1967 Lincoln Continental Convertible - Full Air Suspension Installation - Part 3

My last post covered installing air suspension on the front of a 1967 Lincoln Continental.  This one will cover the rear suspension.  These cars feature a unibody construction with leaf springs locating and suspending the rear axle, so they present some unique challenges when it comes to installing airbag suspension.
We created a link suspension that is designed to tie into the strongest parts of the factory subframe, and incorporates an upper crossmember with the airbag mounts integrated.  This makes installation as easy as possible, with only six holes drilled into the car and simple welding on the rear axle housing required...  Anyway, a picture's worth a thousand words, right?

The stock leaf springs were removed, along with the hanger brackets and shackles. 

The leaf spring mounts on the axle were cleaned up of rust and paint in preparation for welding as shown.

Our lower link bracket bolted in place of the factory spring hanger, and the lower link bar was bolted to it.

The lower link bracket on the axle side was welded onto the stock spring perch.

To make clearance for the crossmember, airbags, and upper 4 link bars, the mufflers needed to be removed.  There is still a pair of large mufflers at the rear of the car, so this Lincoln will still have a nice quiet system.

There is a sheetmetal bracket under the floor that needed to have a section cut out of it to make way for the upper crossmember.  This bracket isn't structural- it's just where the bump stop on the axle hit when the car bottomed out.

The crossmember was raised into place against the subframe rails.  There is a hole in the side brackets that matches up with a hole in the subframe, so we positioned the crossmember using that and marked the three holes on each side to be drilled.

The holes were drilled out, and reinforcing sleeves were placed into each hole to give the crossmember more strength.

At this point, we bolted the airbags to the crossmember and bolted everything to the subframe. 

The bolt closest to the airbag needed to be ground down to prevent rubbing.

Now that the crossmember was bolted in, we installed the upper and lower link bars.  After some careful measuring, the upper link bar tabs were welded to the axle housing as shown:

The 4 link was now complete!

A quick trip to the exhaust shop down the street, and new piping was run around the suspension.

Our customer wanted to mount as much of the system as possible underneath the car, so we were able to find homes for the AccuAir VU4 valve manifold, eLevel ride height control system, and iLevel iPhone add-on module against the bottom of the floor.  Lots and lots of wire and air line snaked all around underneath, but the only pieces that ended up in the trunk were the air tank and compressors, with a single air line and a pair of wires the only connections passing inside.

The rear ride height sensors were mounted to the side of the subframe and down to the lower link bars.

 To help conceal the system's wiring, we fabricated some sheetmetal panels to keep everything as tidy as possible.

That's about it for the underside of this car...  If you've stuck around this long, check out Part 4 for some shots of the finished product!