would be to have a nice finned aluminum dress-up plate for the Sanden AC compressor! There's one available for the York/Tecumseh compressor but it's not the right dimensions to square up on the Sanden.



But man would it be nice to have something to make the Sanden look a bit less unsightly - and I'll be honest, I would be totally ecstatic to have a flat plate cover that I could then use as another "tool table" in the engine bay  That's really the motivation here. I get real mad when I prop all my tools on the compressor and then they fall off the sides and get all tangled in the belts and stuff. 

I was thinking that a part like that would be easy to make with a CNC because dimensionally it's nothing particularly complicated. You'd just need a piece of rectangular aluminum stock and then would just have to slice the fins out, drill 4 holes, and bevel the edges of the piece a bit to clean it up. Of course, it could look totally stupid once installed, who knows.

Well, I'm not a man, but I will weigh in anyways.

I assume by the fact that you installed adjustable strut rods that you must have a '65/'66 car. For those particular cars, you need to let the shims do the talking. While the adjustable strut rods should theoretically adjust caster, if you change their lengths side-to-side (i.e. make the left longer than the right or vice versa), it will do silly things to the steering geometry. On the '65/'66s, it is best to set your adjustable strut rods at the stock length and resolve as much of the caster/camber issue as possible with the shims, and then adjust the strut rods further if absolutely necessary. You could be getting wandering to the left as a result of having two different lengths of strut rods, which causes each side of the suspension to act differently from one another.

The best technique for alignment would be to get an alignment gauge and use that, rather than measuring wheelbase - keep in mind that these cars are not necessarily even square to begin with! My '66 is set at 0* camber, +3.5-4.0* caster, and +1/32" toe, biased just a smidge one way to account for road crown. No wandering at any speed, even exceeding 90 MPH, and I've got power steering to boot. I did my own alignment with a Longacre gauge for caster and camber, and then had a guy do toe because I suck at measuring in units less than 1/8".

Yes, you must roll the car. It is very possible for the car to appear to be a lot higher directly after you put it down. This is because of the way the suspension is set up on these cars. You may notice that visually, when you lift the car off of the ground, you get a lot of negative camber. But when the car is back on the ground and has been driven a bit, the tires are straight or have positive camber.

When you put the car back on the ground, it is essentially put down with the tires rolled onto the outside edge. This then binds the suspension and keeps it from sitting down right. Unless you are capable of kicking the inside of the tires to force the whole contact patch to sit down level (you aren't), you will not be able to get the suspension to settle correctly. Rubber just sticks to the floor real well. If you roll the car forwards and backwards a few times though, perhaps a few meters, then the tire will naturally settle down over the entire contact patch instead of being rolled onto the outside edge, and the suspension will settle down.

If the car was not sitting high beforehand, then it shouldn't be sitting high now. New shocks will not impact this.

Bah, I was a teenage girl with a 300+HP lightweight 50 year old car... now I'm not, but mostly because I turned 20  Don't think that should be a consideration at all. Especially considering you've got 16-year-old granddaughters... one would hope that your daughter is a bit older than her teens! LOL.

That said - I have a Unisteer power rack and pinion. I love it. Before I put it in, I had a perfectly functioning 16:1 GT box which was also quite good. The biggest improvement in the Unisteer rack is the ratio. Where the stock box is 16:1 and thus is 4.5ish turns lock-to-lock, the Unisteer rack is only 2.5 turns lock-to-lock. It is extremely quick which means it's real easy to whip out of a bad situation if you're calm and collected about it, but it's also real easy to oversteer if you aren't thinking. It's not twitchy in any way at all, just very precise.

The turn radius is marginally increased, but it isn't bad because this rack replicates the original steering geometry quite closely. No bumpsteer, no weird behavior. Not terribly difficult to install though you may need to grind on the brackets some and you'll probably need to make your own lines. I'm fixing to put a cooler inline on my lines as the pump tends to get hot under a lot of stress and then it groans very annoyingly.

I've got 40,000 miles on the rack since install a few years back and it still drives exactly like it did on Day 1. I did recently destroy most of the seals in it though so it is going back to Unisteer for warranty work because I don't like it leaking. Not sure what killed it, it just leaks, so not a huge deal.

As far as other racks and power steering systems go, I have heard nothing but good things about the TCP rack. The Randalls rack and Steeroids rack have mixed reviews. The Borgeson system mostly has people happy, but those who have had bad experiences have really had bad experiences. I've heard nothing bad whatsoever about any of

Well shoot, you were in Austin and didn't even come say hello?! How rude!

 

I can't make it to the Bash, having used up all of my vacation for the year and then some, but I know the "bash thrash" feeling! Seems like every year I come back from a huge trip and there's a laundry list of little stuff that needs to be messed with. And then I leave it alone and don't mess with it until 2 weeks before I leave for the next big trip... and then I run around with my hair on fire trying to get everything done. 

This year, it was rear brakes, rear axle bearings, springs, stuck thermostat, a gauge, debris in the gas tank, valve stem seals, and a rocker stud. Got everything done except for the stuck thermostat, and that made it as far as California with no problems LOL. Of course, when I was on the road I ended up having to replace the starter and the flywheel ring gear, which was interesting. And the throwout bearing and thermostat happened "while I'm at it". Just how it goes...

Yep, the front seats are exactly the same.

Furthermore, the front seats from any year Mustang will actually fit in a vintage Mustang with minimal effort because they all have the same track width. I have '93 Fox seats in mine - all I had to do was drill two holes and swap the vintage seat tracks over onto the newer seats and bolt them in. Soooo comfortable!

A bit late here, but - if you have the rubber boot that goes over the clutch fork where it sticks into the bell, that boot will actually help hold it in place. The little "cheesy spring" you were talking about - is that this?
[img]http://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTYwMFgxNjAw/z/L4gAAOSw65FXvOUQ/$_1.JPG[/img]

If so, that's just an anti-rattle spring - it doesn't actually hold the clutch fork in place. Of course, you could be talking about something else since you've got a T5, who knows.

Glad that you found your issue in the throwout bearing. I was also going to suggest that you check the end of your lower clutch rod where it pushes on the clutch fork. A few months back I was wondering why my clutch had gotten so out of adjustment (had to push the pedal almost all the way down to get the clutch to disengage) and found that the pointy end of the lower clutch pushrod was pushing THROUGH the clutch fork. The locating hole in the clutch fork had just gotten hogged out enough over the years to let the pushrod start pushing through it.

I've stayed in Lake Charles before while on the southern route and it was inexpensive and quiet, if that's any use. I want to say that I've stayed in Lafayette as well... but I can't remember when or why!