Hot Rod Homepage

UPDATE: The Build up of the Drift Fox 5.0 Mustang has MOVED to www.drift50.com

Before I begin to detail the roll cage installation in my 1990 Mustang GT, I just want to state that this was not a one day installation. I have really cut down this page to the basics. Building a cage from scratch requires a significant amount of time in the design phase. Careful measurements must be made of all the dimensions of your car, then you need to calculate the angles and locations of all bends. Once you finish planing out the cage you have to strip out the interior and prep the metal in the areas where you will be attaching you foot plates. Then the foot plates themselves must be contoured to match the floor of the car. This takes a significant amount of time and I did not want to misrepresent that fact due to the small number of pictures that I have in this article.

The next step is to bend up the main hoop. For this cage the main hoop is the only section that will require bending. Before bending the final hoop out of .125 DOM I practiced on a stick of ERW.

Here is a better shot of the tubing bender. Thanks to Steve McClenon at Hotrods to Hell for letting me use his bending equipment and for lending me some guidance.

Here is a shot of the main hoop after I finished my final bend. The only thing left at this point was to trim down the legs of the main hoop. Since I had already done a mock up hoop out of ERW this step was easy.

Here is a shot of the cage mocked up in the car before final welding. You can see the foot plates in this picture. I chose the location for the rear spreader bar so that the foot plates would tie the rear upper shock mounts, the wheel tubs, and the top of the rear spring perches together. The spreader bar itself works like a massive shock tower brace. I was able to feel a dramatic difference with only the rear foot plates and spreader bar in place. Yes I took it for a test lap to see how much of a difference it made, before the rest of the cage was welded in. Even if you are not considering a cage, the rear spreader bar is a good idea.

When I chose the Fox Mustang as my basis for a drift car I viewed the cars light weight as a major advantage. Less weight means less car for the engine to accelerate, smaller brake requirements, and lower spring rates, and small swaybars. Since this car will still serve as a daily driver I will be retaining the Heat and A/C as well as the Radio.

Freebies:

Stereo (~35 lbs)
No impact on comfort or drivability. The car came to me with an aftermarket stereo that had 2 subs in the rear hatch, 3 amplifiers, and EQ and a CD changer. The first action that I took was to remove all of this. When I placed everything, including all the RCAs, power wires, etc it weighted in at just over 40lbs. The Kenwood CD player that I replaced it wil weighs 5 lbs. This was the most painful and involved process that I have yet to undertake on the Mustang project. The reason for the difficulty was the method by which the old stereo had been installed. The installed had paid little attention to the function of the factory wiring loom and simply tapped into power at the fuse box and added their own loom for the stereo. I can understand doing this for a very high end system, but high end this system was not. I had to spend about 2 hour removing the aftermarket stuff, but then spent another 3 hour repairing the factory loom that had been cut in numerous places.

Alarm (~5 lbs)
Depends on how you feel about car alarms and their effectiveness. My next action was to remove the aftermarket car alarm that had been installed in the car. I have been driving cars from the 60’s my entire life and I don’t care much for car alarms, and have learned to operate a manual door lock, so for me this was a no-brainer. The noise maker part of the alarm was probably the heaviest part and in my opinion the least useful, so you could probably just remove that and get most of the weight saving while retaining all of the “useful” alarm functions. All that I need to remove the alarm system was a pair of snips, a screw driver and a crimp connection to repair the ignition kill and door lock circuits that the alarm system tapped into. If you are not comfortable around electronics, I would recommend picking up a wiring diagram for your specific car to make sure you know what each wire does.

Rear Seats (~40lbs)
None but a wee man could fit back there anyhow. All the brackets, seatbelts, fold down covers, hardware and the seats themselves start to add up quickly. The back seat in a Mustang is a joke anyhow.

GT driving lights (~15lbs)
No impact on comfort and drivability. The support for the driving lights on the GT Mustang are not only heavy, but located about as far forward on the car as possible. Mustangs are already nose heavy and do not need additional help. The removal was quick and easy with basic hand tools.

Rear Swaybar(~ 5lbs)
I am not a big fan of rear bars, ask Ryan Hampton, I fought with him about it on the rear of the Formula D Camaro. I feel swaybars are band-aids and do not address the core of handling issues. The rear swaybar on the Fox Mustangs is mounted between the two lower arms of the triangulated 4-link and in my opinion simply serves to make an unsatisfactory rear suspension even worse. I like the feel of the car much more with the swaybar removed, but like the Moose Balls, the bar can be easily re-installed to take it off and see what you think.

Still free, but the car becomes a little more Spartan and a bit louder:

Moose Balls (~10lbs)
Supposedly this thing has an impact on NVH, but I could not tell a difference. On the 8.8 rearend Ford has placed a huge cast iron weight that is mounted to the center section with rubber isolators. My research into the part uncovered that it is intended to eliminate certain types of driveline harmonic vibrations, but I was unable to detect any difference with it removed. This was an easy removal and can be re-installed in just a couple of minutes.

Carpet, Jute padding, sills, plastic interior cladding, and extra dashboard and kick panel covers (~25 lbs)
The car is quite a bit louder inside, but I can still talk in the car without having to yell.
At first I removed everything, but the whine of the electric fuel pump was a bit too much for me so I put the heavy jute padding that covers the spare tire area back into the car. The good thing about this piece is that it only takes about 5 seconds to remove at the track so keeping it in the car is not a real weight penalty. I would just make sure that if you do any scaling of the car make sure to remove it as you want you setup optimized to race conditions and not street driving conditions. The car is still a whole lot quieter then my ‘66 Chevelle.

Sun Visors (~2lbs)
They kept falling down and blocking my field of vision. I want to rant a bit here. I have very little love for sun visors, especially those with little vanity mirrors, besides adding weight up high in the car they encourage makeup application whilst driving. They simply must go.

Some stuff I did not remove:
Headliner (~3lbs) I think that the negligible weight is not worth the increase in cabin temperature.
Console (~6lbs) A car with no place to put cell phones, change, etc. is no fun to drive around town.
Windshield washer fluid bottle.(~2lbs) It is located mostly underneath fender which would take quite a while to remove. I figure just leave it empty when it is time to hit the track.

Summary:

In total I removed around 125lbs and the car is still quite civil on the street. At the track the spare tire, tire area cover, and jack can be pulled out for another 25lbs. The tire itself is a light weigh aluminum unit. Some of the weight that has been removed will simply offset the weight of the roll cage that I plan to install, but I am pulling weight from areas that in no way help performance and putting it into something that does.

I do not currently have a set of corner scales so my only way to get a weight for the car is to go to LACR and hit the scales, I hope that I will have a chance to do this soon to get a baseline weight.

Looking Ahead:
Basically that is about it for the simple “bolt off” weight removal. The next step is to attempt to lighten up some parts where I can. After that it will start to cost money to save weight. The only major purchases I have planned is a lift-off fiberglass hood and moving the battery into the rear passenger area. This will help with both weight removal and weight distribution. One more future possibility would be a lexan rear window, but I have not made a decision on that yet. I will also be removing the quad shocks once I work out a better rear suspension setup for the car.

Summary
Since my high school days I have wanted a Fox body Mustang. Last week I finally got my hands on one. A 1990 Mustang GT with a 5-speed. The car has 140,000 miles on the odometer, but other than fading paint, the car is in strong mechanical shape and should serve as a good starting point for a buildup.

I have big plans for the car and will be documenting the buildup here on the Hot Rod Homepage. My goal is to build a street drivable car that I can take out to some local Drift Day and Just Drift events and have a good time in. So far there are not a lot of Fox Mustangs out in the drifting community, but I think that I bound to change once someone does the initial legwork and developes a proven recipie to making one work well. Vaughn Gitten Jr and Ken Gushi have had great success with their ‘05 Mustangs, but for the average guy that just wants a car that he can have some fun in without breaking the bank, taking a brand new Mustang and converting it into a track car, is simply not a reasonable option.

To quickly get to this article simple type www.drift50.com into your browser.
Articles:

• Drift Fox Cage
• Drift Fox Diet: Stage I
• …

Why did I choose a Fox Mustang:

1. Cheap
2. Plentiful
3. Lightweight
4. Strong Aftermarket support
5. Junkyards provide cheap replacement parts.
6. Nostalgia

My requirements for this Buildup:

1. Car must remain smog legal - Many people choose to ignore this, or have a friend that knows a guy that can get a car passed smog, but I have been there and do not care for the headaches.
2. Car must remail streetable - This car is my only means of getting to work and back home, so things like solid motor mounts, steel clutch disks, and welded differentials are not going to work.
3. Nothing exotic too used in buildup - I am going to keep this car NA, turbos and superchargers are nice, but they add a degree of complexity that can quickly get out of hand.

I intend to give it my 100% effort and document my success and failure here on the Hot Rod Homepage.

Fox Mustang Internet Resources:*

1. Corner Carvers Message Board - A lot of useful Mustang suspension information on the site. Word of Warning: No Drifting Discussion on Corner Carvers
2. The Corral - Big Mustang Forum with a lot of good information, but you have to do a little digging to find the goods.
3. A bunch of technical information and wiring diagrams

*This list is very much a work in progress, if you have a good resource let me know.