Rear end swap

[96GTstang46]

Ok, well iam new on stang net, but i wanna know what you guys think about this..
I have a 96 Gt stang, and my friend has a 98. I had 3.73's gears and he had 4.10's.. My motor is a faster rev-ing motor to begin with and we talked about it and i needed to get some upper and lower control arms. He already had some and bought new ones from Maximum Motorsports so we can do this swap. Now I have ABS and he doesnt. So the plan was to swap over ever part we could to make this work. The axles had to be swaped, as did the brake dust shield, the control arms, diff cover plates, fluid, and did this in one day. Well 7 hours to be more like it. With a half hour lunch and 2 15min breaks. Now iam not a ford tech and niether is he. He does body work for a living, and iam a Maintenance tech at a college.... Never done a rear end swap either.. It was the 1st time either one has done anything like this.. Now a local shop said they could do this in 3 hours.. or less.. Now tell me if that sounds at all possible...
We had 2 jack the cars up
Wheels off
Rear brakes off
Disconect Ebrake lines
drop sway bar
control arm bolts
pull both rear ends
swap over diff cover and axles
put everything back together... On 2 cars mind you...
Let me know what you think.. thanks lol

 

[stangman]

i wasn't aware that 96-98 cars cam without ABS. but regardless it would have been alot easier to just swap out the whole rear section as opposed to all the parts

 

[BennyBlown2v]

I just dropped a solid axle from my car in 35 minutes (Saturday afternoon)...so yeah 3hrs is more than reasonable quote from a shop. :SNSign:

 

[96GTstang46]

Well we had both rear ends dropped in 45min. But it was swaping over the parts... the reason for swapping the parts was for the gears. I wanted to 4.10's and he wanted the 3.73's. Other wise yea it would be so much faster. Plus we had to welding on the upper control arms due to hard driving tearing the holes bigger than stock. So we welded a washer to fix the slop...

 

[Turbo92PGT]

My 98 does not have ABS. I went from 410's to 373's. Never make that change. 4.10's all the way lol. I'm going to be running some good amounts of power and nitrous here in the future so I think the 373's are going to be better for that.

It could have gone faster having new control arms for both cars. Because the exhaust has to be dropped from both cars, then unbolt the lower control arms from my car, and goto NC24's and install my lowers. Then go back to my car and finish my control arm install. After I fixed my old upper control arms.

All in all I would say it went really well.

Had to pull both sets of axles and swap them over, plus swap over all the necessary ABS bracketry and everything.