anyone else have any input on this subject

 

Well...someone did have a question that seems to have gone unnoticed


The 'common' *gasp everyone does it so it must not be the approach to take* method to lower the car is with the suspension (read: new springs). Reverse eye springs in the rear are readily available and put the car low enough to have a 26 diameter tire disappear into the fenders add to it a 3 inch tube rear end and you get another 1/4 lower before you even put in a lowering block of your preferred thickness. Paired up with front springs at your desired rate trimmed to the height you are looking for, then lower the upper control arms 1.75 inches, add a wedge kit to avoid ball joint bind, and then I also recommended shock cap extensions to extend shock travel and avoid bottoming out the cylinder from the 1.75 drop and super short springs (you will also want to install a limiting strap to keep the front from going uncompressed too far in case you get wild one night so the spring doesn't slip out). So for Under $600-700 you can have a very low riding stang with basic/marginal street manners (in term of suspension) because you will want to keep your spring rates high for what I believe is obvious reasons.

So....

Really is a defining question. I had mid-eye springs on my car, reverse eye springs will lower it 1 more inch than where it is at. With the mid eyes my 3 inch pipes for the high horsepower motor I have are 2.5 inches from ground. The car can not go over a speedbump but it has never bottomed out on anything while driving it hard. If I switched to reverse eye I would have 1.5 inches of ground clearance. That is not an acceptable level of clearance unless I want to cruise sub 30 MPH around town with my woofers coming out of the casing and saying hi to all the ladies. I think it is also good to point out that if your standard ride height has the wheels always under the fenders, besides the springs to lower the car you will IMHO also need to install a positive rear centering device..aka panhard bar or watts link. Assuming you want to stuff as wide a tire as you can go, then you need to make sure you're rear can't shift in turns and have your tires shreading.

Still the defining question I now run a fully adjustable coil over 3 link with a watts in the rear because I found that with my simple mid-eye leaf spring setup I was occasionally scuffing the tire sidewalls on sheetmetal on high speed turns with my 255 40 17 tires in the rear. Adding the watts fixed that problem for me and adding the 3 link with adjustable coil overs allows me to raise/lower my ride height in the rear with a jack and a wrench. I set the height to the same place my mid-eyes were to maintain my 2.5 inch ground clearance for the reasons I stated previously. So maybe I need to change my question for you.....

Using an air bag suspension certainly changes the approach a bit and what you can do. You can certainly go all Impala and drive it somewhere and when you shut if down have it drop so low that lowest part of your car is sitting on the ground and then dial in an air powered ride height when driving....one for cruising which may be uber low and one for spirited rides (or crappy roads) that is a little higher but there is one problem I see with that approach. You want to put in a big powerful motor with a turbo. You are going to need big pipes and those pipes are going to ultimately limit you on the 'visual' appearance of being low and if you did go all Impala...the pipes would take the damage...unless you are planning on sectioning out the floorboard and recessing the pipes partially into the cab (which I have seen before BTW).

It seems to me you really are all over the map on what you want. You want a show car, that you are going to be driving all the time, that is super low to the ground, and has a lot of horsepower (but you don't go to the strip/track) so I assume it is to show off with your friends and boost the ego with the occasional BLVD battle. A car like that is certainly not impossible to build but when you attempt to build a car to suit all those needs it becomes VERY expensive. What is your budget for this project and what is your desired time line to completion?

I've spent well over 45k on my little project to build a mustang that I could drive anywhere, anytime, run deep 11s at the drag strip and hold its own on open track days.

Have you considered maybe not going uber low, getting a little tire tuck and building your own custom side skirts and front defuser, this will give you the appearance without having to make quite as many compromises as I see it in order to have some semblance of performance out of the suspension? It sounds like you have some fiberglass skills.

 

Shorten the rear end depends on how wide of a rim and tire you want same thing with the wheel tubs.The front kit i posted gives you new upper and lower control arms with it.The rears both are about even but with the tcp one you can order it with a 9 inch housing with everything welded on it which saves time but cost more.Nick they do sell oval shaped exhaust tubing now so you can have a fat pipe and ground clearance too.My mustang i lowered about 3 inches and i drag my headers on speed bumps but it handles great so its worth it.

 

The terms "lowered" or "lowering" might have been a little more widely understood, but I don't think that anybody who read past the first paragraph in your first post was at all confused.


Here's where things like controversy and misunderstanding get started. "Looking right" is a very subjective and personal thing. Be careful what you ask for in the way of opinion, especially if your skin isn't thick enough yet to deal with unexpected or unfavorable responses. Even if it is, a little care in how you approach your question can make a world of difference.


It's better to just start new topics instead of trying to stuff everything into this one. Don't start them by putting yourself on the defensive.

And it's way better to break each new thought off into its separate paragraph. I'm not picking on you or playing school teacher here - just offering some non-automotive advice that should help. It's a real struggle to read through posts where everythingsortof runstogetherlikethis and youcan'ttellwhereonethought stops andthenextonebegins. And that's before you even try to put together an answer that makes a little sense.


FWIW, the Air Ride stuff seems to be attracting some interest from the "Pro-Touring" segment. Maybe it's not ideal for the hardcore performance folks, but it could be a legitimate choice for your build.


Norm

 

ok, see i like this, more people need to point things like this out, at first i didnt think you seen my air ride point about wanting to go low, but after reading it all i see that you do but you may have miss understood some parts of what i had been saying. and im hoping that when u see my talking bout air ride ur not thinking about hydros, because thats what the old impalas and that style cars did and do. i want air so i can raise it to drive and adjust for my driving style and lower it at shows, no absolutly on the ground but low low, like the 1.5 inch and 2.5 inch would be something around the look i would say, but i love your way of lowering it, it would definatly get low and it looks like a better deal than the air ride kit looking at it from a price perspective. but here is the main issue and i got to ask one question here, what part of the country do you live? and i dont mean that in a rude way i was just curious but i live in the north georgia mountains, which sucks horribly bad, very bad roads, which was the other idea for the air ride. because the eclipse i had that had been lowered bottomed out so bad around here that i cracked the aftermarket bumper too pieces and put the factory one back on it and it was doing the same when i sold the car, i will attach a pic to show the height of it and maybe get an estimate of how low your talking is in comparison to the eclipse i had.

dont get me wrong though i really love your idea im just afraid of it bottoming out too much and hurting the car, because at shows if it is on air i wont slam it down quick, it will be a slow drop and im not going to be dragging (in the term of dragging frame to throw sparks not the racing kind) with it.

the coilover idea might work but the problem is i really dont want to lug around a jack with me to some of these shows, the shows where i go with other people wouldnt be a problem i can put it in with their stuff but some shows i go all alone with nobody else, reason i say this is the stang will have the trunk fiberglassed in and i believe that i am going to put my some more of the system where the backseats are so they will be deleted, which does not leave me much room to be carrying everything around with after i have cleaning supplies, clothes if it is a show that i stay overnight and things like that. and the time it would take to lower one by jacking it up the wrenching it down sounds like it would take a while.

also the car dont have to sit on the ground, i just want it to be really low


and the part that realy got to me about your post was this last part here, i want the big motor in it because its a show car, and i want something that hasent been done before in it, but still something that keeps it sounding nice, the turbo i want because im used to driving a turbo'd car everyday, i love the way it feels once it gets spooled up. but you were wrong about the car being daily driven, it is going to be driven to the shows because i dont like trailer queens but i wont be out in it everyday.

and it is definatly not an ego boost thing with my car, because i could really care less what people think about what ive done. but the car is going to be a shop demo car so it needs to get attention at shows and prove that we can build it things even if they arent ment to go in that certain car.

the drag racing and track part of it, well the only drag strip we have here (commerce dragstrip, it may even be called atlanta dragstrip but it is in commerce, pinks went there once last year) there have been alot of talk about them shutting down this year. and atlanta motor speedway in hampton does 1/8 mile drags on pit road of the track but im really not sure if it is timed or anything, plus if i was going to drag i would want a 1/4 mile. and there isent any time attack, or any other type track races around here where i live, so it isent that i dont want to it is mainly because in my area there isent any.

thats the main reasons behind alot of it, and if you think it would work in my area than i will give it a shot because it sounds like a really nice idea, but i wanted to state that about the area i live in being so crappy, but like i said if it is possible to have it this way i will check into it and may get some more info from you, but here is pics of the eclipse that bottomed out way too much.

 

A 66 mustang can never look that low without body moldings. Just like the eclipse even with lowering springs 'techincally' wouldn't be as low as your photos if the body kit wasn't there. Because of the stock roll in with the sheetmetal in both cars. If you add fiberglass that extends as low as the bottom of the sub frames and squares out the roll under on the 66 mustang when combined with the lowering mechanism of choice (air or springs) it will appear as low as the photo you have pictured.

I didn't mention coil overs to suggest jacking it up and dialing in a ride height at the show. I mentioned them because you can lower the car easily once installed and 'feel' out the optimum compromise between low and drive ability and still maintain a performance oriented suspension (which is obviously where my loyalties lie). If however performance is not as high up on the priority list then something more adjustable with regard to height might be your better choice. There are also some people who would make an argument about there being suitable performance possible out of the air ride setup (namely their manufacturer, but I think there are a few others who go along with them).

It really comes down to the car. If it is nothing more than a show piece for the shop and its ability to function as a car is purely limited to driving to a show and back then you can make many more compromises in the handling/performance characteristics of the car than someone like I would make.

And on edit: please don't put lambo doors on it.
And on edit, edit: I live if what we call BFE. My daily driver is a 3500 dually truck that has to go 62 miles to a major city suburban area for my tech job. I cross every type of road in every type of condition you can imagine. The 65 goes to the office once a week in the nice weather and needs to be able to traverse anything and I got it as low as I feel it can comfortably handle the situation, fit the tires I want, and perform to the level I want. I am sure that it could get lower but then I would 'worry' about the bumps in the road at 80mph that cause a little bounce in the old suspension and I would have to downsize my front tires from the 245 40 17 that are on there now.

 

yeah i know what your saying about the body kit practically makes a car "look lower than it is" concept but the bad thing is that is with the factory front bumper on it, not the aftermarket one, now the sides and back are the body kit but the body kit front got beat up so bad it ended up in pieces, so i put the factory front back on it, so it was really lower than you would think, the exhaust scrubbed in alot of places i went (3" exhaust from greddy no cat, btw the car was turbo'd i didnt just run a 3" because i wanted to "rice" it out and make it look like it had something under the hood the exhaust and cat delete was for performance) but i do know even the factory bumper will appear a little lower than the actual car is but not so much as a body kit would

now are you saying i need to buy a bumper and fiberglass my own body lines on it to make it look how i want? i have thought about that alot, in fact my idea was to buy the eleanor kit for the hood trunk and fender flares and modding the front rear and sides the way i wanted them.

but i want the car built on the car show side of things yes but also if i want to go run a time attack at road atlanta ( i know for sure they do one a year but any other time i have no idea) or if i just want to play around one day in it i can, because alot of performance parts look nice at the same time.

and no it will not have lambos on the mustang, i got a really good deal on the ones on the eclipse on nobody at the shows in this area had verticals so i put verticals on to be different from the rest of the cars at the shows here, now at the big shows it just blends in like every other car but at the smaller shows it got people to stop and look at it, as well as the custom airbrushing under the hood and the way everything inder the hood was plumbed for turbo and dressed up. so it helped promote the shop as well. but no the stang wont have lambos on it, even though i am doing some things different some things just arent meant to be messed with like that if you know what im saying.

so in your opinion what would you do in my situation? the ai ride kit from air ride technologies says it is setup for autocrossing, which seems to sound like it would handle the perofrmance part of it. but is the pic u posted how low u say urs gets to or does it go lower? because ot dont look like 2.5 inch off the ground, and i would really like mine to be lower than the pic you posted, which like u said u have coilovers and thats why i was asking in case you took the pic with it up instead of lowered. which then again i did scroll back look at yours again and on the sides it does look pretty low, and i dunno how you have it set it may can go lower and if i made modifications to the sides and front of mine i might can have it appear at a nice stance. but how low you have it set here in the pics i guess is where i need to start from. thanks

 

I said my exhaust was 2.5 inches off the ground not my rockers
I don't adjust my height. It is set and done.

 

Here is about as low as you can take it. I think this car is running a MII front suspension and has air ride.

 

Big and classic...all at the same time.

http://cgi.ebay.com/ebaymotors/05-06...ehicleQ5fParts