DRIVELINE, SUSPENSION, CHASSIS, AND GENERAL HISTORY

Everyone is always interested in suspension modifications, so I ought to make a page for it, even though I really haven't done that much in this department.

~1998: The first chassis change I made was having different shock absorbers installed. The ride was satisfactorily soft when I bought the car (thoroughly justifying the "Ride Engineered" badge on the dash), but I've never seen another car bounce quite so wildly all over the place. A guy I worked with had been talking about the favorable characteristics of Monroe's SensaTrac shocks, so I asked a nearby Goodyear dealer to install a set. They weren't perfect, and certainly weren't as tremendous an improvement as I had hoped, but they made things a good deal more predictable.

~1999: The two-hour highway ride to and from college did a good job of pointing out the car's evil tendency to squirrel all over the place in a crosswind. Wouldn't you know, the thing had no rear swaybar at all. Oddly, my '79 Squire doesn't blow around in the breeze nearly as bad as this Mercury did. Anyway, it seemed that there was only one thing for it, so I coughed up the $139 for a 1" G-Max rear swaybar from Performance Suspension Technologies at www.p-s-t.com.

~2000: During this time, I painted many silly things on the car. The wheels got several coats of different inappropriate silver spray paints, which while none looked as good as I'd have liked, at least allowed me to leave off the factory full wheel covers without looking too stupid. I like the car's original wheel covers, but I hate chasing them through fields and finding them squished in parking lots when they involuntarily let loose while the car is in motion.

2001: After about four years of reliable service (though laterally squishy and unsatisfactory in deep snow), I finally had an excuse to replace the 205/70/15 BFG Touring T/A SR4s that came with the car - they were nearly bald. I'd heard good things about BFG's ubiquitous Radial T/A, so I did a few quick calculations, concluded that a 255/60/15 was approximately the same height as the car's original-equipment 205/75/15, and ordered a set. The fun part is that the car was nearly impounded by crane and flatbed when I was called out of town while the tires were being installed and a certain parental unit refused to install the rear wheels and put the back of the car safely down on the ground. The installer complained that the tires were too wide for the 15x6.5 rims, but there wasn't anything to be done about it at the time, so I insisted. I also cleaned down the wheels the best I could without a blast cabinet and applied a few coats of catalyzed argent silver, hoping it would be more durable than previous attempts. In retrospect, I should have just used a proper rattlecan wheel paint. Oh, well. Also, during this time I pulled apart the front suspension, cleaned and painted components and installed all new balljoints, and cut a half-coil off the front springs. Made for a fairly pleasant look and somewhat improved handling, though it was interesting explaining to a local tire dealer why I thought my car needed an alignment.

2002-2004: After a while longer driving on the OE wheels, I finally admitted that they really were bent out of true (can't imagine how that happened - even the spare was bent!) and ordered up a set of four 15x8 US Wheel 75 Series chrome wagonspokes. These were about $20 cheaper apiece than similar offerings from Cragar, and I couldn't find the 4.5" backspacing, so I went with 3.75" backspacing. These wheels did wonders for the car's handling, of course, and they looked pretty decent for several years (until they started to rust badly around the rim - perhaps you get what you pay for in a steel wheel). Not much else was done with the suspension until '04, when I put on a pair of Monroe MaxAir shocks with the view of increasing load capacity and reducing the car's tendency to scrape when loaded down.

It was also during this time that I got a new transmission. Embarrassingly, I managed to damage the old one while installing a new B&M Tork Master 2000 converter, so it ended up costing about $1000 to get a new rebuilt unit installed. I never found out what converter they used until the engine came back out (it was a stock reman - I have no idea what they did with my brand-new B&M unit). The good news is that this tranny came from a local shop that's known for doing extremely good work, and it shifts crisply and seems suited for at least 100,000 miles of fairly trouble-free service.

2004-2006: Regrettably, the car ended up parked in late '04 due to the fact that it quit running a couple months after the engine rebuild. Seems the stock EFI system had gone kaput, and I didn't really have the resources to resurrect it, and so I started making plans for either a mass-airflow or carbureted conversion. I had also been involved in a minor collision in July '04 due to the fact that the Radial T/As were now dangerously low on tread and I couldn't really afford to replace them. Annoyingly, my prospective father-in-law (a pretty decent fellow, mind) had found it necessary to point out this fact not two hours before the crash. The raw repair parts, consisting of one fender, one bumper, and one header panel, came to about $300, but I was silly and had taken the engine out of the car before purchasing the body parts, and so I was left with little choice but to rent a big, stupid 14' U-Haul truck for the purpose. Suffice it to say that the good ol' boys at the wrecking yard thought I was nuts. It wasn't until Feb. '05 that I finally spent another $300 to purchase the hunk of rust found elsewhere in these pages, which could have been used to fetch parts if I'd bought it sooner, and only been out about $200 compared to the cost of renting the truck. I hate renting stuff. Anyway, to get back to suspension, I spent some time in '05 working for a Mustang restorer, and a client of his bought an interesting '70 Mach 1 that had been treated to wide fiberglassed-in fender flares - and corresponding wide rims - sometime in the mid or late '70s. I eventually purchased these wheels for $175 under the condition that I also take the nearly-new 245/50/15 and 265/50/15 Euro T/As that were on them. After having a set of 255/60 and 275/60 Yoko Avid S/Ts installed, the Euro T/As are now stacked in my basement. I haven't measured the wheels, but I think the fronts are 15x8.5 or 15x9, and the rears between 15x10 and 15x11. Interestingly, as mentioned on my first page, I initially thought these wheels were by American Racing due to the presence of a set of ARE centercaps, but Blaze86Vic has a seemingly identical set in size 15x8.5 that he says are by someone called Western. Next time I get a chance, I'm going to look for the markings he said would be there.

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Page 1: Intro
Page 2: Engine Details
Page 3: Suspension and General History
Page 4: What is a 5.0 HO?