Posting this up in hopes others can easily find and remedy the problem. If your 1960 - 1964 Galaxie exibits wandering, darting, uncontrolled and scary behavior - read on. 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. 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. As 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. 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 caused me to recall what Mike had said earlier this year. 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. This should be a required upgrade for any 1963 (I believe its actually 60-64) Galaxie. Along 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. The car is absolutely TIGHT right now. No weird stuff going on. Thanks! Here's the stock control arm through bolt. If you can imagine it rotating, this causes the control arm to move sideways, while also effecting tow in. Here's the new bolt. It uses offset bushings, but is otherwise a simple and straight forward fix. Versions of this are made by born again classics http://www.bornagainclassics.com/products.html as well as rare parts http://rareparts.com/
Far freakin out...can't imagine Henry allowing this, but wait he was already dead! That explains it...
There used to be a bar available front John Bender that would attach to both lower front pivots on the control arms. It prevented the slop and wallow in those Fords. I put them on both my 63 and 64, made a real difference. That was many years ago. I am sort of looking for another 63 and would do what you have done or try to find another Bender bar. Thanks for the info?
I think its 63 and 64s that had those offset bolts where the 60 to 62s had a normal suspension,when I had a 64 I found a kit from Moog that fixed that problem.
Moog had a lot of neat stuff for Fords back then. Can't believe that the rocket surgeons @ Ford didn't see the simplicity of the offset bushing.
Just had the front suspension apart on my 61 Starliner and the lower control arms had straight thru bolts. As a kid I remember seeing those bars on the front of 63/64 Fords. The "old guys" at the place where my dad worked showed me how they worked and swore by them.
I never driven the 64 much before rebuilding the front suspension so I do not know how it was supposed to work,I got all the suspension parts from a guy who sold old car parts from his garage and that Moog kit came with it. The guy selling the parts and the shop I had install them knew what they were but I knew very little on the 64 suspension at that time.
Thanks for the update, IRMB! The Holman/Moody & John Bender bars were the 'fixes' I applied to address this problem when I was in the business of front end repair & alignment, in those years. The straight-through bolts hadn't appeared yet, least to my vendors. The 'bars' came in two types, one a solid round forged bar with flattened ends, the other was a formed 'leaf', about 1.5" X 14", both had ends biased and bored for the ends of the 'crank bolts'. My boss was an elder German, (I was a younger one) so when he asked what the bar accomplished, I quipped: "Keeps 'em from crankin' ". He laughed, (but not loud)
I had 3 '64 Fords and never had the lower arms out of them. What a horrid design as a manufacturing PITA.
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