I've just started designing this webpage because I've spent a fair amount of time working on my mustang, and I thought other people might be interested in information I have.
I have spent countless weeks of real time reading, working on researching, and just gaining a general knowledge of the cheapy musclecar of the 60's. It might seem funny to think of the mustang as a cheapy car, but in reality it was. The unibody design was much cheaper to produce. It made the car lighter, gave some small benifits to ground clearance, and was easy to produce. Cheap doesnt imply that this was a bad car. It was buy comparison a lot of car for a reasonable amount of money. The number of people who could afford a Corvette was slim, and Ford wanted to compete in the performance car market. Hence the Mustang was born. The design of the mustang was based on the Falcon frame. The 64-66 mustangs had the exact same suspension setup, although the front framerails where a different length which allowed a little more room in the engine compartment. The V8 engines offered for these first production years of the mustang were the 260 and the 289. These engines were basically the same overall desgin, and externally were the same. The main difference between the two was the cylinder size. The 260 had a cylinder bore of 3.6in (correct me if I'm wrong, may need to check that number), whereas the 289 had a cylinder bore of 4.00in. The 260 was an engine of the small-block windsor family that was still evolving when the Mustang was introduced, and was phased out in 66 due to the fact it had no real benifit over the 289, which had superior power output due to the increased cylinder bore, and the superior casting strength(the 260 and its predicessors were Ford's developmental stage of the smallblock thinwall design). The benefit to these engines were numerous. Up until this point the engines being used were the Y-block family of engines. These things were huge, heavy, and not extremely efficient. Seriously, these engines were elephants. A nearly equivalent engine size, the 292 Y-block engine weighs nearly twice as much as the 289, as well as taking nearly twice as much engine compartment space. The design improvements were significant as well. The Y-block engines used external oil pumps for instance, and the exhaust manifold usually wrapped around the front of the engine. As I'm sure you're beginning to realise, this new engine design was a vast improvement over the older design and was to the extreme benefit in the relatively small Mustang.
To be continued, sorted, and otherwise improved upon...
