I like it. Something different.

Living in a sea of Wilwood RED it's nice to see others take a different approach.

Great looking work on the other items as well.

 

Ok, now on to where to mount the pedal cluster in a solid fashion.

As I mentioned earlier, I was lowering my (bucket) seats as part of my ergonomics update. As the body moves down, the legs tend to push out, leading to the need for more legroom. This is a precious commodity in an old truck. I determined some sheet metal surgery was in order. Here is the floor board before:


And here it as after I cut out the required material to allow the brake and throttle pedals to move forward:



At this point I could start to look more seriously into how to mount the brake pedal cluster. And I decided to mount it to the frame. Here it is clamped in place as a mock-up:





The challenge was, with the brake cluster mounted solidly to the frame, but inside the cab, how to accommodate the inevitable relative movement between the cluster and the cab with the master cylinders mounted outside the firewall?

This is where I got cute. Probably a little too cute. It worked out ok, but the next time I would probably do it a little differently. I decided to built a sheet metal 'box' around the pedal cluster, and have the four mounting bolts to the frame and the four bolts attaching the master cylinders protrude through the box via metal spacers inside rubber grommets. That way everything is still solidly mounted, but the sheet metal box (welded to the cab) can move around a bit. Here are some pics of the box and the grommets and spacers:









Here is the bracket I welded to the frame for the pedal cluster to bolt to:



And here is the pedal box with pedal cluster bolted to the bracket:



Now all that was left was to "fill in the blanks" with additional sheet metal:



The 'pocket' on the right side is for the (floor hinged) throttle pedal (which I built from scratch).

At the end of the day the limiting factor in how far everything could be pushed forward is the corner of the valve cover. You can see the small blister I welded on previously to make room for said valve cover. The top of the throttle pedal just contacts this blister at WOT. There is no more water to be squeezed from that rock.

 

Before this mod phase my caster was running around 2 degrees. This explained why I could never drive with one hand down the highway and always had to have two hands on the wheel. I do usually use two hands, but still, the truck just would not track true enough to be comfortable.

So now it has 11 degrees of caster. From the little I've driven it, self centering is much, much better. In fact, though it sounds like a ton of caster, it actually drives quite normally. It follows the crown in the road a bit, which is expected, but not excessively.

I run a KRC power steering pump and a Mustang rack. The KRC pumps allow one to change out a fitting (restrictor) which varies the amount of assist. I believe there are around 10 choices or so. With the previous setup I had finally gotten to the point where I used the fitting yielding the least steering assist. Even then the steering was still very light.

With the added caster I speculated I'd need more assist, so I swapped out to a middle of the road'ish assist fitting. I also added a power steering fluid cooler, figuring that would help keep temps down. I am not personally a fan of placing auxiliary coolers in front of the radiator. That just reduces radiator efficiency, and mine is already on the small side. Plus a truck has lots of other places to put coolers.

I decided to mount my Earl's cooler behind the front gravel pan, behind the bumper. Here are some pics of the installation:

 

Is there a cover going on the back of that cooler to protect it against flying stones?

 

Yes, I am cooking up a solution for that now.

 

Good to see you over here. I've been following your build over on pro-touring for awhile

 

Well, you will have seen a lot of these pics before then

 

At one point a previous builder installed some type of lightweight starter to the engine. It was a permanent magnet type, and was not wired correctly with the Ford starter relay. So it did that 'thing' where once the engine fires and starts to drive the starter pinion, the pinion won't retract right away. I did not realize any of this at the time, other than the engine made weird not-so-good sounds when started. But it seemed to work ok.

I did figure it out eventually, though not before chipping a tooth off the ring gear. I replaced that starter with a Powermaster unit, which worked a lot better, but had limited rotation available, so that it was close to the header. Every once in a while I'd have to toggle the start switch a few times to get it moving. I suspected that might be due to heat, not totally positive about that though.

I have heard a lot of good things about Robb Mc starters, so I thought I might try one of those. It is smaller and has unlimited rotation potential, so I was able to the solenoid well away from the header. A couple of pics of the starter:



I also installed studs into the bell housing so that the starter would not have a threaded fastener passing though it, but an unthreaded portion of stud. A little thing I know, but little things add up.



Since the pics were taken I've installed a plate between the engine and trans which helps positively locate the starter, instead of relying on bolts or studs to center it. The previous builder did not install one. I'm not sure if they are absolutely necessary but it seemed like a good idea to me.

 

Since the new suspension pushed the front wheels forward by 1 inch, I had to move the rack forward also. Otherwise the Ackerman would be been altered, as well as bump steer most likely, since the steering arms rotated up during the camber change.

I also wanted to rotate the steering rack about its axis to get the input shaft at a different angle. Before this change, the steering shaft was passing through the bottom portion of the engine mount, and now it would have to pass over it.

I was a little worried that the rack might not work correctly if it was not installed at the 'factory' angle (which I've never understood to be honest). But rotating it a small amount does not seem to have affected its functionality at all.

The easiest way I could come up with for moving the rack forward was to make some little 'boxes' that I could weld around the existing rack mounts on the subframe. Here is one of the original rack mounts:



And here are the little boxes I welded up:



Here are the boxes welded to the subframe:



I did hand calculations to determine the new position of the steering rack. It seems to have worked out mostly ok based on driving the truck around. But once I get everything settled out I will measure the bump steer to make sure.

 

Here is a photo of a bracket I made as part of the new upper shock mounts:



These brackets (two per side) were then welded to the existing shock mounts as such:



The upper 1/2" hole is where the shocks used to attach. Now this remains only as a mounting point for the shock mount cross brace which extends over the front of the engine to the opposite side. The small tubes at the bottom of the brackets are for the poly-urethane bushings, which isolate the shock/spring combo from the chassis. The final setup is best shown in this pic which I posted earlier:



There is a 5/8" diameter airframe bolt which mounts the shock through steel sleeves inside the poly bushings. There are also two steel spacers to make up the distance from bracket to bracket. This spacing was necessary as I wanted the shocks mounted upside down, so the fat part of the shock is at the top. And it needs to be able to move around as the suspension compresses and extends.

The next photo shows the reworked sway bar drop link:



The previous builder mounted the sway bar (anti-roll bar) at the same height as the lower control arms. Bad idea. It makes it very difficult to make the drop links long enough to avoid large angularity changes through suspension movement. I added drop link mounting tabs to the lower control arms which droop down below the control arm. This made things a little better in terms of drop link length. Ideally the sway bar should be mounted at the same height as the top of the drop links, something I will correct in the future. Here is another picture of this area:



Here is a photo of a front wheel and tire mounted to the suspension from when I was checking for interference when the wheels are turned:



If you look at the cab you can see I'll have some front lower corner rust repairs in my future. Joy!

 

Nice work. Do you have a link to a different build thread? I was looking at how you mounted your radiator and was wondering if you had a better pic or details on that. I'm still a ways out from radiator mounting, but I'm thinking about something similar.

 

I'm loving this thread and the other race car inspired build. Keep the posts coming.

Did you consider triangulating your front bar? As you have it now it could rotate about the bolt axis at the ends. If you add a simple triangulated link to each side it would totally prevent the rotation about the bolt. I'm not sure how much difference it would make but it wouldn't hurt.

 

Would have to read the AX rules for the intended class, triangulated strut bars are not allowed in many classes. Might have been better to have it solidly bolt to a bracket on that hoop instead of a single bolt mounting.

 

Impressive build. I haven't seen anyone put this level of effort into making one of these handle at a high level before. Good luck and I'll be following along.

 

The radiator was installed by a previous builder. And he had to work with what was left over by the previous owner, who had installed a 460 big block, along with the radiator from some type of Lincoln sedan.

I dug through my archives and found some pics sent to me by the builder. They should be self-explanatory I hope.