Build Thread 1978 Mercury Cyclone. The pig is in the pen.

95BlueStallion said:

Hey, didnt you get any work done this past Saturday and Sunday?

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I did,.....just not really of any importance, and definitely NOT worth posting.

I welded up all of the torque boxes,...and stripped more of the bottom of the floor.
Lets just say that given I was welding upside down, on dirty, greasy, galvanized metal,( not the actual metal, but the joints) alot of the welding progress pics are not worthy of publication.
Unlike alot of folks that seem to have no shame when it comes to posting pics of their welding,..I'll spare you the horror.
(To help you picture it, imagine an 80 old woman,......naked)

My welder took a sh it on me,..... My HF helmet finally broke at the hinge point.
The welder needs a new liner, diffuser, and nozzle, the 50.00 helmet finally broke clean off my face,........and it was so cloudy I could barely see what was in front of me.... Primarily because both are over 10 years old.
I was wayy past time for a tune up.

Couple all of that to the above, and now you know why there is no progress pics from Sunday.

I went this morning to my fav weld stuff supplier, and bought the consumables, then went to HF and bought the exact same helmet only in red, but this time w/ a grind mode switch that wont let the lens darken. ( for even less than the last helmet)

I will say this though,.......get ready for a progress EXPLOSION!!!

hoopty5.0 said:

Haha I can guess who the shameless one is

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Not even close.


This is one of those "how can you dog it" builds.

Despite the hack job fabrication, total disregard for waste gate placement, (he also has one on his down pipe to act as an exhaust cutout.) He still manages to prove your JY cheap, while being reliable enough to drive to the track and back theory as viable.
A JY 5300 that dude shattered two stock pistons, in his quest for an street drivable 8 second ET, then replaced them w/ two additional JY pistons from a different JY engine, and using a twin scroll BW S400 SX3, ( into a common T-4 flange), a Godspeed 60mm wastegate, and uses a stock case powerglide while still going high eights in a 2850 lb RX-7.

95BlueStallion said:

Christmas, Schmistmas, are you out in the garage or what???

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I was, but really only piddled around. I put my welder back together w/ the new stuff, and moved the rear end under the car. The rear end is located, The PromaStar C/O's are assembled and set to ride height. I gotta put the tires on it before I mount the shocks to be sure I don't have any interference problems, which means I have to install the axles. I'm getting the axle bearings sometime this week. I've had the shortened axles back from Moser for months now, I just have never put them back in. (I hope they fit).

The plan for Sat will be to get the entire back half it's final fab-up, weld up the shock mounts, and mini tub completion.

hoopty5.0 said:

touche. I've seen that one. I at least have shame enough to try to make it look decent and put thought into design.

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Look, your barely what.......30? You're miles ahead of me.
**When I was your age, I was king of hack ( I cut an 8 point roll bar out of one wrecked car, and finagled it into another, with the door bars still attached) I made my own ladder bars, ( Because real ones were too expensive, and too long to fit w/o cutting the floor) Mine were shorter, and much cheaper.
I actually polished the inside of a pair of Weld drag lite because I needed a different back spacing to make it fit, so I ran it backwards, and drilled an additional valve stem hole.
It's a learning curve. If you stay at it long enough, you'll get better, or you'll pay somebody else to do it. Either way, everything you own will look better because of it.

** My "Back in my day speech"
P.S. the inner fender aprons you made were made out of what?.......24-26 ga galvanized?

95BlueStallion said:

Thats awesome. When you have it sitting on rubber after that work is done, I bet it will look like a whole new animal.

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It will. It's gonna stay up in the air for a little while still though,....I still have to paint the floor, weld in my Matrix SF connectors, and run fuel, and I/C lines and finish the engine bay detail before it becomes a roller.

More stuff:

It's funny how my "plan", and reality are so far apart. I expected to get a whole bunch of stuff done today, but after spending the entire day down there feel I have little to show for it.

The plan was to mock the rear end up using the old stock control arms, to be sure that it was properly located. Once that was done I intended to build the upper and lower shock mounts, and finish the wheel tubs after that.

Ha!

I did get the rear end located.
Starting on the driver side, I "eyeballed" where I wanted to hang the shock, and marked the frame rail. The shock needed to be moved inboard to the extent that I was gonna have to notch the frame rail.
I just happened to have some 3.5" .125 wall tubing from some other past project, and decided to cut it in half, and use it to build a tunnel in the frame.


The tunnel ended up being so deep, that it compromised the integrity of the frame rail. I used the other half of the tubing to build a backer, to restore the section I cut out.



I still plan on fabbing some additional "out riggers" made out of .125" plate, and weld them to the inner semi-circle, to add additional width to the frame rail. I'll add one in front, and one in back. When done, it should just look like a bend in the frame there.
I bought single adjustable aluminum QA-1's. The adjustment knob has 18 positions. I've used these shocks on two other cars, including the last fox mustang. This time I opted for the street shock. The only real difference is how it's bushed. The race shocks, use a heim type end, these use some sort of hard rubber to house the eye for the bolt. The shock is supposed to be installed at a "ride height" of 13.75." Locating the bottom mount in the stock location would require that I lean the shock in pretty dramatically, and I did not want to do that. Instead, I built a lower shock mount inboard of the stock location.



I built a 3/16" end cap, and welded the short piece of 1.25" .125 wall tubing to a piece of plate I welded on top of the frame rail. I added a front support that is welded to the frame rail. I know that there is now significant added stress at that mount point due to it becoming a part of the support system for the rear of the vehicle. When the tub is re-installed, I intend to add additional reinforcement after that.
After I got it all welded up, I assembled the shock, and mounted the shock.


Then I loaded the chassis (as much as you can load a completely stripped chassis)


This is all I got done. I worked on it from 9 AM till 5 PM to get to this point.

Oh,....I did manage to do one, other, thing................
View attachment 121050
hand slipped up the angle grinder while I was cutting some of the stuff today. Cut has to be 1/16 deep. Because it was a cutoff wheel, the cut actually self cauterized, and didn't bleed.

Weird.

95BlueStallion said:

Do you think the coil over is going to rub in your notched frame? It looks awfully tight in there, but maybe its just the pics. I managed to slice and dice my hands a few times today with a combination of my dremel tool and glass tiles I am using for a kitchen backsplash. Looks like neither of us have much feeling left in our hands, so no biggie.

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No, I'm not worried about contact. There is actually 3/8" clearance around the perimeter of the coil.

And yeah,..my hands are getting really bad,...that's why I'm positive this'll be the last car I build.

hoopty5.0 said:

I have to ask - why not just mount the shocks inboard of the frame rail?

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I still plan on having a full length exhaust that has to come over the axle. Additionally, the wider I keep those shocks the more stable the car will be in the corners. If this was a drag car, I would've probably thought nothing of putting them inboard of the frame,................. but then you know what I think about a drag car.

JEESUS!!!

At this rate I shoud be done w/ the car sometime in 2015.

Seems like every time I plan to get alot done anymore, my plan is so shortsighted, that I always leave the garage w/ the plan woefully "incomplete".

I decided to complete my minitubs. I have already completed one side, but wasn't all warm and fuzzy about how it came out, so I decided to do the passenger side the way it shoulda been done in the first place.

Obviously, the start point is the butchery required to get the old tub out:
Typically I use a cut off wheel, and a sawzall to do this. I start by making reference cuts along the inner wheel tub edge:


I cut the support structure free at the front and rear of the tub



Once referenced and free'd up, I whip out the sawzall and connect the dots. Eventually, the old tub is on the floor.

Now I'm gonna bounce around from right to left, because I didn't duplicate both side pics tit for tat, so don't rag me for not keeping it all lefty loosey, righty tighty.

Once free of the tub, you now have a big assed gaping hole where the old tub used to be.


I don't have to tell you that this is what all the support structure looks like before the carnage. The upper shock mount reinforcement, the upper spring perch, and the axle snubber mount.

There really isn't a lot of room to move the inner tub over where the increased width potential isn't cancelled out by the fact that the frame rails in a fox aren't straight. The rear most portion of the frame rail is significantly wider than the front, and limits the actual potential gain to about 2.5". Since I intend to use a 315 x 17 wheel, the stock tub was almost wide enough, but to be safe, and to give me the room to put the tire way up inside the tub, 2.5" is really all I was needing.

I slid the sectioned tub up in place, moved it over 1.5", and put the tire up there to check clearance:


This was all I had for inside clearance:


I was gonna need all I could get, so I wiped the frame rail clean. After about an hour of drilling out spot welds, cutting, and grinding, I had a completely clean frame rail.

After getting both sides to look like this I was ready to put the thing back together. Earlier in this thread, I made the necessary modifications to allow for coil over shocks. The upper mount bugged me. It was gonna stick too far inboard of the inner tub, so I decided to modify it.

My friends call me "Do it twice Mike", because it always seems I second guess myself. The version above was probably more than adequate to support the load, I just wanted to shorten it up, and at the same time increase the strength, and leave me the ability to finish it where it'll look decent. I came up with this goofy assed solutionb:

First it required I cut away the inboard leg of the mount.
Then I made the new reinforcement out of 3/16" bar stock, bent in a semi-circle to match the semi-circle beneath that was welded to the frame.

Whether or not this solution is any stronger than "plan A", it will allow me to cap it w/ a dome type cover that'll look a little less home made. Since the whole tub was out, there was no better time to do it. One things for sure,....there'll be no plan C version of this. This is it.
Next I moved on to prepping the tub. It was covered in undercoating, seam sealer, and glue.

And there was all of that old metal that had to be cut free:

I use a 4.5" cut off wheel to do this. I just follow the old metal seam, and cut the old mating surface clean away. After that's done, I strip the rest of the funk off of the exterior of the tub. It's best that this is done while its out, it's way easier.

Now Scott, @RacEoHolic330 chose to strip the entire underside of his tub. After just stripping the 1/2-3/4
" that ran around the perimeter of this tub, there's no way in hell I'm doing that. It's still bonded to the inside like day one, and even w/ heat, and a stiff wire wheel running at 20,000 RPM, the stuff didn't want to come off.

So I'm leaving the rest.

Next, I prepped the inner wheel lip:

This is prep that you will thank yourself for later if you do it now. It is galvanized, thin metal w/ all kinds of undercoating/seam sealer just begging to foul your welds. Do it now, you can thank me later.

This^^^
This is the underside of the tub. Just like the inner, it needs to have the undercoating stripped so it won't catch on fire when you weld in the new section. This is an enormous mess, and there is NOTHING that makes it less so. I used a stiff wire wheel mounted on an angle grinder and a mapp gas torch to heat it up. It just throws junk everywhere, be sure to use a respirator, ( You know I didn't.)
I used a 3" wide piece of 18 ga. mild steel as a spacer to move the tub in board. Since there'll never be a better opportunity to make sure it's really tightly mated to the inner lip, I welded this first. I used a combination of clamps, and vise grips to hold the thing in place, w/ clamps located about every 4". I welded it completely along the inner cut line till I got to the top of the arch, where i couldn't get my weld gun in place to weld it anymore. After making a giant mess of the top of the arch, I called it a night.

This is what I'm talking about w/ regard to prep. Up until I got to the top, the welding was going along beautifully. But after an entire day spent to get this far, I had no patience to go farther after the disaster at the top of the arch, All I can say, is good thing these things are gonna be covered in sound deadener.