Mustang 4-Link

Today on muscle car, it's back half time. We'll help horsepower's Mustang hook up with a four link coil over kit. Then it's a rare dart that could have used a four link back in 68 Mr

Norms. Ultra hot

gss.

You know, I had no idea what I wanted to do this week. Not a clue. So I decided to come out here to the power block staging area for a little bit of inspiration.

These are finished projects,

current projects.

Oh, yeah. And some future projects

and some projects that have more bars than since.

And as I suspected I found what I was looking for horse power Mustang build up.

You just watched Joe and Mike take a stop 92 LX with only 100 and 91 horsepower at the rear wheel. The goal find out how much power they could get with a $1400 budget. The results are respectable 32 horsepower game

in the coming weeks. They're gonna live up to their name.

They're upgrading the clutch suspension

brakes, a 373 eating positive unit in the rear and all that. Just to find how much power this small block could make

starting with a bigger cam aluminum twisted wedge heads, a high performance intake manifold and of course 100 and 25 shot of nitrous the result almost 380 horsepower at the road.

I saw the show, man. You guys made some pretty good numbers with this thing. It's actually a little too much power for the set up right now. Yeah, I was looking at that. You're tearing it up on that lip there, man. It ain't good. I can help you with that, you know. Well, we were in a four link it and back after the rear end and that, but we just don't have the time.

Well, you know what? It just so happens. I'm looking for a light project this week and I think I can help you out.

You wanna get it in the shop or what? Yeah, that'll be good.

You may not classify this pony car as a true muscle car,

but it's a car with muscle and that's good enough for me.

No, I'm not Buddha and I'm not sitting here meditating. I'm getting ready to explain something to you guys because it's really important in what we're gonna do.

Our Mustang over there has a triangulated four link. Now, they've been around a long time, but there is actually a more efficient method, a

parallel for

link for what we wanna do. Drag race, go fast

if you take a car and you the strip and when it launches it'll twist and take off, that's wasting energy. It's kinetic energy it's going to waste because you're using power to twist the car. You want the car to squat

and go forward. That's where you're maximizing all your power. If it's not getting into the rear wheels, which is getting to the pavement, you're wasting your time and it's slower.

My cell phone is my engine and this is my car because I'm no artist. So I gotta use what I got. Remember back in the day when you were riding your old Schwinn Sting Ray and you had your handlebars too far forward. You couldn't pop that wheelie because all the weight was over the front wheel. If you rock them back, it was real easy to go backwards because all the weight was on the rear wheel. The same,

same basic idea with a four L.

If I find center of gravity of my car

and I pull two strings on my top and bottom bar, they should intersect at

the center of gravity on my car.

So if I had my bar too high

and I pulled my strings, my intersect point would be right here, which would keep the front of the car

from coming up.

If I had it too far down like this,

my intersect point is gonna be here which will make the front wheels come up quicker. So you need to find a happy medium. My neutral point which is my center of gravity on the car. So the car will come up just a little bit and go straight and that's what we wanna do with A four L

and here's how I'm gonna do it. I'm gonna use this Comp engineering magnum Force four link.

Now, you can buy a full rear section that's all set up for your mustang. And that's ok. But I'm gonna make my own using this 0 83 wall two by three tubing. And I'll explain that to you later.

But I gotta get the way.

Now, the trick is, is to be careful when you're taking this thing apart because a lot of this stuff is gonna get reused like these panels, I'll probably put back in

and then do whatever sheet metal work I gotta do around it. So it looks factory. It'll look cool.

Wow,

that's that northern rust

garbage.

All this can go

check that out. The radio wasn't even bolted in.

Take it down

good.

Pull it on back

with the underside gun and the interior all stripped out after the break. You're gonna get to see some sparks cause I'm gonna cut this baby from the tail lights all the way to about here. So don't go away.

Coming up frame rails from scratch.

I'm back. You're back, Joe and Mike made a little too much power with their project Mustang. So I decided to help them out

and put a F

link under it and I'm building the frame rails from scratch

before we cut out all that sheet metal that's making that floor in that trunk. We're gonna heat up all this seam sea

so we can make room for that plasma cutter. Then we're setting this baby at ride height.

Normally, we would use a jig for a project like this, but this time we're gonna use the floor like most of you guys would do at home.

There's a lot of different ways to determine your ride height. I like to use the old calibrated eyeball to get my stance just right. So when it's sitting on the line, it looks good, then I go around with a tape measure, measure it all up, square it out, level it up. She's good to go.

Hi,

it went out.

We're cutting everything out in small pieces and we're taking our time because you don't want to cut out too much. You can always go back and remove things that are in your way later.

Hey, Mike. Yeah.

Can you reach over here?

Yeah. Where are you at?

It looks like nobody's a winner.

What do we do now?

Uh huh.

I won.

Nice.

I use my calibrated eye on that one.

Well, Mike is finishing making a pile of scrap. I'm gonna start welding together the four length bars. Now, if you remember or have ever seen four link bars, they usually come one inch 156 wall chrome Molly. Well, nowadays that's changing guys are going to screw in bungs and they're using an inch and a quarter or inch and three eights bar. 0, 95 wall. For one simple reason, you weld it in

the bar is lighter, but just as strong.

The messy part of this job out of the way. I've got my wheels right where I want them nice and secure so I can get my rear end measurement because I knew I was gonna have to narrow down that bad boy

and it's 51 and a quarter. I can start making some sparks.

Now, you've seen us do this before. Ford always uses an offset P

center on this car. We're not changing that. So all I need to do is take four and 3/8 inches from each tube and I'll have the desired measurement that I need.

Yeah,

you don't have to have a cold saw to do this, a pipe cutter or even a chop saw can do the job. But remember the goal here is to have clean 90 degree cuts all the way around

with the rear four

brackets on first, I'm using a jig to assure accurate alignment because this thing needs to be dead nuts, straight

and simple levels and squares to mimic the correct Flans locations.

Now that I've got my rear end all finished up, it's time to get some axles. All your major manufacturers have these order forms, get a couple of them and follow the simple measurements that they tell you to give them when you call them up. It makes your axle ordering experience very painless. Not to mention you'll get the right axles because once you buy them, they're yours.

Well, being at my axle is gonna take a couple days to get here. I decided to pull out these old broken ones that I had so I can stab them in here and I can keep on working.

Now that I've got my rear end and

fling in place. I can start planning out my cross member. I'm gonna come out of this rocker panel, come down and I'm gonna go straight up alongside these front brackets. So they've got a good solid weld point. Then I'm gonna go across down the brackets on the other side and then into the rocker panel and then I'll start planning out my framer

that

something that's really important. We're building this car at ride height. So your bottom bar has to be parallel to the ground. The reason for that is, is you're gonna be referencing it throughout the build. And another thing that's cool about building it this way is your four

link set up this front of the bracket is gonna tell us where that cross member is gonna go because we're gonna weld to it.

The N hr A requires that you use mounting plates at all your weld points. Why

it's simply stronger?

This is why I love building stuff from scratch, man.

It's level, all I gotta do is clamp it down, weld it up, but there's plenty more to come. So you guys better come back after the break.

Only six left in the world. The dark GSS

back in 1968 street racing was serious business. Grand spoiling Dodge out of Chicago decided,

hey, we're gonna get 48 Dodge Darts built with four forties. Those things with a ticket. The GSS was born

today's muscle car flashback. The 68 Dodge Dart Gss

back in the day, it was all about raw performance

and dealers like Mr Norms, Grands Spaulding Dodge in Chicago sold some of the fastest, strongest, most outrageous street machines they could get Detroit to build. You want to join the proud crowd with the high performance Dodge for Mr Norms. Grands spading Dodge

love to have you. And one of the most ferocious dealership specials was the 440 dgs.

It was just what street races needed. Mo Park's lightest car and their biggest engine

Chrysler yanked 48 darts off the assembly line before the engines went in. Then hurst turned around and stuffed a 440 in it.

The 383 was strong enough but the 440 had more power, more torque and more weight and a lot more attitude. It looked almost stock. Mr norm even left the 383 badges on it.

He just changed one letter made it a GSS for Grand Spalding sport.

The 440 was really big for the A body and

look how they had to hack out the fender wells just to get those pipes in there.

But

uncorking them didn't take long and then you could really go play.

The GSS was quick.

It run 12 on the street right out of the box. Just don't try and take any sharp turns with it

and don't try and make any sudden stops.

It doesn't turn at all hardly. And then you add the fender well headers and it gives you about a quarter of turn of steering before you hit the headers with the tire. So you really have to plan your move

with that much engine just pulling onto the highway. Could be a high-speed adventure

inside. It's a stock dark GTs except for that tag.

Only 48 of these were made, all of them in 68 collector Colin Coma's GSS

is the earliest of the six known survivors

and it might be the first that hurst built

Norm's cars from Grandal

and Dodge are, I mean, they're like a, a Yanko or a Baldwin or a Nicky car.

Uh, they're, they're a super car and actually Mr Norms was the only guy building Mopar

supercars.

The GSS was just too hard to handle for daily driving, too heavy up front. It wouldn't turn,

it wouldn't stop.

But with that kind of power, who cares?

Hey, see you back at the shop after we take it for another little ride

that was traction. Then this is traction. Now, more four link tech coming up.

Welcome back. We got a few minutes left, but here's what we did so far. We took Joe and Mike's overpowered Mustang, cut out the entire back half of the floor narrowed up the rear end and started building new frame rails to put in a badly needed four length set up

while you guys were gone. I've been hammering out these frame rails, something that you really wanna keep in mind. You wanna have all your cross members the same length this way, keeps everything square and nice and symmetrical

at this point. Just about everything is tacked in a place. You don't wanna weld it all up yet because the heat could distort your frame alignment

before you mount your middle cross member, you need to set up your rear shocks at 90 degrees, which is required for all four length set ups

and the cross members mounted directly over the shocks to help keep the frame from twisting.

There's a few reasons why I made my own frame rails versus buying a set of prefab ones. A lot of your prefab ones, the frame rails are closer, which moves your shocks, your link bars, everything in closer

and it's less stable to me. If you think of it as a triangle, you, you have a narrow base. If you make it wider like I did, you've got a nice wide base and it helps with that twist, which is really cool when you're launching this thing because you don't want twist. And it also makes room for your mufflers. You've got room all in there for them. You can run your pipes out the back and run them out like they're supposed to instead of dumping it out in front of the rear wheels, which gets rather annoying. To be honest with you, when you're sitting there

pounding your head, it doesn't make sense to do it that way.

And it makes room for other cool stuff like this tank. RC. I hooked us up with this thing because we're running electronic fuel injection and it's really important that you've got to pick up and a return. The reason why you have that is your fuel is circulating and it sends it back to the tank and it also helps keep your pump cool less failure because it's a cooler deal and it's got this rollover vent. God forbid you put your car on the roof. This isn't gonna let gas come out because the valve actually shuts when the tank is upside down.

Oh, yeah. See when I laid out the frame rails, I made it. So with a tank would fit between them this way. It's easier. It's got more protection and it's, you can lay out your straps with no problem.

I'm liking that it fit good.

Well, that's it. I'm out of time next week though. We're gonna do some tin work roll cage, run some fuel line. And if Mike Galley pays me his friendship dues, I might put him behind the wheel of this thing so we can see how it launches. I'm out of here later.