1963 ford thunderbird control arm install#

It takes time, patience, some ingenuity, a little strength and attention to safety. It uses offset bushings, but is otherwise a simple and straight forward fix. Re: 1961 Thunderbird steering box removal. If you can imagine it rotating, this causes the control arm to move sideways, while also effecting tow in. Here's the stock control arm through bolt. This should be a required upgrade for any 1963 (I believe its actually 60-64) Galaxie.Īlong with this, I also swapped out ALL bushings front and rear, ALL ball joints and tie rods and added Quickor sway bars front and rear.

1963 ford thunderbird control arm install#

Looking into it further, I found 2 companies that make retro fit kits to delete this dog-legged through bolt and install a straight one - so the suspension can cycle without causing the control arms to move around wildly. When the ball joint wore out you drilled or chiselled the top of the rivet off and used bolts to hold the replacement ball. This caused me to recall what Mike had said earlier this year. As you are all probably aware when the car rolled of the production line the lower ball joints were riveted in to the lower control arm. Well, I finally tore my whole suspension apart and while doing so, manually rotated the lower control arm through bolt and was startled to see the movement in the suspension.

This effectively caused the lower control arm to move outward (side to side) as the car suspension moved - this outward movement constantly changed the tow in as well.Īs Mike said, this was a known issue back in the day - and Holman Moody created a bar that would tie the right and left control arms together so they wouldn't do this. So what I found - (and now understand Atwater Mike was saying all along) is the 1963 Galaxies used a 'dog legged' lower control arm through-bolt. If your 1960 - 1964 Galaxie exibits wandering, darting, uncontrolled and scary behavior - read on. Posting this up in hopes others can easily find and remedy the problem.