Lowering my 78' F150 and Crown Vic and DOHC 4.6 w/ manual swap
 

Well owned my truck for going on 14 years now. Have done alot of work to it including swaping in a 87' Fuel injected 300 six. Now that I own my 96' dually for towing the race car around I figured it would be kind of fun to lower this one. I have already installed the DJM rear lowering kit and am in the process if doing a Crown Vic from suspension swap. At this point I have removed the twin i-beam suspension and need to start drilling out rivets to remove the front crossmember. Anyway, figured I would share a few pictures as I progress.

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EDIT....fought the old crossmember and suspension points last night. Alot of Rivet drilling/chiseling/beating/sawzalling/grinding to get everything out but got most of it. Something that seems to be an issue with our year truck that I haven't seen mentioned is that the crossmember is welded in. Still a bunch of work to go but could not resist setting the CV cross member in place. Also I have a lot more structure to fix than just boxing in the frame. Found alot of metal loss under the spring buckets.

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UPDATE 7/15
Finally got a chance to get back at it.
Man these remaining parts of the crossmember are a PITA to get out.
Lots of grinding and creative sawzall use.
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Got a bit more done today...got the rest of the scrap metal out and started to locate the front cradle. Also had to try out some 18" rims I had lying around.
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UPDATE 7/17/2012
Not much progress tonight, just got all the bolt holes drilled and just waiting on my spacers to get cut and I can start welding. Crappy part is I am out of town now for the next 2 days :-(. Guess it will have to wait till the weekend. Hard part is going to be engine mounts. Not looking forward to that.

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Also placed order for parts to connect steering and brakes


Got the sleeves for the bolts today and will be heading back out to start welding things up a little. I am going to weld a nut to the top of my sleeves so the setup will work like the stock CV mounts.
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No more c-clamps holding it together the sleeves have been welded and it's mounted to the truck, Have to figure out the rear trailing arm mounts and abox the frame in so not even close to being done yet.
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7/21/12
Worked on the Steering linkage a bit, Ended up having to cut the rag joint flange in half to remove it from the column. turns out it is swedged on and after I cut the flange off and the swedged part of the column my 36 spline 3/4" u-joint slid right on.

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Don.t stop there! You can't leave us hanging like that!

What he ^^^ said!!!!!

C'mon. Where's the "money shot"???

This is as far as I am right now. Going out to work on removing the stock cross member this afternoon. I am dreading drilling out rivets, ugh.

Did this with my 69 but i did spring under in the rear.

Thats a beautiful truck. What size tires are those? And whats your paint code or whatever? I love the color and have been wanting to paint mine.

235/75/15's, I don't know the exact paint code it is a 99' GM color Dark Indigo Metallic.

A quick Search on google came up with this.....Indigo Metallic Clearcoat 39/WA9792

wow...those are the same as mine. Look so much better on yours though. Must be the lowered factor. Everything looks proportionally perfect in the rear. Cant wait to see the front.

Thanks so much for the code. It truly is a beautiful color.

Added pictures from last nights progress

its really that easy? Cant wait to see what you do with the motor mounts.

subscribing

Looks good, I am around the same point with mine. Keep up the good work and the pics.

Just added 2 pics, nothing special, working on getting the welded parts of the crossmember out and it sucks, haha. I drilled a large hole in the frame to get rid of some rotted metal and will fill that later.

I saw a magazine article about a plasma cutter with a "chisel" tip attachment that would be perfect for that. now if only we could all afford plasma cutters.