[Portmod7]

A couple things you may notice......

The rear end housing is a full-floating 9" unit. As I said before, I've spent a lot of years racing cars. I've got a lot of parts left over, and this rear end housing was one of them. So I decided to ditch the 12-bolt and put this thing in there.

Also, I don't like panhard bars on cars/trucks that are meant to turn both left and right. Not only does the chassis move side to side over the rear end as the suspension travels (even with a long bar), but I don't think anyone will ever be able to convince me that the forces that influence handling are distributed the same during a right-hand turn as they are in a left-had turn when running a panhard bar.

NASCAR runs a panhard bar. Why? For one, because the rules say they have to. BUT, the reason the rules say that, is because when they decided to make that rule, the panhard bar was the best thing out there for locating the rear end on a car that turns left all day long. It's simple, efficient, easily adjustable, and the results of changes are very predictable. Plus, on a car that only turns one direction, the panhard bar flat does the best job. When NASCAR started going to road courses, they didn't want to change the rules on the rear suspension package and basically change how the whole car worked for just a couple races out of the year. So they made them stick with the panhard. But even Chad Knaus will tell you (and has stated on the NASCAR Performance show on TV) that a panhard bar is not optimal on a road course.

So, because the #1 goal for my truck was to handle well, I wanted to ditch the panhard bar that came original on the truck, and even comes with the Hotchkis TVS. I considered triangulated 4-links, wishbone type upper links, watts links, pretty much every way to keep the rear end under the car without using a panhard bar. The simplest and best thing I found is what I went with. It's a product from TSM Manufacturing, and they call it a "modified watts link". There are a couple different mounting options. I chose to mount mine in the center of the frame, and mount the links to the axle.

As simple and small is it is, I had a really hard time figuring out where to mount it without doing "major" frame modifications. TSM sells a bracket that bolts right to the pinion of a Ford 9" center section, and originally that's what I went with. But, with the amount of drop in the rear, the pinion mounted bracket would have hit the crossmember over the rear end at full suspension travel. What I finally ended up doing is mounting it in the crossmember behind the rear housing that is meant to strengthen the frame where the panhard attaches.

But it wasn't as simple as bolting it straight to the frame. The gap between the housing and the crossmember isn't big enough for the watts linkage to fit in. A Boyd's rear-mounted tank was in the build plans, so I couldn't move the crossmember or mount the watts behind it. What I noticed is that the mounting bracket for the watts would fit inside the back of the crossmember, with the moving parts actually passing through the crossmember and giving enough clearance to the housing. BINGO!

One more small issue was that the crossmember I mounted the watts to is angled in the frame. I wanted to make sure the watts was parallel to the housing, so I had a wedge shaped mounting spacer machined. I sandwiched the spacer between the crossmember and the watts bracket. It turned out really good, like it was meant to be!