Global West Strut Rods

Recently I had an alignment problem with my ’69 Mustang that resulting in excessive wear on the inside edges of the front tires. This was apparently due to the lower control arm mounting point slipping outward, either due to some harder driving on a twisty road, or road-construction issues, or both. I had eccentric eliminators that were supplied with the TCP rack-n-pinion conversion. These were not installed properly by another alignment shop.

I took the opportunity to replace the strut rods with Global West ASR-6, and their 6 position eccentric eliminator kit. Thus far, I am very happy with the quality of these new strut rods. The best price I could find on these was at Car Shop Inc.

It took the alignment tech at the local Ford garage 6 hours to bring the car into a reasonable state of alignment, but he couldn’t quite get enough castor. Global West has been very helpful and explained that the rods are threaded extra deep and could be cut to achieve more castor.

Hopefully, with the new eccentric eliminators properly installed, the alignment will stay in place. I am sure that replacing the lower control arms with Global-West tubular units would provide additional stability, but that will have to wait.

Since I had to re-align the front end anyway, I took the opportunity to drop the rack and the oil pan to replace the leaky oil pan gasket with a one-piece Fel-Pro OS30214T gasket from Rock Auto.

I replaced the 14 year old Comp T/A back tires with new BFG G-Force 255ZR50-16 tires at the same time. The old tires were both worn out and lacked grip so badly that it was all too easy to break traction 2nd gear. Now, not only is 2nd gear useful again, but I’m no longer afraid of being caught in the rain due to the tires. Not that I like driving this car in the rain, but rain happens. 255/50ZR16 tires are getting difficult to find. Goodyear no longer makes them at all. BFG offers either the G-Force, or the drag radials.