If the front of the car is lighter than it would be with a regular engine, I would not want stiffer front springs. Alot of people cut small sections off of the coils. It doesn't hurt anything.

I have the stock type steering box with a roller idler arm. My steering box is a quick ratio unit. This works nicely. I also have the roller spring perches.

 

I'm going to think hard about the roller idler arm. I decided against the roller perches -- do you think they made a big difference?

 

The rolller idler arm is fantastic. The roller perches did make a noticable difference.

I'm still not sure those springs are a good match for the front of your car with the setup you have. There are less stiff lowering springs available.

 

Roller arm is a nice upgrade. Im running that with man steering, quick ratio box, aftermarket steering wheel little smaller then stock, my car is pretty low in the front with about the biggest tires i can fit and the steering effort is easy. I really noticed a difference when getting the roller but mine was also worn out. And with the rear leafs you when with you said 5 leaf if i remember right you might want to look into lower pressure shocks if you dont want the ride overly stiff.

 

I went ahead and bought the roller idler arm from ORP -- my old one was shot anyway and it sounds like this is a worthy upgrade. I didn't get the roller perches, but that's mostly because of cost. I just need to slow down the spending a bit right now.

One problem I still need to address is that my rear battery pack (weighing about 260 lbs) is slightly off center to the driver's side. I need to balance that out. I can think of several ways to do that, but the simplest (and cheapest) way I can think of is to leave the air shocks in, but put them at a much lower pressure (right now they're at about 100 lbs). I can put the driver's side one at about 30 and the passenger at 25 and see if that evens things out back there.

If I did something like that, would you think I'd still need to reinforce the upper shock mounts?

 

How much off center is it?

Alot of cars/trucks are not 100 percent equally balanced. My F150 has a rear fuel tank and a front one. The front one is inside the driver side frame from about the back of the cab back to the axle. Thats offset weight. Also, the Mustang rear gas tank was not center in the cars either from day one. So when its full of fuel, thats offset or off center weight.

I still say no to the air shocks period. Since there is more weight in the rear, you could try KYB gas adjust shocks.

I know you already read it, but I'll say it again. The front of your car is too light for those higher rate lowering springs. I would return them and use some of the 500 ish rate springs. I think Opentracker may have them. I have seen them from a few different sites.

 

that's news to me. whats the factory weight distribution for the classic mustangs?

 

It's fairly offset as you can see from this photo:



I'm not sure what I have up front is too light -- nor am I sure exactly what I have up there suspension-wise. The car had several suspension upgrades when I bought it and the guy did them over 20 years ago -- he couldn't even tell me exactly what was on there. I can tell the UCA is not stock (it's tubular -- maybe Global West?) and it's very possible the springs in it now are not stock either. He was planning on putting in a 351 Clev so the springs that are in there now may be heavy-duty.

The motor weighs about 250 lbs and there's 58 batteries, each weighing about 5.5 lbs. that's a total of about 870 lbs. That's way more than the 289 that originally came in there. I removed a bunch of other things, but still, it's got to weigh more now than it did stock.

I've just got too many variables and unknowns. I think I'm going to want those 620 springs -- I may need to cut them down a bit, but I'm worried if I go too light I'll be bottoming out.

 

I just got a look at the car with the suspension. It looks MUCH better. I'll try to take some pictures later, but the front is slightly lower than the rear -- exactly what I wanted.

So we went with the 620 1" drop springs, and cut about 2" off to begin with. That seems to have done the trick. We'll see what it looks like after a couple weeks of driving, but for now at least, I couldn't be happier.

I'm also curious to see how it handles. I could have taken the car today, but I told them to remove the air shocks and put the old gas ones back on. I should be able to pick it up tomorrow, then I'll let you all know how it rides.

 

I'm not really sure what the actual weight distribution is. If you look at the factory trunk floor you can see that the gas tank is a few inches over to the driver side. This is also noticeable from under the car. On the passenger side there is more than enough room for an exhaust pipe. Whereas its a much tighter fit on the driver side.