Adds a lot of strength to the cab floor and it cut down a lot of the road noise. In between helping out with the steps I got working on the mufflers, the stock ones were ridiculously quiet. It's a little better, real nice sound but still very quiet. I'm pretty sure the catalytic converters are plugged (the Crown Vic came with four of them!) but those will eventually be removed. Here's the new ones in place:
Next we spent some time on the brake pedal. The Vic pedal sat way to high and too far to the left, so the pedal arm was modified to bring it down and over. Don't mind my ghetto carpet:
Finally time to get started on the bed. This is the biggest remaining challenge. Due to the difference in wheelbase between the truck and the CV the bed needed to be shortened by 3.5 inches so that's where we started. We cut the pinch welds at the bulkhead, cut the bed sides and floor, the moved the bulkhead back:
That's as far as we could get today. Before we put the bed away for now we did move it over the truck to have a look at the new length:
I'm probably going to shorten the back a bit as well, but lots to do before then. The rear frame will need to be shortened and dropped down, the bed floor cut out some, and the fenders widened. It will be a couple weeks at least before Troy will be able to help me with the bed so the next couple updates will be interior work.
For anyone looking to do something similar- I learned from a member on the Facebook group "Custom Classic Ford F100 Trucks 1957 1958 1959 1960 F-100 Rat & Hot Rods" that the Lincoln Town Car wheelbase is 0.3" different than the 57-60 F100 wheelbase. That would save some work modifying the bed, which is a pretty big task. Ideally for a full frame swap it would be better to use an '02 or earlier in my opinion, the track width is narrower giving you more wheel options.
No comments:
Post a Comment