Continuing the project...

Once I had the bar stretched a bit on taking permanent set I marked the mounting holes in the control arms.

I drilled out holes top and bottom for this through pipe. I then slid the pipe through the arm and welded the ends. The 9/16" bolt now tries to crush the pipe (which it can't) rather than distort the arm.

Powder coated with new good bushings installed (Harris).

I had to notch out the brackets on the axle for the sway bar to clear them.

Painted and installed.

One note, you have to get those bolts ape tight. I still do not have the coil springs installed and I used the trans jack under one tyre and jacked up the axle on one side. Well the bars job is to lift the other side. There is tremendous amounts of torque on that sway bar and it will slip on the oblong holes in the sway bar if not cranked down.

Installed the dreaded the coil springs. On the old Fords we have if you undo the shock and let the axle hang in suspension bind, it's enough to simply reach in and pull out or install the rear coil springs. Not so on this one. Even with the axle hanging down past shock stop there is still about 4 inches of coil spring that needs to be compressed. Even the rear coil springs on this are really long and very stiff because it's so darn heavy. I fought for over an hour to get these in alone.

For the first time since I started this hideous project the old girl is sitting naturally on her new axle and rear suspension.

This pretty much concludes the rear axle installation. There are some tid bits left to do like make a proper vent hose, install the height sensor, rebuild the brake booster and powder coat, make the brake lines from the master to the combination valve, make a new intermediate parking brake cable to adapt the '73 front cable to the '96 rear cables.

Really the Ford portion of this (dealing with the 9 inch directly) is done, if anyone would like to see the rest I'd be happy to post, but it's more GM stuff at this point.

Cheers.

UPDATE - March 2019:

Had to do a final closure on this as the old girl made her maiden voyage in over 4 months. Rebuilt the booster, new master, all new stainless brake, fuel supply, fuel return and vent lines. I must say, other than a tiresome air bubble to bleed out of the brake system and the speedo 3 MPH off, it turned out really well. New speedo driven gear arriving tomorrow hopefully solves that.

The 4 wheel disc literally stops the car on a dime. I did a panic stop at 30 MPH and my eyeballs nearly exited my ventricle sockets. Not one wheel locked up and the car brutally stopped so hard the GEN and OIL lamps came on, then went out as the car settled. The older Chevy engines have their oil sump in the back so all the oil flew forward and away from the oil pump under the hard deceleration. The GEN lamp came on because all the fuel in the bowl of the carburetor also flew forward causing the mixture to go wonky for a moment causing the idle to dip way down.

Using carefully selected OEM later year rear disc brakes on this resulted in a nice balanced braking system without the need of any proportioning valves as you sometimes need with aftermarket brakes.

The car still has a luxury ride to it but much less noticeable body roll in a turn with the rear sway bar. There is no drive line vibration at any speed and the Eaton True Trac is a marvelous invention. Acts like an open diff under normal driving and locks both wheels together under harder acceleration all done silently and smoothly all with no clutches to wear. Leaves nice 11's from a floored stop and will do a brake torque till it runs out of fuel thanks to the new Richmond 3.25 gears which are dead silent.

Just to retouch on old seals in a transmission. Even with around ~20K miles on the transmission, a quarter of century of entropy did a number on the seals. The old transmission doesn't leak a drop and shifts perfectly smooth now. In fact under normal driving conditions you cannot feel the shifts at all anymore. Oddly if you floor it (hit the electric detent) it will bark them on the 1-2 shift, but even then you barely feel it. It's just perfect. Exactly how I like my automatics.

In this interim I did procure an overdrive tranny for it. A 1999 4L80E out of a 3500 (1 ton pickup) 2wd with a 454. Perfect, will bolt right up to the Caprices old Mark IV 454. I have all summer to rebuild it and customize it with a wide ratio kit.

All in all I am very happy, even though countless hours and into the wee hours of many a morning were spent on planning, research, maths and fabrication.

I know this isn't a Ford, but hopefully someone will find some inspiration in this because if I can do it (I'm a bloody EE afterall) anyone can do it.

Now back to work on the 1966 Ford LTD.

Cheers

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