CAM-T Falcon Wagon?

In reply to flyingmonkeybus :

Its a 17x9 wheel with a Bridgestone RE71R 245/40R17 tire.

I'm a little late on this update but we have a brake and carb solution!

First the brakes. Obviously the stock drum brakes were not going to hold up for much longer, especially with all this added power. We choose to go to 4 wheel disc brakes using Wilwoods Forged Dynapro big brake kit. We are using 6 piston front and 4 piston rear calipers. The rear even has parking brakes! 

Since we changed from drums to discs we also had to replace the stock master cylinder. We used an Wilwood aluminum master cylinder with a proportioning valve. We also added stainless steel front brake lines. 

All the new Wilwood parts laid out.

Here is the front rotor and hub assembled

The front assembled on the car with the massive 6 piston caliper!

Assembling the rear brakes. The kit requires a different bearing retainer. The old one was cut off and the new one slipped between the bearing and wheel mount flange. 

The rear assembled on the axle before the caliper and rotor were mounted.

The rear all finsihed up (minus the parking brake). We did have to remake the hard line on the axle to allow for the new placement of the caliper. 

New vs. old master cylinders

Unfortunately, the proportioning valve bracket would not fit the car without interfering with the clutch linkage so we had to relocate it in the engine bay.

Here is the simple bracket made up to mount the proportionating valve. 

Our carb solution was simple, go to fuel injection. We bought a Holley sniper EFI Stealth 4500. This system should work with our Torquestorm supercharger. This did require running another fuel line for the return system, a new fuel pump, and with all that changing we decided just to add a fuel cell to the car. 

Here is what was included in the Holley Sniper kit

For the fuel pump we once again choose Holley. This is a drop in tank fuel pump using a Walbro 255 fuel pump. It replcaes the fuel cells filler cap.

Here is the fuel cell mounted in the car. It's a 15 gallon tank from RCI. it even came with a sending unit! Unfortunately when the tank is filled with foam, the sender doesn't work too well. 

So much for an un0-cut rear floor, but we had to fill it up somehow. We cut the floor large enough so that we can remove the pump from in the car. This came in handy when the stock pump failed after a mile. Fourtuntly Holley replaced the pump for us. 

Here are the fabricated fuel cell mounting straps. We will be adding rubber to fit between the straps and the tank. 

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Here is the Holley mounted in the car. We were amazed at how easy everything was. The kit has a screen that sits in the interior. We followed the simple instructions for wiring and setting everything up on the screen and the car fired right up. It is a self learning tuning system as the car is driving but even the base tune seemed to run quite well. 

Picture of said screen.

If you rememberer back we had an issue with a high RPM fuel starving issue using the home made blow through carb setup. This problem disappeared with the Holley kit. The car has been running quite well with the EFI. Our next steps are to dyno it as is and then build the engine up a little more. 

Now for the weights!

Stock front discs

Wilwood fronts (missing brake pads)

Stock Rears

Wilwood Rears

Stock master cylinder

Wildwood Master cylinder and proportioning valve 

Our past experience with disc brake conversions added weight to the car, We were very happy to see some weight come off the car with this modification. 

We've been behind on updates but we're at the CAM Challenge at Grissom this weekend.  Anyone else going to be here?  

It's fun when another wagon shows up. 

Love this thread.  What other suspension changes do you have planned?

Mr_Asa said:

Love this thread.  What other suspension changes do you have planned?

Jack's been way too slow to update this build thread.  Last summer, just before the Grissom CAM Challenge, he put Ridetech coilovers in the front and a Ridetech triangulated 4 link with coilovers in the rear.  The rear setup was for a 1967 Mustang and took more modification that we had hoped.  I'll pester him to write it up for this build thread.  I'll be writing it up for GRM in print as well.

Definitely interested in those, I'm trying to determine what I want to do with my '67 Mustang's suspension.

The rear setup was for a 1967 Mustang and took more modification that we had hoped.  I'll pester him to write it up for this build thread.  I'll be writing it up for GRM in print as well.

I’ve often considered a Mustang 3 or 4 link as a starting point for my wagon, but guessed that it’d still take a good amount of fabrication to adapt it to the Falcon chassis.  Looking forward to some detail on how things went, and it’s good to see this thread active again,

Life long love of falcons, and wagons. 
had forgot about this one till I clicked over from the lawn kart thread. Enjoyed reading it again!

In reply to 03Panther :

Since you popped this back to the front page, I read it again too and see that it's out of date.  I'll pester Jack to update it or more likely just add some pictures and updates myself.

Wow, we really left out some good stuff from this build thread.  As the thread shows, Jack did the electric power steering, Wilwoods, seats, etc over the Winter/Spring of 2019. 

In May of 2019, the clutch was slipping, so we planned to pull the engine to replace the clutch. Why pull the engine and not the just the trans? Because we thought we'd put a cam and some aluminum heads on the engine and get some more power.   But when we pulled the heads, we saw some pretty bad wear in the cylinder walls, so the whole engine came apart. It turned out the block was already overbored (can't remember how much) and would have needed sleeves to be used.  So we found another block and got it machined.  Our machine shop does a lot of Ford stuff and recommended some new Chinese rods they liked as well as the Chinese aluminum heads and a pretty mild cam that would go with the supercharger. Bottom line is we planned a very budget engine build with the Chinese parts. I don't have the details handy, but I think it was around $3000 for the machine work and all the parts. Jack assembled it all as the pictures below show.

In addition to the rebuild parts like pistons, rods, timing chain, bearings, cam, heads, and so on, we went for a baffled oil pain to try to keep from oil starving on corners. The clutch was tricky because we're using a Toploader from a Galaxy, which has a larger input shaft than other Toploaders and there are not a lot of clutch options.  We went with a Hays unit that's basically stock.  More on that later. 

Jack's pretty good at talking me into helping him do a pretty big job shortly before an event. We never pull all nighters and are always done a few days before the event, but the weeks leading up the event are definitely thrashes.  We did this work in May, 2019 and the event was probably some autocross, but I remember we were running out of time when we put the engine and trans back in.

If you look closely, you'll see the reason we didn't put the intake on was because we didn't have pushrods.  We of course had to use custom length pushrods and didn't have them in time, so we did what we could do.

I think we got them a day or two after the engine went in and started putting it all together after setting the initial valve lash.

You also may notice that in one picture there is tape over the distributor hole and in another there isn't. Somewhere along the way while we were dropping the engine in, we dropped a bolt and couldn't find it on the floor anywhere.  We were pretty nervous that we'd dropped it in the distributor hole, but not nervous enough to pull the engine out and pull the oil pan.

Now for the drama: We had spun the engine over several times while were building it and it was just fine. Before we put the ancillaries on the engine, we thought we'd prime the oil pump, then spin it over and make sure we had good oil pressure. The oil pump primed just fine, but the engine would spin 359 degrees and stop.

We thought we knew where the bolt was.

So we pulled the engine/trans back out and prepared to pull the oil pan to find the bolt. But during the pull, we found the bolt on the floor near one of the hoist bases.  So our stray bolt theory wasn't valid anymore.

More drama ensued.  We could turn the engine over by hand with a socket on the crank pulley, but if we spun it with the starter it stopped at 359 degrees. Jack heard a scraping sound, so we had a clue.

The car uses a scattershield because that's what came with the fairly rare Galaxy Toploader and we couldn't find conventional bellhousing. The machine shop had installed a new (likely Chinese) ring gear on the flywheel when they resurfaced and lightened it for us. 

The ring gear was hitting the scattershield in one spot and causing the issue. It was no fun pulling the drivetrain out to deal with this, but much better than taking the engine apart again. We did a little work with a die grinder to get some clearance, put the drivetrain back in, and all was good.

Here's the engine with everything else back in place.  We added the catch can as there is more blow-by than we expected under boost and we still need to tidy up the wiring a bit.

In case anyone is wondering about weight differences between iron and aluminum heads, we checked.

Not sure if we had spark plugs in the aluminum heads or not, but they're probably less than a pound,

This is the dyno graph we previously posted of the engine when it was a worn out pickup truck engine with the supercharger.

I can't find the DynoJet data with the graphs from the new engine, but my notes say we made about 320 HP at the wheels, with good power above 5000 RPM.  Much better than 211HP and dying above 4300 RPM. 

We had one dyno session when I forgot to download the data from the dyno shop (Capizzi Automotive) and I think this was the one.  I'll edit this post when I get the data/graph.

We weren't really expecting 320 at the wheels with the fresh engine, a conservative tune, and the lowest boost pulley we had, so we were really happy.  We think we'll be able to get it up at least 50 HP, maybe more, with more boost and a less conservative tune.  We still haven't done anything to get the additional HP as we've moved on to some other projects, but we'll get back to the Falcon sooner or later.  

The car is still in the 3300-3400lb range and I'll say that it has a very nice power to weight ratio that pins you back nicely. I think we'd need a lot more tire to use much more power.

That is awesome. Beautiful work, and glad to see it pat off on the dyno. 
Depresses me some, seeing a good budget build coming at at very much way over anything I could afford to spend on a toy; but that's my fault for putting builds off years back. 20 years ago, I never imagined I'd be this broke for the rest of my life. 
Great to get to live vicariously through guys on here!!!

Wagons Rule. 

I mentioned that before the 2019 Grissom CAM Challenge, we'd installed a Ridetech suspension.  Here are some details.

I'm a little foggy, but I know we were on a thrash again. We ran an event at Grissom a few weeks before the CAM Challenge with the new engine but the original suspension. Ridetech had given us an offer we couldn't refuse to switch to their suspension, but we got pretty last minute and had a lot of work to do before the CAM Challenge.  We sent them the corner weights of the car and some dimensions and goals. They thought their 1967 Mustang stuff would work with some modifications and they sent us a kit of parts.

Looking back on e-mails, I know the Ridetech parts showed up on July 25, 2019 and we had the car back on the ground a few days before the CAM Challenge on August 9. Again, a thrash but no all-nighters and done with a few days to spare.

The good news was that we had a lot of high quality parts. But they didn't fit a 1967 Falcon wagon nearly as well as they fit a 1967 Mustang.

Here's some detail on the front coilovers. 

Jack made these adapters.

The larger adapters went on the bottom.

Some clearancing was necessary on the shock towers.

And my memory is a bit foggy here, but I think the smaller adapters went on the top of the coilover assembly and through the newly-clearanced shock towers.  I'll try to add some photos soon with more detail.

While the front coilovers were pretty simple with those adapters, the rear was a lot of work and head scratching. 

If you have a Mustang, this subframe bolts into some existing holes between the unibody rails. If you have a Falcon Wagon, the holes aren't there and the unibody rails aren't the same width.  So you cut a beautiful, brand new subframe apart and get to work.

Jack built these adapters to go into the subrame and give us something to weld to the Falcon rails.

Jack was thrashing faster than I could take pictures, so I'll just say the subframe got mounted. I'll also say it was really frustrating to get it square. I don't have my notes, but I remember that when we had the wheelbase constant side to side, the diagonals were like an inch different. If we got the diagonals close, the wheelbase was way off side to side.  I think we settled by splitting the difference. Build quality was really bad in the 1960s. We've done a lot of chassis repairs at Eclectic on muscle cars and those types of variances are fairly common. And unsettling.

Jack built some dummy shocks to establish ride height so we could set the pinion angle and get the mounts on the rear axle. 

He got them tacked in and of course some brake line rerouting was necessary.

It's nice to have a hoist and some big, strong tables.  We ran the suspension through its travel to make sure all was good.

After that, the axle came out for finish welding. Somewhere along the way, we put an Eaton Trutrac limited slip in the 8" differential.  A lot of people ask why we didn't go to a 9."  Our driveline subcontractor thinks the 8" is good for 450-500HP, so we went for the weight-savings of the 8." Plus we had the 8" so that saved a fair amount of money.

Back to some overall pictures of the car. This is the stance and look before the 2019 CAM Challenge.

Somewhere along the timeline, our friend Nick decided that American five spokes needed dark centers and he repainted the silver ones for us. Much better.

We decided to run the car at the 2019 Solo Nationals. By the time we registered, the number 24 was taken, so we ended up with 67 (and 167) since it's a 1967 Falcon.  Nick put the numbers in meatballs for a new look.

I'm only a mid-pack driver but Jack and my younger emergency backup son Chris are pretty decent drivers so Chris co-drove with Jack at both the CAM Challenge and the Solo Nats in 2019.  I foolishly thought it would be a great family event. It sort-of was, except Jack and Chris are very very very (did I mention very) competitive. So no matter what, one would beat the other, and the one who got beat did not like it. And there I stood between them. Anyway, despite the rivalry, this is one my favorite pictures of them sitting on the tailgate of the fastest station wagon at the 2019 Solo Nats.

03Panther said:

That is awesome. Beautiful work, and glad to see it pat off on the dyno. 
Depresses me some, seeing a good budget build coming at at very much way over anything I could afford to spend on a toy; but that's my fault for putting builds off years back. 20 years ago, I never imagined I'd be this broke for the rest of my life. 
Great to get to live vicariously through guys on here!!!

Wagons Rule. 

Regarding the budget, the original build was something like $2500 in the car and pickup engine and Toploader plus the new wheels and tires (maybe $1200 more?).  Since Jack and I have a lot of connections, a lot of the parts for the subsequent improvements were discounted, sometimes heavily. But the car is no longer a budget build (maybe the engine was).  All the good stuff made the car faster, but not in proportion to the spend. That's pretty much the nature of performance--the next fractional increase costs almost exponentially more than the previous increase.  The initial suspension mods plus the tires made a huge difference and everything else only made incremental improvements.

Thanks for the update! I've poked my head under my wagon and compared it to '67 Mustangs in the past and came away thinking there is much less in common than you'd guess. Seeing how y'all struggled with adapting this 4 link kit has only made up my mind further; I'll be sticking to leaf springs, thanks.

One thing I'm curious about is how it changed the handling of the car.  Perhaps Jack can answer that better than you can, but was it enough of a difference that you'd say it was worth the effort?

Either way, I will say that it looks berkleying cool.  Great work going into this project as always!

In reply to jerrysarcastic (dork in training) :

It changed the handling for the better to be sure, but you're right that we need Jack to chime in with his assessment. I'll pester him to do that. 

This is a photo that someone unnamed person took that floated around the internet after (I think) the 2019 Solo Nationals while it was still on leaf springs. I swear the inside tire was up about 10" sometimes. People loved it watching it wag the tail and lift the tire, but Jack and Chris thought it was a pig to drive.

Maybe Perry Bennet has some good photos of the car running with the new suspension for comparison. I know it still picked up the wheel. We played with springs and a lot of other settings and couldn't get it down much. Jack thinks it's the chassis flexing and I wanted to figure out some ways to measure that, but we haven't been autocrossing it since the 2020 CAM Challenge.  More on that soon.

So this post will pretty much bring us up to the present. At the 2020 CAM Challenge, the car was certainly faster and handled better, but it still wasn't as competitive as we would have liked it. Most of the other cars had upped their game just like us, so nearly everyone was faster, which was cool, but we started to think, this is a lot of work to take a cool wagon and turn it into a race car that's not that driveable on the street anymore.  We considered finding a way to get more tire under the car, and test fitted some 315s or something like that since our 245s were just too small. Then, they moved more Camaros and Fox Bodies from CAM-C to CAM-T. I don't want to get into that debate (it's all over the internet anyway), but Jack decided the wagon is cooler as a wagon than a race car, plus he was getting ready to go road racing, so he's put the stock seats back in, taken off most of the stickers and will probably soften it a bit for comfortable street driving.

The car is pretty much on the back burner for now and getting driven occasionally. I'd guess we'll bench race sometime again and figure out what its next iteration will be. We've talked about trying drag racing with it at some point, but for now it's a fast, fun wagon on the street.