Total Control Products Subframe Connector System Package With Driveshaft Loop Coupe/Fastback 1965-1970

If you've been following along on our You Tube Channel, you're probably familiar with the seventy Mach One behind me. We've been doing a lot of suspension upgrades to this car. Basically using the entire Total Control Products catalog. We used their front coiler system, all their engine bay braces, the rack and pinion steering conversion and most recently the rear four link set up that also went with coil overs.

Now that the front and rear suspension have been upgraded, it's time to tie it all together. To do that, we're going to use a sub-frame system also from Total Control. Today we're going to show you how to install this using our seventy Mach One. The sub-frame system is basically made up of two separate parts. The sub-frame connectors and then the sub-frame center support brace. The connectors are made of two by two steel. They're going to weld onto your factory frame rails. The brace is going to bolt to the sub-frame connectors to further strengthen the chassis as an addition at the drive shaft loop in the center. The support is made of one and five eighth tubing and the entire thing comes in a nice black powder coat that will fit your 1965 through 1970 Coupe or Fastback.

For this installation, let a lift and a pull-jack or a jack and jack stands, welder, grinder, quarter inch ratchet, half inch socket, three eighth ratchet, shallow nine sixteenths socket, deep nine sixteenth socket, torque wrench, nine sixteenths wrench, drill, three eighth drill bit, marker, tape measure, mallet, pry bar, file and safety glasses.

We're going to begin the installation by getting the car off the ground and remove the exhaust and the drive shaft. It's designed to clear most exhausts but if you have a two and a half you should be okay. Three inch might a little bit tight but you want to take it off for the installation. Same thing with the drive shaft. To install the loop you have to remove the drive shaft anyway, so take everything off to start to make the installation much easier.

Once you do that, the first step is to measure between these two front floor supports. To install the sub-frames you have to have twenty-seven and an eighth minimum between these two. If you don't have that width, you'll have to actually hammer them out to get that. You want to check it first and see where your measurement comes in. We're right at twenty-seven and a quarter so we're good to go as far as the width.

You also want to take a good look at the floor supports. The front of the sub-frame connector is going to wrap around this basically right in this area here. In the case of our seventy, these are some after market ones that were replaced probably a long time ago, somewhere in the eighties maybe early nineties and these have a flare on the outside edge here. This is actually not correct and not the way they're supposed to be made. For the sub-frame to fit properly, we're going to have to modify these before we begin.

We're going to start by test fitting the driver side sub-frame connector. These are going to be a tight fit. This is going to be very tight against the frame rail. It's also going to be tight back here so you're probably going to have hammer it up into place.

Keep in mind in a perfect world these will go right on without an issue, more than likely it's not going to do that. We're probably going to make, probably do a little bit of grinding, maybe a little bit of clearance to make everything go where it's supposed to. This one is actually pretty good on this side.

Now we're going to test fit the crawl support. You want to make sure this little bracket back here, this is designed for a torque arm, when you put this support up into place, you want this bracket to be on the driver's side. Now we're just going to see how well the holes line up.

The holes are slotted so you have a little bit of room to adjust. You just want to make sure that you can see all the holes, so all eight holes are visible.

Now as you can see, ours did fit nice and tight in there though if it is off it does include shims. We won't need them. All right, now that we've got everything test fit we know it's going to fit where we want it to go, we're ready to begin the process of getting ready to weld. To do that though, first we're going to mark everywhere these went on the car and we're going to remove the sub-frame connectors, Total Control supplies them with a nice black powder coat but unfortunately if you're going to weld, you have to grind that powder coat off. So we're going to grind those and prep them and also prep the frame rails on the car, make sure there's no rust or anything so we're ready to actually get a nice, clean weld.

Everything marked now we can remove the sub-frame connectors and prepare to weld.

RK is going to grind the powder coating off of the sub-frame connectors where we need to weld. While he's doing that, I'm going to prep the car.

Got everything cleaned up and now we can put them back up into place and get ready to weld.

Now obviously again before you're going to weld these in place permanently, you want to double check the fitment of the cross pipes. Good. All right.

We're going to start by tack welding everything, get everything tight in place. Then we'll go back and do our final weld. I'm going to leave this part to RK who is a much better welder than I am.

Once you're done welding everything you want to make sure prime and paint any areas of bare metal. Once you're done there, we can move forward to the front floor supports and drill the holes for mounting the cross brace.

You're going to drill four holes on each side. Two for the outside and then two on the inside.

Once you're done drilling, check all four of the holes to make sure the bolts go through all the way easily. If necessary, you can ream the holes out slightly to make sure everything clears.

Okay now we can put the cross brace up into place. Again, make sure this little cut out notch bracket here is on the driver's side.

We want to make sure now just get all the hardware just put everything on hand tight. It'll take a little bit of adjustment to get everything to line up. Now we'll go through and tighten everything done and come back through and torque to thirty-five foot pound.

We went to tighten everything, we did notice over in this corner here on the driver's side, there's more of a sixteenth of a gap. If you do have a gap like that, grab some of the provided shims to fill the gap. The shims come in different sizes so just find the one that fills it in properly and then reinstall the hardware.

Now go back through and torque everything down.

If I were to bolt the loop to the bracket and put in the car, the orientation of the loop doesn't really matter as long as it's in the right place in the car. So if we were to bolt this together like this loosely, put it up in the car again loosely and then reinstall the drive shaft and figure out where it's going to have to sit.

We're going to put the loop into place and again loosely install the hardware.

All right, now we're going to reinstall the drive shaft and check for clearance.

Now everything in place obviously means the drive shaft has no clearance issues, then you want to measure, you want to be around six inches from the center of the U-joint to the center of the loop. Yeah we're pretty much perfect, we can tighten it down.

Now we go back and torque them to thirty-five foot pounds.

And your installation of the sub-frame system is now finished. A couple of things you want to keep in mind with this installation, the exhaust system that's probably on your car is not going to work. The exhaust has to go up over this and kind of travel down the drive shaft to go out the back so if you're doing this and the rear suspension at the same time, it would be dumb to complete the installation and then order your exhaust system. As far as the install, it's pretty straight forward, take you around three hours, be back on the road in no time.