Rod & Custom Rack And Pinion/Disc Brake Conversion Kit With Tubular A-Arm System And Coilover Kit Mustang V8 1965-1973

Today on our project 50-30, we're going to get ready to start installing a Rod & Custom front suspension. To do so though we need to remove a few stock components before we can actually start the installation. A Rod & Custom cross member is going to mount right here on the frame rail and go straight across to the other side. It's going to sandwich the frame rail. To install it, we have to remove the complete shock tower assemblies, we also got to more forward, remove the front braces here for our strut rode brackets and also the brackets for the front sway bar. Basically the goal is to get down to just a bare frame rail with the aprons then we can begin the installation.

The Rod & Custom suspension is not for an amateur installer. It's going to require extensive cutting and welding to properly install it. I'm not going to show you a step-by-step, but we’ll give you the basics on how everything goes together. Before you start the job you want to pick up a spot weld cutter, this is the easiest way to get through all the factory spot welds, which are on all three pieces we're going to be removing.

Once the spot welds are cut out of a few other places we'll have to actually cut some welds before we start removing the brackets. Now we're going to grab our chisel and start separating the brackets from the frame. Now we have our strut rod bracket and sway bar bracket removed. We're ready to move onto the shock tower. There's a couple different ways to get this off. There are spot welds all the way around, you could start by doing that, in our case we have access to a plasma cutter; that's going to be the easiest way. We’ll have somebody cut along the outside edge here and go all the way around. You can cut it out with a torch, there's other ways to cut it as well, but since we have a plasma cutter and it's the easiest way to do it that's what we're going to use.

Now that we have it completely cut out, we still have to break out the chisel to release some of the welds and stuff around the bottom. We're going to do that next then pull off the tower. Here you can get an idea of where the cross member is actually going to fit now that everything is cut out. Next step is to actually take off all this metal, we got to smooth these all out before we start fitting our cross member.

This is what it should look like when it's done. All the brackets are removed, all the burrs are off; nice and smooth, ready to start fitting our cross member. Rod & Custom includes this diagram with the instructions, basically showing you where your new Rod & Custom cross member is going to fit in our stock Mustang frame rails. We're going to measure it out and mark the frame rails and prepare to install our cross member. What we're doing now is jacking the cross member into place and then we'll line it up with the marks that we made and you'll start tacking it in.

We got the vice grips in place now to hold it while we tack it in place, you want to make sure you double, triple, quadruple check your measurements before you weld it. Once it's in place that's where it's going to be. With the cross member located properly, we have clamps holding it in place, and now we can start welding. Now we're going to put the upper control arms spring pockets into place. You want to get them lined up with the cross member. You want to make sure it's level, then I'm going to tack those in place next, and once they're tacked in then we can go back and pulley weld everything.

That's pretty much it for installing a Rod & Custom cross member into your Mustang. This is obviously the hardest part of the installation. It's the most time-consuming, but it's also important you get it right or the rest of the suspension is just not going to work out. From here, we just bolt on the rest of the components then we can install our shock wave and get our Mustang back on the ground.