Dumb gear question

You jut buy the gears along with a few other small items needed for the install. I know some poeple have done it themselves but it does require some special tools and if you dont get them set up right they will be noisy and wont last long. Ask other poeple in your town who did theirs and if they did a good job. Any mechanic can install them but not all will do it correctly.

A trip to the junkyard and $150-$300 for a 87-88 T-bird Turbo Coupe rear end will get gears AND rear disk brakes. That's less than the cost of the labor to install the gears by a quailified mechanic that knows what he is doing.

Auto trans Turbo Coupes come with 3.73 gears and manual Turbo Coupes come with 3.55 gears. I choose 3.55 since I do more highway driving.

It takes 2 guys the first day to get the old rear end out and the new one bolted in place. It takes 1 guy another whole day to do the brakes.

You will need a several sets of fittings, I recommend that you get them from Matt90GT's website, http://www.svo73mm.cjb.net/. Read Matt's instructions thoroughly, everything you need to know about the brakes is all there. You need to be patient and follow all the internal links, and there are many of them. You will need 2 fittings in the rear to adapt your old brake tubing to the TC disk brakes. The fittings go between the steel tube and the caliper brake hose. You will need another set of fittings to make a 2 port to 3 port adapter. To make life simpler, just buy the kits from Matt. You could piece them together, but it's not worth the time unless you work at an auto parts store with all the fittings ever made.

You will need to drill the quad shock mounting holes 2” below the holes drilled for the Turbo Coupe mounting points. The bolts are metric, so don’t loose them or the nuts. A 15/32” drill should be about the right size unless you have access to metric sized drill bits. Going without quad shocks is not an option unless you have aftermarket parts to soak up the wheel hop.

You will need a proportioning valve, Summit has one for $40 + shipping.
You will need a kit (FMS makes the part) to gut the stock proportioning valve, Summit also has that, about $10.

You will need a new master cylinder, see Matt's site and make you choice. I used a 94-95 Mustang master cylinder. Note that rebuilt 94-95 Mustang master cylinders do not come with a reservoir. That means a trip to the junkyard and some more money spent.
Your brake pedal may be very hard and almost impossible to lock up the brakes. I had to replace the front calipers with 73 mm calipers from a 91 Lincoln Mark 8 to get the braking performance up to par.

Bleeding the brakes will require 2 people and some coordinated effort. I don’t recommend using you wife or girlfriend to pump the pedal – they get offended when you yell at them. I used a homemade power brake bleeder constructed from a garden sprayer and some fittings from Home Depot. It cost about $25 and was worth every penny.
See http://www.mustangcentral.net/tech/brake.html for help with the emergency brake - the stock setup tends to lock up and not release properly.

All in all I have been very pleased with the results.

Wow, I'd love to see a picture tutorial on "someones" website documenting a swap like that, hehe...

I saw a good one about a power door lock actuator swap...

I've done the T-Bird swap a couple of times. I'd recommend just buying the gears and having them installed. The T-Bird settup is too much of a pain and it takes a lot of work to get it to work right. Also, the T-Bird set up is 3/4 of an inch wider on each side and from experience I can tell you that wheel/tire spacing becomes a problem sometimes. Have somebody that specializes in ring and pinion installation do it for you. It will be one of the best upgrades, if not the best, that you will ever make. Don't go too small- never fear the gear. 3.73's are a minimum. If you don't drive too much 4.10's are the way to go.