Coilover Replacment process

8 bolts total. 1 each top & bottom of each shock. removal & replacement is a piece of cake.

Good luck
Gary #06984

fordgt....Thanks for the reply, along with the good news!


Bob

OK......looks like the assembly (front) wont swing low enough to get the top of the coilover out. (I did remove the sway bracket to get a bit more lowering)....

Do I just need to pop the lower balljoint, or possibly the tierod end is the deal?(just cant get it out of the top mount "cradle" enough to make the swing)

Or........obviously I'm just wrench-challenged


Bob

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

What might the torque specs be on the balljoints?

(this is reminding me of when i did the front of the 928)


Bob

I've recently finished this upgrade.

I'm writing an article with pictures on the topic.
It is not as easy as 8 bolts, and not as hard as Jack's first paragraph.

I hope to be finished very soon.

Chuck

Sorry, Bob, I guess it has been awhile since I had the fronts out and now that I've read Jack's post I guess it is a little more difficult than I remembered. I think my confusion was that I completely disassembled my suspension when I did my restoration project a couple years ago. I have not taken the fronts out since but I have had the rears out a couple times and they are just the 2 bolts each. Again my apologies, I hope I didn't cause you too much undue grief on your project.

Gary

Bob, as far as torque specs on any ball-joint studs, the amount of torque is less important than the fact that they should have a cotter-pin inserted to mechanically lock the nut after its wrenched tight. The initial tightening jams the tapered stud into a matching tapered hole and this is what actually takes all the loads. So I tighten them "firmly" to set the stud, then either add or subtract torque to align one castellation to the drilled hole for the pin.

Jack.....Actually what I ended up doing was to pop out the lower carrier bolts, and the sway cap bolts......and that gave me plenty of room to swing the lower A. (although taking out the top would have probably been easier, then to put the base of the new coilover in first)......

...and my, my, my.......they were crusty..