Support Bracket on top of rearend housing?

It's an aftermarket adjustable upper control arm and heavy duty mounting bracket - BMR (and others) make them.

lobe50 said:

I just was looking at the suspension parts available and I see that there does seem to be only 1 upper control arm. I will have to look under there and try to understand whats different from the older setup in my 1991????

Also all the Upper arms I see available seem to have bushings at the body mount. Mine has a Hiem joint where it connects to the body?? Who makes this one??? Is the Heim joint supposed to be better than a bushing style??

Thanx so Much...

Click to expand...

The SN95 and Fox chassis had a four link rear suspension, and not a proper one at that... This particularly awful reincarnation of a four link used bind between the four arms to center the axle, meaning as the axle raised and lowered the arms would fight against each other distorting their bushings. This is such an incredibly bad suspension setup made much worse by the fact that Ford ran it for a quarter century (since the mustang II I believe).

The new mustang (S197 chassis) has a much better rear suspension, a three link with a Pan Hard Bar. The three link uses two lower control arms and one upper control arm to control the vertical and fore-aft motion of the axle, and uses the PHB to control the left-right motion of the axle. This rear suspension setup is so much better than the old suspension that it is a large part of the reason why these cars can hit 13.xx passes fresh out of the factory, as it provides not only greatly increased lateral stability but also much increased forward bite.

There are some inherit issues with our 3-link though. For one, the third link is too short for proper geometry, which is a large portion of why these cars have wheel-hop issues. The others are more minor, and general have to do with your last question about the Heim joint (I call them spherical rod ends, to each their own). A regular bushing has some deflection, this was necessary for the old 4-link to work as it used bind as a location mechanism (thus why you didn't see heim joints on foxes much). Bushings come with different durometer ratings as a level of how stiff they are and thus how much they deflect. A heim joint, since it is a metal on metal bearing, has zero deflection which eliminates unwanted suspension characteristics caused by bushing deflection (like the axle jumping sideways over expansion joints and similar). The potential down sides being increased road noise and normally a shorter lifetime.
Dan

lobe50 said:

I just was looking at the suspension parts available and I see that there does seem to be only 1 upper control arm. I will have to look under there and try to understand whats different from the older setup in my 1991????

Also all the Upper arms I see available seem to have bushings at the body mount. Mine has a Hiem joint where it connects to the body?? Who makes this one??? Is the Heim joint supposed to be better than a bushing style??

Thanx so Much...

Click to expand...

It's a 3-Link suspension set-up. We've got one upper control arm and two lower control arms. Plus we've got the panhard bar.