XW FALCON WAGON
CLASSIC Aussie cars with wild body mods make our hearts sing, so we can’t wait to see this two-door XW wagon project hit the road.
After lots of research, Robi determined that using the frameless doors and basic rear quarters from a 1966-67 Ford Ranchero would be the closest match to help build the two-door Falcon wagon Ford Australia never dreamed of.
“I didn’t want it to look odd as a two-door, so rather than just weld up the rear doors, we’ll completely reshape the car using the Ranchero stuff, as they have loosely the same body lines,” Robi says. “That’ll allow us to use longer doors, and moulding the rear quarters into the Falcon body will make it look like a factory car.”
The body mods won’t stop there, either. Robi plans to fit the wagon with a split tailgate, a roofmounted centre console and a few other cheeky mods.
The suspension design Robi has come up with to fit the front airbags is particularly out there. “The front end was a tricky one to accomplish,” he says. “The fact that we wanted the car to lay out flat on the sills but also have a legal ride height of 100-115mm and the ability to still get up steep driveways made it a bit of a challenge.
“The main issue you face when airbagging an early Falcon or Mustang is that the chassis rails in relation to the outside of the car are very wide, meaning the distance from the rails to the outside of the car is very small.”
Robi says the process would’ve been easier with conventional coil-overs, but airbags were a must to achieve proper suspension travel and adjustability. “Travel with coil-overs is around 50-75mm, but we wanted approximately 175mm of travel, so we needed the airbags,” he says.
“To fit decent-length tubular control arms, spindle and airbag and a decent-width front tyre with a neutral type of wheel offset, all while fitting it around a Coyote engine, becomes almost impossible.”
Robi landed on a cantilever set-up with Shockwave-style air struts that house the airbag and dampener in one unit.
“We started with the steering rails, which are around 25mm narrower overall than the front rails. From there, we mocked up the steering rack, which dictates a lot of the front-end geometry,” Robi explains. “With that done, we fabricated the tubular control arms, front crossmember, suspension pick-up points and so on.
“With the front end done, we tried mounting the airbag in the conventional location on the lower control arm, but it physically didn’t fit,” he says.
Robi tried multiple ’bag locations, but creating an outrigger mount was an elegant solution that allowed full clearance for lock-to-lock steering along with full suspension travel. “It was also the only way I could still have room for turbos, radiator, intercooler, fluid coolers and so on at the front of the car,” he says.
“Between doing a bunch of maths and modelling in Solidworks, we came up with three different cantilever arm designs and ended up going with the ones you see in the car. These arms have a leverage ratio of 1.7:1, and that, combined with the leverage ratio of 1.5:1 on the lower arm pivot point, got us the 175-180mm of suspension travel we were after.”