Maybe not too aggressive, generally. But it could well be a little too aggressive for your specific conditions.

Keep in mind who Ford's target buyer for the GT500 is, and that tinkering with the rate of throttle response by the OE's is commonly done for marketing reasons. It's one way of making a slow car more commercially acceptable by making it give a better showing of itself at test drive time and around town later at part throttle. Your foot tells you that you're only using maybe 1/3 of what's there, but the engine may be delivering 70%. For something at the GT500 level, it's sort of the same thing for slightly different reasons. Can't be letting a base V8 Camaro get the initial jump on your top-powered model in an impromptu sprint.


Time to pick on some of the advertising methods a little. Relo brackets can be beneficial from the standpoint of handling, but that's normally the case only when the car has been lowered. A lot of advertising tends to omit qualifiers like that, either because the seller's advertising guy doesn't expect the average customer to understand why it matters or because he doesn't understand it himself. The end result is a pitch for a product that implies it does everything.


Norm

 

Wow, that was actually pretty fast. If it were me, I would have been extremely **** about it and probably have taken no less than half an entire day to do it.

Were the included instructions easy to follow?

I know, it's just that since your ride is a GT500, and I sure would hate for anybody who crawls under your car to not see the underside as nicely dressed as the rest of the car

I kid, in reality, the majority of tube ones have the benefit of being adjustable where the vast majority of billet ones are fixed length and that is what you are stuck with (as a matter of fact, I cannot fine ant billet ones that are adjustable).

 

The instructions were not horrible but when it came time to install the LCAs i had to take a look at UMIs website so that i knew which side goes where because they are offset and that is left out of the instructions.

 

Ya, i need to adjust the panhard again, when i had it on jackstands and the suspension loaded it was centered but when i put in on the ground it was about 1/8" to 1/4" to far to the left. So ill be doing that today, also i plan to retorque everthing since i drove the car last night just to make sure nothing came loose.

 

FWIW, torquing LCA bolts with the suspension loaded is only required for OE LCAs with their bonded rubber bushings. But it is unnecessary if none of the bushings are bonded to both the inner sleeve and the outer shell. I'm not suggesting that it is bad practice to torque poly bushed or spherical-jointed LCAs as if they were OE rubber, just that it is unnecessary to do so.

A little tip for reducing squeaks that does not involve constantly re-lubing the things - if the poly bushing is longer than the inner sleeve, sand the poly down to be closer to the same length as the sleeve. What you're trying to do is avoid compressing the poly when you torque the bolts. I'm pretty sure that the squeaking that poly is known for happens between the faces of the poly and the chassis and axle brackets (I'm thinking it's a stick-slip-stick-slip chatter that's at a high enough frequency to sound like a squeak). There are other possible benefits.


Norm

 

Well i finished centering the rear end with the panhard. It only took 3 tries lol. To get it within 1/16th of an inch it was a matter of 1 thread more than i estimated.

I have heard of people doing that (sanding the poly). I didnt even remember it until you mentioned it honestly. Hopefully they wont squeek for a while. I loaded the outsides up with the supplied grease then used 2 pumps on each joint as the instructions said to do.

 

Just do what I do and take everything apart every other weekend until you can do it in your sleep. Four hours is long for LCA's, brackets and panhard after you've done it 4-5 times. Nothing has time to lose torque on my car because I love playing with it so much .

No, ideally do it once and leave it alone but I can't seem to do that...too much fun taking things off/on and getting a feel the subtle differences tweaks make over a few weeks drive time.

Very nice car you have there. I like how Ford decided to throw some paint/coating on the rear axle of the new 500's.

 

The way the bushings are on these things I don't know how you avoid taking it apart at least once a year to re-grease things. The arms with zerk fittings on there help but the outside of the poly bushing still needs to have grease manually re-applied. Not to mention it's not a bad idea to clean the things before you re-grease. Mine get pretty nasty and that's on a car that doesn't see rain.

Some arms like the blue steeda don't even have zerks on there. PITA.