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The guys at Fatman’s take great pride in giving you the individual attention it takes to get your car built your way. Our list of the most popular options gives you an idea of the brake upgrades that are available. Goofy little 9" rotors or overseas cheap parts are never used, only full size rotors made with top quality cold stabilized, warp resisting iron. We can get nearly anything you want added to a standard hub to hub kit, so please discuss those ideas with our Sales and Tech staff. Drilled rotors don’t add performance, but do look cool inside those big billet wheels. Polished hubs and aluminum calipers look trick and save weight, but may be better left to those cars which won’t see a lot of road use. The standard coated finish Wilwood and Baer calipers will not require the constant polishing to remove corrosion which occurs faster with the heat of regular use. Wilwood just changed to a very pleasing black coating on their rotors, which preserves the like new finish much longer than old style Cad plating. Our sales and tech staff has the experience to come with a system that will operate properly for the usage you have in mind. Chromed Power rack and Pinion now available as a $429 Add-on option over manual rack pricing.

SPINDLES POWER RACKS — BRAKES

We offer a line of sway bars to control body roll, enhancing handling and passenger comfort. The general rule is to add a sway bar to the end that is misbehaving, so an understeering car would want a front sway bar. Since most pre-’48 cars have such favorable front to rear weight distribution, they seldom suffer from that problem. In fact, their high rear center of gravity generally causes oversteer, so rear sway bars are recommended. We add a front bar with larger engines, top heavy cars like panels and woodies, and the ’49 and later cars. Those later cars have the engines much further forward in the chassis and bring us back to nose heavy induced understeer. Pickups can use either no sway bars, or one on each end to get really tight handling. Remember that sway bars improve handling by tying the wheel motion to the frame, and also tend to tighten up the ride quality for the same reason. That is another reason to use sway bars as a balancing device, making the chassis handling neutral without getting overly stiff at the expense of ride comfort.

This is an alternate way of mounting the front sway bar under the control arm to better clear Airride suspension.

We highly recommend the use of upgraded shocks as a way of solving this dilemma. They will dampen the suspension movement, controlling the effect of a heavy nose and body roll. The difference between normal heavy duty shocks and race quality shocks is that the race ones have special valving (which is more expensive) that provided control without the harshness common to huge heavy duty shocks. The advantage is in the valving, not the size of the piston. We supply top quality gas shocks with our standard kits, and can help you swap up to adjustable shocks for the ultimate way to dial in ride and handling qualities. The adjustable shocks let you tighten them up for heavy loads under highway use, or for the occasional hard drive on twisty roads. A simple slide underneath and a twist of the dial lets you then return to a lighter setting for solo cruising and normal road use. We have become convinced of the benefit of premium shocks by their use as the major chassis component device in NASCAR. They are so important that teams carry shock dynos to tune the shocks to each set of track conditions. Airride Shockwaves are built around a variable shock, and will give you all the benefits of adjustable ride height and exceptional handling.

Our steering connection kit will make the hookup from the rack and pinion to your column easier. We can get around nearly any exhaust system with 3 joints. We supply Borgeson needle bearing joints splined to match the rack and column, along with a center joint and a matching machined shaft that allows the center support bearing to be serviced. You do want to keep that center support as far away from the exhaust heat to keep from cooking the lubricant. The shafts are supplied long enough to be trimmed to length before final assembly. We find that ¾" wood dowels or PVC pipe works well to mock up the lengths without wasting shaft material. It is important to mark the shafts so that they do not extend more than ¾" into the joint, since more can cause the joint to jam in rotation. We prefer to weld the shaft to the joint for a secure system, but you must ground the welder to the shaft so that welding heat/current does not pass thru the joint’s needle bearing. If you are going really show, we can put together the same kit with stainless steel components for about 15% more mill finish, and 50% more polished.

The braided stainless hose kit for power steering hook up is another real problem solver. There simply was never any factory cars that combined the common power steering pump fittings with the metric O-ring fittings used on power racks. It is futile to try to find them. Our catalog does list part numbers for rubber hoses that can have their upper fitting changed to match the pump, but we find it easier in our own shop to make up exactly the hoses we need with this kit. We designed special fittings that handle the O-ring rack fittings, which seal to the rack body at the base of the fittings, not inside. We even supply spare O-rings in the kit in case you get carried away with the wrenches.

A total of 4 different adaptor fittings will fit nearly any power steering pump with the reservoir made integral with the pump. We figure it’s easier to have too many fittings than be one short. Neither you nor we have to figure out over the phone what kind of fittings to send either! The kit comes with 90° hose ends that fit to the adaptors. Be sure to tape over the ends of the hose before cutting them with an abrasive cut off tool. Leave some vinyl electric tape over the hose end returning fluid to the reservoir, and dip the hose end in boiling water for a few seconds to make the Teflon liner easier to slip over the hose barb. There are many variations of fittings with remote reservoir pumps, so we suggest getting the hoses with the pump if you go that way. ALWAYS use genuine rack & pinion power steering fluid — NEVER trans fluid as in the old days!

Our repro MII spindles are the best on the market! They are forged from one piece of steel just as the originals, with precision machine work for a properly snug fit to the bearings. We do not drill and tap the three holes for the tin backing shields used with the original MII 9" brakes. If you are using Wilwood brakes that mount to those holes, we will supply original reconditioned spindles with that feature. The 2" dropped spindles are purchased from a vendor that casts them with nodular iron having a tensile strength in keeping with the original. A 4140 steel pin is then pressed in place using a combination of heating the casting and freezing the pin for a secure interference fit. They are drilled for the Wilwood caliper mounting brackets.