Reply to "Coilover Replacment process"

IMHO, adding coil-overs is a LITTLE more complicated than 8 bolts, Bob. On some cars with some shock lengths, in front you will have to unbolt the upper ball joint carriers (2 bolts each side). And since this is also the front alignment adjustment, you'll need to pay attention to the placement of shims (caster adjust) and the position of the bolts in the slotted upper a-arms (camber adjust). A good wheel aliugnment may be nessesary afterwards anyway. In the rear, removing the upper ball joint from its tapered connection is simplest and normally disturbs no alignments, although the usual rear subframe collapse may make the adjustment of the lower rear arms parallel to the ground difficult and may ultimately involve an adjustable upper brace-bar.

OK; that gets the shocks mounted in the car; now the fun begins. Assuming you got the proper spring strengths for the weight of your Pantera and its intended use, and the chassis is not severaly bent from a previous accident, you can begin to set ride height & a-arm parallelism with the threaded collars and a spanner wrench. If you are easily satisfied, once set, you're done.

But if you want to actually use all the capability built into your expensive shocks, you will begin balencing the corner weights usind a set of 4 scales, This is an iterative process that usually takes all weekend to do correctly since adjusting one wheels' ride height & load affects the other three....
Having fought your way thru this, now you get to adjust damping to tweek the handling to your standards. Both bump and rebound are normally adjustable, with a trip up & down your favorite handling-road in between each setting. This can take a week or so to get things to your liking. Bump-steer adjustment via rack height shimming might be called for as well.
What you really bought was a set of racing spring-shocks, and just like the racecar mechanics that set up Indy-cars, you can do likewise. Getting them on the car is not difficult. Getting them set as good as or better than the stockers, IS difficult or at least tedious. There are entire race prep shops that will do this job, incidently