Scott Drake Strut Rod Bushing Kit Mustang 1965-1966

If you've been following along our Forgotten Fastback build, you've seen we already did the body work, and last time out we seam sealed and primed our chassis. Now it's time to upgrade the suspension. The current suspension is just a bunch of parts just to roll it around, 2 x 4's for springs. It's definitely time for an upgrade. Since our goal is a car with modern updates, we're going stick with a stock style suspension and give it a little better handling while we're at it. We're going to go with the Scott Drake 1" lowering progressive rate springs, Scott Drake premium upper and lower control arms, this 1" sway bar, and the Scott Drake strut rod kit. While we're at it, we're going to place our tie rod ends as well.

Scott Drake's progressive rate coil springs will give us performance similar to their 600 lb. contour springs without sacrificing ride quality. We're going to pair them with polyurethane insulators, and install polyurethane coil spring saddles as well. We're also using poly for the end links for our sway bar, and using the premium control arms from Scott Drake with their high quality ball joints.

For this installation, you will need a lift or a jack and jack stand or rotisserie, 1/2" impact gun, 1/4" ratchet, 3/8 ratchet, 1/2" ratchet, 15/16 deep socket, 7/8 deep socket, 3/4 deep socket, 5/8 deep socket, 13mm deep socket, 1/2" deep socket, 9/16 deep socket, 3/4 shallow socket, 5/8 shallow socket, 13mm shallow socket, 9/16 shallow socket, 1/2" shallow socket, 7mm shallow socket, 1/2" swivel, 1/2"-3/8 adaptor, 3/4 wrench, 1/2" wrench, adjustable wrench, needle nose pliers, standard pliers, coil spring compressor, hammer, pry bar, grease gun, and safety glasses.

We have the car up on our lift, ready to begin our installation. This can be done on jack stands, on a lift, or even on a rotisserie. First step is to remove our wheel. Now we're going to disconnect the spindle from the upper and lower control arm by removing the nuts on the ball joints. Now we'll disconnect the spindle from our tie rod. With a pry bar we'll just separate everything from the components here. Now we're going to remove the tie rod. And now we're going to remove our lower control arm. Now we'll remove the two nuts in the engine compartment that hold on our upper control arm.After we seam sealed the chassis, we undercoated up inside the torque box area and up inside of the frame. Since we have the suspension out, we can do the inside of the frame rail and the back of the apron assembly.

Now we're ready to install our new uppers. We want to make sure the bushings are facing inward, and put them back in the factory location. Now we'll install the new lower. Now we need to remove the spindle from our drums. Our plans for our Fastback include disc brakes, so all we're going to need is the spindle. These four nuts hold the spindle onto the backing plate for the drum. They look like this piece inside here. If you get lucky, you turn the nut and you can pull it right off the back. Our bolts had a lot of paint and buildup on them, so we had to use a hammer to get them on. So far so good, two for two. I've never, ever had all four come off before.

Now we're going to flip it over and disassemble it to remove the spindle. We'll start by removing the dust cap off the top here. Normally you're going to want to carefully pry and hammer on the outside edge here to get the cap off if you're trying to save it. In our case, it's already been hammered and destroyed, and we're not going to reuse it, so we're just going to take it off with a hammer. Believe it or not, underneath all this grease somewhere in there is a cotter pin. We've got to remove the cotter pin so we can get to the bearings. There it is. We'll start with the outer nut once we remove the cotter pin. Take off the inner nut. Take the top plate off. I'll remove the bearings, and then finally remove the drum. I can remove the back of the plate, hammer the bolts through to do this. And we have our spindle. The spindle's going to be reused with our new suspension. They don't reproduce this part yet, so you want to make sure you hang on to these if you're working on a '65 or '66 V8 car. We're going to sandblast ours and paint them before we reinstall them.

Now we're ready to assemble out inner and outer tie rods with our tie rod sleeve. First step, put the grease fittings on and put a little grease in them. Then we'll put the collar over the sleeve. We've threaded our outers. The outers didn't have a conventional thread. Don't turn them in too far, get them in about an inch. We'll do the same thing on the other side. Your inner is going to have an opposite thread. Now we're ready to fit them to our car.

We're going to start by removing the center link. We'll remove the cotter pin first, and then remove the nuts holding it on. We'll tap it out. Now we'll remove the cotter pin for the idler arm. Now we'll remove the nut holding the arm to the bracket. Now we'll remove the nut holding the pitman arm to our steering box. Now we'll install our new pitman arm. You want to make sure you look at the splines of the steering box. There are larger splines. You want to make sure they line up with the pitman arm splines so it slides on. We'll reinstall the nut. Now we'll install the idler arm. Now we'll put on the washer and the new nut. Install our cotter pin to our castle. Before we can do our center link, we want to put the grease fitting close to the idler arm. Now we'll install our new center link. Now we'll install our cotter pins. Now we're going to install the coiled spring cells onto our upper control arm. You want to make sure that the spring stop here is facing inward toward the engine bed.

Now we're ready to bolt our spindles onto our control arms. We'll start by removing the castle nuts and these protective covers. We'll remove our cotter pins. Now you'll get your center link centered between your frame rails. You'll want to turn your tie rod sleeve to get your spindles as straight as possible. Obviously the car will need to be aligned once it's back on the ground, but you want to get it as straight as you can just by eyeing it up. Once you get it right, then you'll tie the collars onto your sleeves.

We're now ready to install our springs. You want to grab the coil spring. Grab the insulator for the top. It's going to out this way with a large coil at the bottom. This layer has a cutout on it. It will sit just in place like that. You'll put the spring on the car, and you will need a coil spring compressor to install it. You want to make sure the bolt for the spring compressor is at the top so you can access it from inside the engine bay. Now we're ready to mount them on the car. The top of the spring is going to mount right around this lip at the bottom underneath our shock tower. The bottom of the spring is going to sit on the spring saddle we installed previously. You want to make sure the coil on the end goes as close as you can to this plate right here.

Now we're going to mount our front sway bar. Now we're going to install the end links for the sway bar. We're going to start with a bolt, one washer, and one bushing. Put that through the bar itself. Use another bushing and another washer and install the spacer. At the spacer, we're going to go with another metal washer, then another bushing. That's going to go down through our lower control arm underneath the installed bushing, and the last metal washer and the nut.

Now we're going to install the strut rod bushing kit. When assembling the strut rod bushings, be careful of the washers. There's actually two different size openings. One washer will go all the way to the bottom. The other one will only go to the bottom of the threads. You want to make sure you have them installed properly with the bushings on the car. We'll reinstall the other side, washer on and then put the nut on. You just want to make it loose for now. We're going to attach it to our control arm. The back of the strut rod's going to mount into these two diagonal holes in your lower control arm. If it doesn't quite line up like ours isn't, you want to loosen your sleigh bar and loosen the bolt on the lower control arm and now you pry it back just slightly. I'll put the two bolts to the back of the strut rod. At this point, you'll want to retighten the bolts for your sleigh bar. You want to leave the control arms loose. If you leave them loose, once you put the car back on the ground and add weight, the bushings won't bind up. And our installation is complete.

Our new suspension should give us a better ride as well as better handling, thanks to our polyurethane bushings and our progressive rate coil springs. Installation should take you roughly about three to four hours. Next up for our Fastback is going to be a set of disc brakes. Make sure you subscribe to our YouTube channel for more updates on the Forgotten Fastback.