The 5-lug swap has begun!

Hate to burst your bubble, buy your rear end is gonna be way too wide.

The 94-98 rear ends push the wheels out 0.75" each side and the 99-04 rears are about 1 inch wider than that each side. You are gonna be gaining about 2-3" of rear track out back.

The 2000 spindles will also puch the fronts out 8mm each side, but that's tolerable. But the rear wheel track will be noticably wider than the front.

spook said:

As for the rear end being too wide, well I guess we'll just see how it looks when we get it under there. Since my current wheels each sit in the wheel well a good inch or two, I was under the impression that I had some room to work with. Thanks for the heads up. So are you saying it won't work at all, or just has the potential to look weird? Because I think the wide rear end look is muscular and pretty nice.

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Oh it will bolt up fine and physically work. Just a little heads up that it may look odd and/or you could have serious rubbing issues.

The 8.8 housing in 1999 was physically widened almost an inch on each side. Add to that the fact that SN95 disks add 0.75" to the width over a drum brake 8.8 rear.

Oh and FYI in case you didn't know, that rear would have 3.27's in it.

Cougar said:

Since it's a live axle, he should be able to run more offset wheels to compensate for that without too much of a negative effect on the geometry.

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True, but he's running '96 Cobras.

I have the same wheels and when i ran an SVO/Mark 7 rear disk setup out back, the edges of the wheel used to hit my fender lips as the wheel was pushed out pretty far. I since modified the offset so that they would be drawn inward more.

The axle will work with the right wheels. In the futue he might need to pick up some rear wheels with a deeper offset in the rear so it pulls the wheel back in somewhat.

spook said:

Well is your car stock height? And the rims still rubbed? How did you end up fixing the problem? Does it depend any on what tires I plan on using? You're kind of scaring me here.

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Didn't mean to scare you, just trying to give you a heads up.

My car is lowered with FMS C springs with uncut rears so it rides only about 1" lower than stock out back.

When i ran the stock SVO offset brakes, the edge of the tire was even with the edge of the fenderlip. That's 1.25" wider offset that stock fox. The 99+ rears are almost 1" wider than that.

What i did was use ranger axles and modified the offset to pull them back in to stock offset.

But you can't do that on the 99+ axles because Ford made the axles itself bigger on each end. The brake hardware on the ends is the same as 94-98. One way to fix it is to get an 8.8 from an 86-98 with the narrower housing and swap the brake hardware to that and use 94-98 mustang axles. That will give you a rear track tha is 0.75" wider which is perfect actually.

Or you could sell the 2000 rear and buy a 94-98 rear.

But install the rear first and see how bad it is. I don't really know anyone who has actually put one in because when it comes to 5-lug swaps, most guys are told to avoid using the 99+ rear ends completely.