Hey all, been lurking on this subforum for a while doing research for a 73 dart swinger that I picked up and wanna roadrace & dabble in autox with with my dad and some buds. Got it cheapish with a blown 7.25, running over-carbed 318, and a 999 torqueflite/manual valve body.

We just replaced the blown rear with a free small bolt pattern 7.25 to get the thing rolling until we do a narrowed explorer 8.8 rear. I have tons of chassis and suspension work planned but have something I want to make sure I take care of properly before going any further on this beater racecar.

The car was clearly setup for drag and i'm wondering if it popped a factory weld from all the frontend lifting on drag pulls? There's no evidence of other crash damage that I can see that would be related to this. Either way, I gotta get this nasty hackjob of a weld "repair" fixed.

[img]https://goo.gl/photos/ppMc9eE5B6oVS9VL7[/img] [img]https://goo.gl/photos/ZoiHWoyp54XVsN4w6[/img]

My question is, how sensitive is the location of this front passenger side upper control arm mount to alignment & stability on-track (assuming the rest of the front suspension was rebuilt)? Would it be alright to have a competent automotive fabricator remove the crappy patch-weld job and put in new, properly fused plate to fix it, or is this the type of job where the mount needs to be jigged and carefully aligned to the drivers side (non damaged) UCA mount and/or the rest of the chassis? Would a standard amount of weld shrinkage be a problem? Looking for input and advice on how I should approach fixing this. I'm sure I'll be posting here often in the future.