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Much progress, no pictures yet. Sorry.
The body is back on the frame. It took a Sunday of unpacking and repacking the garage to make room to work around the car, and a couple evenings of jacking and propping to get the frame properly aligned under the body, but the body is now bolted back onto the frame. It also took a couple orders of bolts and washers from McMaster-Carr to get all the mountings sorted out. I decided to use bolts long enough to run all the way through the factory hat-nuts, allowing me to put an additional washer and self-locking nut on the bottom as insurance against any failure of the Ford stamped-metal threads.
The shortblock is on the stand, and there's a large pile of parts underneath and around it. Alas, I'm missing a front cover and a couple other key parts that will only come from a day of junkyard digging. The prospect of filling the garage with junkyard accessory brackets is so terrifying that by the time of the next update I'll probably own a $100 beadblasting cabinet. The shortblock as it arrived from the builder didn't have a rear cam plug; he'd had some trouble getting the right one, and shipped it separately. No big deal, but my mechanism for installing the plug with the shortblock on the stand pushed it in a little bit far. I need to make sure it's not too far, and redo it if necessary while I can still stick a rod down the cam bore to knock it loose.
After collecting a couple cheap 429 pans off eBay, I went the other direction and bought a new Canton 15-764 gated-and-baffled 7-quart pan for the thing. This requires a Melling M-84D Econoline-type oil pump. So the previously-acquired Melling 429CJ pump joins the stack of never-to-be-used stuff in the side bedroom that I'm starting to list on eBay. Some Canton pan owners have complained that their quality control isn't what it needs to be, and that they produce more than their share of leaky welds; I have a Canton pan on the Mustang, and it's been fine. This one appears good; some of the sheetmetal edges inside the pan could be cleaner, but the welds look good and everything appears to be where it should be.
Betts Spring doesn't answer their email, so if they weren't local I wouldn't have bothered with them. But they were strongly recommended by some fellow Nor Cal Shelby Club members, and they turned out to be very helpful on the phone. I called up to inquire about a new set of rear springs, and three days later I had them in hand. My plan is still to rework them by removing the insulators from the front halves, then shrinking heavy-gauge steel clips around the leaves to essentially eliminate flex in the front half of the spring, turning it into a trailing arm as recommended by Carroll Smith in Tune To Win. I'll remove the smallest of the five leaves while I'm at it, since the clipping will leave the spring stiffer than it otherwise would be and I don't want super-stiff rear springs. I'm still trying to figure out a reasonable way to build a leaf-spring rate measurement tool.
There's a guy who was selling a complete '64 frame on eBay. He's in Michigan, which makes it all a little impractical; I'd love to have the thing, start working on Suspension Rev 2 with some C4 'Vette front control arms and a torque-arm coilover rear suspension, or maybe an E38 BMW 7-series rear subframe. But I really need to concentrate on finishing Rev 1 first...
...and that means finding the front springs. One of the biggest problems I face at this point is one of organization. When dismantling the car, and boxing up the old parts and various new parts that I didn't expect to need for a while, I was very careful with the packaging. I was, alas, less careful with the recordkeeping of just what parts are in what box, in which room on which shelf/stack. A stack of notepaper was long ago supposed to have been transcribed into a database, but it never was, and some of the notes are now gone. So, an equally long time ago, I'd ordered a set of new 500 lb/in front springs. They're around here somewhere, but I may have to bulldoze the house to the ground to find them.