Fellows, I need some advice from Ford people. I sold my 54 Chevy and now I'm looking at getting a shoebox Ford. I've got a real decent 2 door spotted by my house that is going to be cheap. Final poduct should be low, have good highway manners, and drive and stop very well. My 54 Chevy had an SBC, auto trans, Mustang II with big brakes, and highway gears. I want this car to drive as well as it did. What suspension and brakes work well on these old Fords and are reasonably priced? Do I need to clip it, or is the original suspension doable with mods? Which rearends fit these cars well? Thanks in advance...
Original suspension is fine. You can easily convert to disc brakes using a kit. There are several ways to lower it, including flipping the stock spindles.
I have a Camaro clip in mine, narrowed and stepped for a very low stance with a good ride. It works very well, but if I were to do it over again, I'd use Fatman or Jamco dropped spindles with disc brakes (Jamco) and one coil cut from the stock springs. Might be a horse apiece costwise, but a LOT less work. I run a stock '51 Fordomatic rear end (3.31) and have never had any trouble with it (well, one broken axle) handling the power of a 350. I'd do that again, with Jamco lowering springs plus blocks. Stock rear brakes.
Exactly the kind of post I was looking for. Thank you very much... I'm off to learn about Jamco and brake swaps now.
I agree 50 fraud. The stock suspension ,and brakes work well with some modification. A lowering with cut coils,blocks in rear,maybe discs. If you have $$ Fatman's dropped spindles are good. The stock rear is ok for a mild smallblock,and cruising, A SBF, with c-4,and a Mavrick rear,would be easy,and strong. Happy shoeboxing sparky
Hillbilly, I put the spacers in the a-arms on my 51, cut springs, 4" blocks in the back with a couple of leafs removed. I left the steering stock. If I were to do it again I's use the volvo 140 series box. I've been told it makes a hellof a good set-up. My car has a ranger rearend with a 302/c-6 combo. No problems. Rides good, will tag bottom every now and then. TP
could anyone tell me more about fliping the stock spindels? or is there a tech tread on that somewhere in here ? i dropped the rear with 4" blocks so far but she needs to go lower and i need the front down also. thanks in advance
My shoebox buildup is a '53 flattie with a T5 trans, cut coils in the front, blocks in the rear, ECI front discs and stock rear end/brakes.
If you look at the stock front suspension uprights, you'll see that the top and bottom ends are very nearly the same, and the boss that supports the kingpin/spindle ***embly is below the center. If you swap the uprights side-for-side and turn them upside down, that boss is now much higher on the car, and you've lowered it a lot -- 3 or 4 inches, anyway. But the inclination of that boss is now way out of whack, so that you have very wrong camber -- negative, I think. You must heat and bend the upright to get the camber back close to right. Seems to me that it's not possible to get back to strictly stock alignment settings overall, but guys who have done this have gotten the big drop at near-zero cost with apparently few side effects.
Ok my 50 club coupe has a sbc 350 a th550 8 in ford rear end with 3 in lowering blocks!Front suspension is stock but with lowering blocks that bolt on where the coil pack is rivited onto the a arms that works great! Ive put 4500 miles on it since august and it rolls down the freeway at 70-80 no prob and gets up over 100 easy!!!! jamco and fat man are anotherway to go if you have the dough
shoeboxford.com is a great site that has a lot of info on just shoebox fords. The guys on there say what has worked and didn't.
SKO ford PM'ed me these links for the spring pocket drop and upright flip on a Shoebox Ford; although I haven't taken on either project yet. spring pocket http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/...read.php?t=1421 SKO said "on the pocket drop all i did was cut out the rivits holding the a arm to the spring pocket and weldid in some 1 inch square tube" upright flip http://www.jalopyjournal.com/forum/...read.php?t=6342 a la Rocky. . . . and SKO, I owe you a photo of bracket used on the DCMC. I hope to get to work on that this week.
Call Fatman Fabrications and ask him for a shoebox build sheet, lots of good stuff there and all his stuff works as advertised, would recommend his Volvo steering conversion.
I can tell you this, I am in the process of building a 51 dodge pickup. I had a company that does custom built IFS suspensions do my dodge truck, since a lot of the other ones that I called said "yeah we can make something fit". I did not like that answer, and after doing months of research on which IFS I was going to use, I settled on one from www.jimweimerrodgarage.com They were local for me, and after talking to them and seeing some of the work that they do, I was sold! I rolled my 51 dodge 3/4 ton pickup in there with the original suspension, and it left there with a 9" Ford rear end, 4 link suspension with pan hard bar, Air ride all the way around, boxed the frame, built a custom MII IFS for the truck, 2" drop spindles, power rack, motor and ****** mounts, 11" rotors, tubular control arms and reworked the firewall on the truck for me. They also put my 95LT1 and 4L60E ****** in to test fit everything. The price was nothing short of spectacular. The complete job cost me a little more than what the parts alone would have cost me from another IFS place. The guys there do a great job.... Check it out yourself at my webpage at www.oldtruck.sytes.net . It's a blog page with a photo gallery.
so the two of these together may be a little low i put her on the grownd last night and my jack is stuck between the floor and the engnie cradle. ill start a new thred with pics sko
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