[ffindling]

The narrowest commonly available 9"
rears are the 57 - 59 Ford/Edsel passenger car rears at 57.25". This is
the same as the early Falcon/1st gen
Mustang. If you want a 53" rear, you
have to go to Currie or some other custom rear end builder. Bear in mind,
that fully backed-halved cars are not
acceptable for super stock. You're pretty
much restricted to using offset spring
perches and mini-tubs. So you can move
the perches in 1" on each side to use a
57.25" rear and widen the tubs to get
a 14X32 slick underneath. Only the front
spring perches have to be moved, you
can get offset shackles for the rear pivots.
Leaf spring systems only work well when
a certain degree of arch is maintained under static conditions. Since the main leaf is designed to have a certain arch
between two fixed points, it is best to
maintain this by not changing the distance between the pivot points by
moving the hinge points or using longer
shackles. So you need to experiment
with stiffening the spring packs by inter-
leaving the stock Ford packs with spring leaves from other cars. Chrysler
spring leaves from their 50's cars were
the same width as the Ford leaves and
came in all sorts of lengths and stiffnesses, so I was able to build some 7 leaf springs out of Ford and Chrysler leafs for my '64 Comet that
worked perfectly without slapper bars
or a pinion snubber.

....Fred