We're off to Palm Springs for a week, golf in 105-degree heat (pure genius); the spouse doesn't seem to mind that I'm on and off the cell phone to vendors half of the 700-mile drive.

A couple phone calls to Ken at Eaton Detroit Spring produced an order for replacement front springs at 494 lb/in - 35% stiffer than stock, about what I was looking for, though Ken seemed to think they were likely to be too stiff. We'll see who's right; I'll worry about the rear springs and getting things balanced out once I see how the front end works.

Contact Greg Donahue Collector Car Restorations. They're about the only ones that list the big Ford parts books in their ad. $175; still, they're pretty much indispensable I figure. Order the books and a couple other bits.

Contacted Performance Suspension Technology regarding suspension bits. Yes, they have a kit for it. Yes, the parts are supposed to be Moog or TRW. What's in it? Ball joints, upper-arm pivots, outer tie-rod ends. No inner tie-rod ends, no lower control-arm bushings, no anti-roll bar bushings or end links, no idler arm bushings. Still, the price is okay for what it includes. KYB gas shocks available for both ends? Yes, well, no, only the front. I order the kit and the front shocks.

I've got a few things stockpiled as well: power steering hoses, idler arm bushings that were in the car when it came back from Illinois. Some 30-year-old fan belts - not likely I'll use THOSE, thank you. And I'd like to issue a hearty 'Thank You!' to the individual who donated a complete set of perfectly good, corrosion-free Hella quad 5 3/4" round H4/H1 headlights to a local thrift shop about a year ago; I got the complete set for $8.

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Back from vacation; golf in 105-degree heat proved to be a really good idea, as almost no one else was out there and we own big hats.

Moving the vessel is, at present, a hazardous endeavor; the carburetor's utterly shot and hemorrhages fuel from various places when the engine's started. Not good. Contact Pony Carburetor; $195 with a $90 core charge; reasonable enough for quality work, but it'd still be a smallish Autolite 4100 full of rubber bits. Time to consider other options.

Parts are arriving. The big books from Donahue show up. The package from PST arrives. The kit bits look to be of decent quality, though the only parts that say where they're made are the tie-rod ends whose bags say Made In Italy. The upper-arm pivots are definitely TRW design though the origin isn't specified on the part. Notes packed with the KYB shocks indicate that they're also intended for '63-67 Corvettes. Typical KYB - build one shock and sell it for every car it'll physically bolt into - good quality but hit-and-miss on the calibration. We'll see how these work out... meanwhile I'm trying to think about some way to make the '96 Impala SS Bilsteins fit.

A little more research indicates that the bits the PST kit didn't include (inner tie-rod ends and lower control-arm pivot kits) will cost me at least $140 a side, and the inner control-arm bushings on the car are completely shot. Figure I'll try to find them locally. The lower control-arm front pivots in the '63-64 models are truly a bizarre design, wrong in a whole lot of important ways. The 427s and police/taxi models had a simplified pivot layout with much better geometry. Can I find the parts to do this and will they fit the stock non-fuzz lower arms?

The springs arrive. The spouse conveniently ignores the 75-pound box the UPS guy left at the front door. Seriously stout coils. She continues to ignore the box when it's placed in the corner of the dining-room floor.

More random hours spent stripping, inventorying, labeling parts. I need to make the thing moveable.

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Drum brakes scare me. And the prospects for putting discs on the MS Galaxie are not clear. I suppose I could find some shop to make some brackets to put big Wilwood or PBR calipers on there, but I'd settle for OEM-level brakes if the packaging were simpler. Posts on the Fordnatics mailing list turn up a suggestion to try late-'60s big-Ford spindles - a reasonable idea if I could make time to get to the junkyard with wrench and pickle-fork in hand.

Meanwhile, I spend an hour scrounging the street-rod magazines at Tower Books. Tucked away in the back of Popular Hot Rodding, an ad from Master Power Brakes. New! 55-70 Ford Disc Conversion! Sounds flaky; I know a '56 is nothing like the later models. Squint harder: looks like OEM stuff. Call them up: ad is screwed up, it's '57-72, makes more sense. They ARE 1970ish Ford spindles. Price? $995 including master cylinder, booster, bellcrank assembly, proportioning valve, etc. and everything but the calipers (and the spindles, I suspect) are new. Scratch head, consider junkyard; have to rebuild or exchange every piece except the spindles and maybe the rotors. I pull out the American Airlines Visa card - the spouse gripes less if she gets the miles.

Begin sorting through the Ford parts books, making the wish list. Start rounding up phone, FAX, email addresses for potential used and NOS parts vendors.

A little idle thought on what to do about wheels once the new brakes go on: I have a pair of 15x8.5-inch American 200S wheels sitting in the garage, and could probably find another pair. Torq-Thrust Ds, Halibrand Sprints, fat steel wheels are all suitably retro. But none of these are available in a 16-inch size, and there are very few really good-quality large 15-inch tire sizes. One 16-inch candidate: the local tire shop manages to come up with a catalog entry for 16x8-inch Panasports in two different offsets.

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