Ignition switch mod

As unsophisticated the mustangs were in 1999, they still had a few very interesting electronics on board. One of them is the Passive Anti Theft System (PATS). What that means is the car need to be started with a special key that has a chip inside. This days it's almost a standard for every car to have this feature. In 99, and I am sure Ford introduced it even earlier in some other cars, it was an innovation. The system is not very complicated and does not really have that many parts. The on-board computer ECU has at most 3 keys programmed. The key has a special chip inside. The last link in the chain is the ignition switch closing the circuit. The plan is simple you take the right key, stick that into the ignition switch that reads the chip, the ECU matches the code of the chip in the key to that stored in memory. If everything matches the car fires up!

Most of the time the builders of the custom cars can't be bothered with all this complexity. However, I have it already from my donor car so why throw it away? The donor ignition switch and lock cylinder are actually fairly far apart. There's a linkage that translates the turning action of the key into a sliding action on the switch. This parts are all made to fit on the mustang but would not fit behind cobra's dash. Let's make them fit!

This is how the housing looks like for the lock cylinder.

I have marked the blue line to cut off the excess of the material.

After some grinder action

Here you can see how I reused the linkage to connect to the ignition switch. The angle bracket here is temporarily. It's holding the parts together for now. Once I get closer to the dash mounting I will fabricate a real bracket that mounts to the frame behind the dash.