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It's been four months since I posted an update-again? Oh well.
It's been a productive few months, just not on the Galaxie. I've cleaned out the garage, built a couple of workbenches, built some shelves and gotten some of the mess up and out of the way, bought a compressor and plumbed air to within ten feet of just about everywhere in the garage, bought a MIG welding rig and made a lot of useless metal sculpture practicing. I've done brake- line work on the Taurus, driveshaft work on the Mustang, and so on.
The body is back on the frame temporarily - I wanted to get all the Panhard rod and trailing link bracketry on the frame before it goes for painting or powder-coating, which means making and installing the bracketry, which means cutting and trial-fitting it all, and I decided this was best done with the body in place to ensure no clearance problems. To be able to get everything to fit correctly, I've made a pair of spring-compressor-like devices of 1/2" threaded rod - plus a couple hardware-store forged eyebolts and bronze bushings - to pull the suspension down to normal ride height via the shock mounts.
The Panhard rod will be a garden-variety '82-92 Camaro piece - for trial fitting I'm using a stamped-steel stocker from the boneyard, when complete I may go for an aftermarket tubular piece with urethane end bushings (I don't want spherical rod-ends for a lot of reasons, but it's important that the Panhard bushings be stiffer than the spring-eye bushings to maintain proper axle location.)
The frame mount for the Panhard rod is a piece of 2.5" square x .120 wall mild steel tubing, notched to fit onto the right-hand frame rail - pictures to follow once the parts are cleaned up a bit. It will be diagonally braced to the left frame rail with 1.5" square mild steel tube. This is all fitting up almost better than I could have hoped, clearance between Panhard, rear axle, and gas tank aren't a problem - though I don't envy the job of whoever I get to plumb the exhaust around all this stuff.
The Camaro Panhard rod is very, very long - overall, this is a good thing, but it may be too long for my application. If I use it at stock length the axle mount will end up on top of the leaf spring at the left side - not only is this a very fiddly place to attach a mount to the axle, but it may also interfere with parking brake cable routing to the rear brakes. Shortening the bar about 4" will allow the axle mount to be moved just inboard of the spring perch, simplifying the mounting arrangements. A picture would be worth a thousand words here - maybe by next update all the parts will be ready to go together.
The trailing links will be, as I may have mentioned before, mounted under the leaf springs Traction Master-style. They will be made from cut-down junkyard Saab 900 Panhard rods, with the mounts from the front end of Saab 900 rear-suspension leading arms grafted onto their rear (axle) ends. I've started to trial-fit the brackets, but once again it's all too rough yet for a photo to do much good.