Thanks! I've been a GRM forum & magazine reader for years, just never posted anything here until now. Mostly involved with Lemons, Volvos, and BMWs. The same can be said for most of the other guys. This is our first build of an American vehicle and the Vic was my first V8 powered street car (I'm not counting our LM7-swapped E36 Lemons racer). We are all looking forward to having a cool and reliable highway cruiser / shop truck when this thing is done.
On this past Friday night a few of the guys got together and started disassembling the Crown Vic. I couldn't be there for this stage but was impressed with how fast things moved along. We saved the entire wiring harness from the body, but are debating whether it's most expedient to pare this down for pickup use, or to go ahead and buy a Painless or similar hot rod wiring kit for like $250. Time will tell. The pickup wiring harness was a kind of a joke and has already been removed.
We made it a point to keep all of the potentially useful components from the body, like lights, seatbelts, steering column, pedals, the entire HVAC system, and so on. The idea is to incorporate as much of the nice new stuff as possible without having anything look out of place. Maximize comfort, convenience, and reliability without sacrificing the look of a '60s pickup.
In that vein the guys busted out our cheap plasma cutter and saved two pieces of the firewall: drivers side including the column/pedal mount area and wiring pass-throughs, and the passenger's side with the HVAC mounting features. This was easily accomplished after the body was stripped of everything in the interior and lifted off of the chassis. This was mid-day Saturday. With the body off it was easy to get a look at the Vic drivetrain. The transmission was replaced with a reman unit at some point in the past, so it likely has less than 100k miles on it which is a nice bonus. Everything is pretty clean mechanically. We just need to replace the trans output seal in the tailshaft and the pinion seal in the diff, since both are showing signs of leakage.
One thing I've always wanted to have in a lowered pickup is a continuous higher bed floor - no unsightly hump in the middle - and lockable storage boxes under the floor. So we saved the entire rear section of the Vic floorpan including the rear seat area, hump over the axle & fuel tank, and the entire trunk floor. This way we get a nice strong cargo box that already fits the frame and chassis components at the back of the Viccup. It's going to be challenging to tie this Vic floor into the bed structure but I think we can manage. The original ribbed pickup bed floor will be carefully cut out and moved upward in the bed, up to the level of the Vic hump. We are keeping the original Vic fuel tank along with the pump, lines, and evap system.
By Saturday evening the pickup cab was resting on the frame, to give us an idea of what had to be trimmed. The rear cab corners we knew had to be notched to clear the frame. There are also two braces on each side of the '64 cab, one under the frontmost seat mount near the middle of the cab step, and one at the front just under the firewall. On Sunday we took a bunch of measurements and started cutting the cab with a 4.5 inch angle grinder. These will all be patched with closeout panels welded in place, then primed, painted, and undercoated to protect the steel.
The 1965 and 1966 cabs are the same generation as ours but have a nice triangulated firewall mount that ends up nicely at the same location as the Vic firewall body-to-frame mounts on each side. Unfortunately the '64 and earlier cabs don't have this feature. We have ordered reproduction 65-66 style cab mounts and are going to graft them into our firewall if all goes well. We lost the original '64 front cab mount location when we trimmed the braces on either side, so we have to come up with something new regardless. By using the 65-66 triangulated mounts we won't have to add new brackets to the Vic frame, only adapt it to use one bushing per side instead of the original two.
With all 6 clearance notches cut into the cab, we then found that the entry steps behind each door just barely interfered with the frame - the Vic frame was less than an inch wider than the space between the steps, but there was no easy way around this. Shown here is the step with offending section cut out, and a patch panel bent and ready for fit-up before being welded in.
Now that the cab would nestle down nicely over the frame we were finally able to get a good idea of the final stance. Exact cab position has yet to be decided; we need to trim the front frame horns to allow test fitting of the pickup front clip before solidifying the cab position and building new mounts.
That's the HVAC blower fan and AC evaporator sitting on top of the 4.6. The guys were able to extract this all from the Vic without opening up the AC system, so it's still fully charged with refrigerant. We have a plan for incorporating this all into the cab, and now we're focusing on the patch panels in the floor before making mounts and mating the cab & frame for reals. Exciting stuff.
