This is somewhat special delivery for many many reasons. Let's start with saying that I have ordered it about 3-4 months ago. I have no clue why it takes so long to ship a box of parts. It came from Whitby Motorsports. The people there were pleasant but it took forever to complete the order. They are the only vendor that works with Factory Five to supply all parts for Canadian customers. I really had no choice this time but I hope there will not be a second order.
Oh, the second reason is quite simple: it's coilovers! These shocks and springs have been tuned by Koni on their testing track, on Factory Five Roadster for Factory Five Roadster. My expectations of ride quality are high.
Obviously I would not waste time. A short while later:
And I noticed that the snap rings that retain the spring seats are not in the box. :( This brings me back to my endless communications with Whitby. However, it was less painful this time. They had the rings in stock and mailed them over acceptably quick. In the mean time, I went on to assemble the coilovers and proceeded with the installation.
I had a lot of the front suspension done but was missing the control arms. The arrival of coilovers took away all the guessing about required modifications to the stock mustang arms. Yes, I am using the stock ugly arms. It's part of my plan build now, upgrade later.
Nothing special really but clean.
And now painted and shiny.
The installations of the control arms is trivial: stick them in and tighten the bolts. The only thing i really had to "modify" was to drill 2 holes per arm. The trick here is to install the rear shock mount from the live axle into the spring seat recess in the control arm. I straightened out the small piece of metal that is intended to keep the mount from rotating around the single mounting bolt. In the original location, this piece would be going into the hole on the same plane as the mounting hole. In the new location, I had the hole drilled right in the spring seat and directly under the mount. It took a bit of some wiggling around to get the mounting bolt in the hole but it was not impossible. I should have taken a picture of the final product but I was so happy with it I forgot. Now the only piece missing from the puzzle was the spring and shock combo. After putting a small fight ...
the thing was bolted in.
Here you could actually see how the bottom is assembled. The trick here is to first bolt on the live axle mount to the shock and only then the the mount to the control arm. Otherwise, there would not be enough clearance for the bolt to pass through.
The rear was a walk in the park compared to the front. Take the parts. Add some nuts and bolts and there you have it.
When the snap rings came in, I installed them right in with out any problems. Remember to zip tie the springs to the seats. This would prevent them from becoming unseated in a highly improbable situation.
With the coil overs in, I still had one regret. If you noticed, my quad shocks are out from the rear end. They did not clear the spring on the coilover. With the stock mustang setup the spring would be situated on the trailing arm just before the axle and would not interfere. Well, I'll just have to figure out how to make this work but that would be later.
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