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: