Here’s some photos of the rear axle housing (I mentioned earlier). I picked up a new 9-inch Ford housing from Mark Williams. For this application, it actually began life as a Currie piece, less the housing ends (Mark Williams usually installs his own on these housings). Going in, the plan was to narrow the housing a bit. The rationale was pretty simple: I wanted to use the smallest backspace wheel possible. Why? When I had drag cars, it was something we always did, because it provided you with the lightest wheel of the bunch (a ten-inch wide wheel with a 3.5-inch backspace is lighter than a ten-inch wide wheel with a 5.5-inch backspace), plus it makes removing the wheel a bit easier if you use drive studs (which I do use, even on this car). And one more thing: I think the deeper dish of the small backspace wheel looks better!

Sounded simple enough. So I had M-W drop ship the housing to my old racing pal, Mike Pustelny (MPR in Almont, Michigan). Little did anyone know that my request for a slightly narrowed housing would morph into such a major job. Here’s the housing as it came from Mark Williams:



It became pretty obvious that in order to narrow the housing, add Mark Williams’ big housing ends and use the stock mounting points, some major surgery would be needed. Mike sliced the lower mount like so:



Next, he installed his narrowing fixture and added the M-W housing end:



He had to piece it all together before finally welding the housing end onto the axle tubes. This wasn’t easy since the lower suspension and shock mount actually overlaps the new (huge) housing end.



Here’s how Mike welded up the housing end. I you’re a welder or even a guy who appreciates good workmanship, then I think you’ll like this photo:



Next up is a photo of how Mike finished the lower suspension and shock mount. As you can see, there was considerable work to make this whole thing work with the stock suspension mounting points and the large M-W housing end.



Another thing I wanted was a back brace on the housing. Mike and I talked about this quite a bit. He suggested instead of using a box style brace that it might be cleaner and easier on this application to use a tubular brace. The reason for bracing a Ford housing is because they tend to want to move fore and aft (flex on the ends) with big power. Here’s a couple of photos of Pustelny’s solution:





As you can see, Mike’s handiwork is exceptional. What else is neat about the bracing job is the fact he never really bitched about all of the trouble. The job took a lot (a Lot) longer than anyone ever imagined, and I suspect he could have been well on his way to fabricating a complete Super Stock housing in the amount of time he spent fidgeting with this piece.







In addition to these mods, the housing also received a large inspection/filler bung over the ring gear “hump” along with a magnetic drain plug on the bottom. Once all of those things were done (and after the anti-roll bar was installed out here on the west coast), the housing was powder coated black and assembled with one of Mark Williams’ Pro Street center sections and a 35-spline Pro Street axles. I used one of the billet steel Lockers inside the aluminum through bolt 9-inch along with 3.89:1 gears. M-W set it up and it too is a really, really nice piece. He even goes as far as safety wiring the ring gear bolts on. Whew. Sometimes I think building a dedicated race car would have have been a whole bunch easier. And cheaper <g>.


Wayne Scraba