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.

rear brakes layout

Solid axle cars I have seen use hard lines on the axle with a single hose attaching in the middle.  My axle was set up this way, but the hard lines in the car had a hose at each wheel.  I decided to go with a hose directly to each wheel.  In retrospect it may have been simpler to tee the hard lines in the car together then connected them to the axle at the single point.

Ford has a clever way of doing brake hoses where the hose indexed into its mount with a small tab so it won't rotate:

I was hoping to preserve both this feature and preserve the mounting point for the hose to avoid the extra work I had to do for the front brakes.  I need brake hoses long enough that when I jack up the car I don't hang the axle from the hoses, but not so long that they have enough free movement to touch the tire.
Dorman's website allows me to search hoses by many different criteria.  I don't think three are any hoses with the Ford end that are female - female and long enough to reach.  The front of the car uses a long enough hose that is female - male.  To see if I could make the front hose work I tapped a piece of 11 gage sheet as a braket and there is enough room to thread the hose into it, then thread on a union. It looks about perfect:

The piece in the image and shown below is a bit of hard line I made to connect to the drum brake.  The left end is double flare and connects to the drum brake.  They right end is bubble flare and mates with the hose/union.

driveshaft weld up

It is nice if I think I lathed the end straight, and also nice that I think I cut the shaft tube straight, but I decided driveshaft runout is probably the only thing that counts, so I decided to check it before I tacked it up, and I am glad I did.  There was about.080 TIM.  I looked online and it seems like people think somewhere from .005 to .020 is ok.  People report stuff like .060 being good to 80 mph, sometimes. The transmission end of the shaft measured at .020 so I made that my target.

I marked what was high and low, pulled the shaft out and tried to beat the cap straighter.  Put it back in, and checked it.  After repeating this process 3 or 4 times I was below .020 so I tacked it:

 I made this rig so I could in theory roll the tube while I welded.

It was easy enough to start and stop on the tacks so I didn't need to roll it.  I dipped the tungsten 0 times which was nice.  I could have slid along at like 85 amps and made this beautiful, but the bevel was pretty tight, so I had to really watch to make sure the puddle was wetting all the way to the bottom before jamming rod in.  Consequently I had to bake this a little bit especially with the heavy casting on the other side.  I went at like 110 amps and even that was probably a bit low as I was floored and waiting most of the time.  But it looks pretty good I think: