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: