new alternator bracket

I went to slide the frame back in that holds the headlights and hood on.  It hit the alternator.  I could have ground the frame down, but I didn't want to give up the strength and stiffness, and the alternator location also had a strike against it since its braked was against the hood insulation.  I decided to move it.  This let me go back to the short belt:

I laid out the hole locations using a transfer punch onto a notecard.

Then in steel:

Tabs for the alternator.  I wanted to make sure that the alternator was mounted really square so that the pulley and belt aren't fighting each other.  I tacked the tabs together so I could drill and grind them identical then cut the tacks off:

The original design used this insert so the tabs don't get bent into the alternator.  Since my tabs are really short and thick, I retained it:

Corner weld turned out nice:

I still prefer to mig nuts onto things.  I tape whatever thread sticks through during welding to avoid spatter making the bolt unremovable.

I did a quick FEA because I am worried about vibration.  The alternator is heavy and cantilevered, which will tend towards a low natural frequncy.  The belt will exert a high force on the bracket which will also drive the frequencies down.  Both the 1/rev of the engine, and the 1/rev of the alternator will be strong forcing functions, so consequently I wanted to take a look. I added the gussets you see which drove the first frequency up 50% to get away from the 1/rev for the engine. 1/ rev of the alternator will be hard to avoid.  The first mode is basically torsion of the post even though it is .095 wall. You can see I added a tab to share a bolt from the water pump.  This did surprisingly little to the first mode, but just seemed like a good move anyway.

exhaust over the axle part 1

So I have to make the exhaust go over the axle with enough clearance to allow the axle to go full bump with out hitting.  Also, the exhaust can't hit the floor, the upper control arm, the shocks, the shock cross bar, or the lower control arm bracket.  The mufflers can't be too low or at a weird pitch or yaw.

It is super close to all that stuff and it sounds hard, but the mustang exhaust was surprisingly close.  With a little cut, weld, repeat, I think I have good clearance on everything:

Drivers side looking right:

Aft looking forward through the hole in the trunk:

Couple intermediate steps:

I learned a couple tricks.  Even with mig where you have a free hand it is hard to hold the pipe really concentric and tack it. So I sacrificed a harbor freight tool to make a jig:

This works really well.  Some may say I destroyed a tool.  I prefer to think of it as giving the tool the chance to be "really useful." By the way, what kind of new world order lesson baloney is Thomas The Train aiming at with all the trains trying to be "really useful" and please Sir Topham Hatt constantly?  As though my kids should aspire to be kill themselves to be some fat cat's expendable tool for the chance at some restrained praise.

Another trick that I had forgotten is related to tack welding.  If you are tacking something so that it won't move around while you weld it out, by all means set your machine for your thickness and burn its brains out (bottom image below). If you are tacking something to check fit and there is a moderate chance you will need to separate the pieces again, set the machine for less voltage that you need.  For my 16 ga tubes I set the machine voltage as I would for thinner 18 ga, and tack for about 1/2 sec instead of 2 sec (top image below).  This way you don't have to destroy your work piece when you grind the tack off to separate the parts again.

brakes finished... for now

I finished the brake line I had to move for the emergency brake routing (will add a few adel clamps later):

I had to cut off the brake line on the car and flare it on the car.  My flare tool mounts in a vice so I had to hold it with a pipe wrench  while rolling around under the car. Of course I forgot to put a tube nut on, so I got to immediately cut off the flare and do it all again.

After finishing the brakes I decided to start laying out the exhaust.  I saw that the only reasonable place for it to run is right next to the tunnel where the floor pan is a little higher... so I get to move my brake lines again.  I thought I did the lines late enough in the build, but lesson learned is that they should be pretty much dead last.  I at least had the insight to not fill and bleed the lines.

I was kind of lamenting using the mustang as a build donor since I feel like all the items I used could have been gotten much cheaper individually, especially since I still have to buy a fuel system.  The mustang exhaust is actually very close to fitting with some small modifications, so that is a huge time and money savings.

I considered side pipes for simplicity, although it would ruin the sleeper look I am going for.  They would also be bad for ground clearance.  I wanted to start by seeing whether over the axle is possible.

In the image above you can see the exhaust behind the fender well.  It looks like it clears everything by an inch or more.  You can see that is comes down lower than I want to meet up with the muffler (on the left), but it should be easy to shorten.  The tail pipe is about 18 inches past the end of the car and angled the wrong way which I will have to fix.

I used up my two jack stands right away, so I hauled out the bed frame that I trash picked to shim things to the right height for layout:

semi-svelte accessory belt

I wanted to work out accessories mounting and the belt.  The factory mustang had a smog pump under the alternator and may or may not have air conditioning which affects belt length and routing.  The previous owner removed the smog pump and had the belt routed in a weird way that only contacted the crank shaft pulley for less than 90°.  I didn't feel good about that routing so I decided to try the original factory positions for everything.  Supposedly the 73" belt should work... but it doesn't reach at all.  So I am using the 82" belt from the focus.  I had to tilt the the alternator out a bit to pick up the slack.  So I made a bracket (you can see it at the top)

 You can see that this routing is no good since the tensioner makes the belt contact itself.  No matter how tight I make my bracket, I can't stop this contact.  So I moved the tensioner back to the custom location the previous owner used.  This puts the non grooved tensioner pulley on the grooved side of the belt:

If you look closely you can see the idle pulley on the tensioner is different in the lower picture.  I used the pulley from the focus tensioner.  It fit, but because the bolt was smaller, I had to drill out the retaining washer. 

Also, found out that the pulley bolt on the 302 is reverse thread.  I hope that doesn't mean it will spin off now that I flipped sides of the belt.  I suspect the reverse thread was only so that when you wind the tensioner open with the breaker bar you don't loosen the bolt.

Here is a close up of the alternator bracket I had to make:

parking brake complete

 Below is the worms eye view of the layout for the parking brake cable change I am making.  Left is the focus setup.  Right is the mustang setup.  The main difference is where the cable sheath goes (shown in green).  On the focus it starts from a bracket near the parking brake lever, and it ends at some point near the drum housing.

worms eye view.  Blue is the cable.  Green is the cable sheath.  Red is the cable bit attached to the handbrake.  Left diagram: Focus cable layout. Right diagram: mustang cable layout.

There were 3 problems with the focus cable:

1) The spring on the cable that retracts the parking brake shoe was too short.

2) The clip that holds the cable into the drum housing was flimsy brittle plastic, and the hole was slightly bigger on the drum which put more stress on this plastic.

3) Since the sheath ends before the drum, I would have had to weld up some large bracket to the control arm to receive it

The image on the right shows the mustang cable.  Here the cable goes all the way into the drum housing, so it instantly solves 1,2, and 3.  However, some fab was needed to put the mustang pulleys, and a new sheath termination bracket.

First I had to cut off the old focus parking brake bracket.  This is exactly what the plasma cutter is for:

When I started laying this out, I found that one mustang cable was frozen into the housing, and I couldn't get it to free up so I had to get another from summit before I could continue.  Below is the final routing tacked in. 

Here is the rest of the cable routing to the brake drum housing.  I zip tied the housing to the control arm at least for now to make sure it stays off the tire.

rear brakes

The rear brake lines from my old focus were so rotten that they came apart in my hand.  I bent up some new ones.  My bend tool makes the same diameter that ford uses.  I figured out that if I put in the old line I can mark where the bend begins, then transfer the mark.  

Drivers side brake line and hose:

 Passenger side brake and hose:

I am happy with how that all turned out.  I think it looks more or less factory.

I thought about transferring the spring on the parking brake cable to the focus cables.  But it just seemed like the wrong move.  I was worried that the focus cable wouldn't stay clipped into the drum (it is slightly smaller diameter than the mustang cable.  I was going to have to weld some large weird brackets to the control arms to hold the cable sheath ends, and that would still point the cables at a weird angle.

I layed out the mustang cable and figured out that it is the right length.  So I signed up for some fabricating.  More on that soon.

rear brake hoses and preliminary ebrake

I got an extra set of Focus front brake hoses and used them to finish the rear brake hose connections:

After I welded on the tabs I sprayed them with galvanizing compound.

I want to have a functioning e brake whether inspection requires it or not.  I saved the ebrake cable from the mustang and some pulleys that went with it.  I was really hoping that the focus ebrake cable would work since it is unlikely that I would be able to lay out the mustang cable without significant fabrication and/or luck.

It does look like it the focus brake will work:

Although the Focus end is smaller, it does fit into the ebrake arm in the mustang drum.  The spring is shorter which may cause trouble since the spring is what retracts the brake shoes when you release the brake. I may try to put the mustang spring on this cable, or make a collar or something.  I also need to make a mount to hold the end of the cable sheath.