1949 Chevy Custom Air Suspension - Suspending Belief

While the poly bushing eyes measure 1 1/4 inches wide, the rod end style are 1-inch wide. I keep a bunch of steel spacers on hand, and digging through the drawer produced four 1/4-inch-wide, 1-inch OD spacers. Most decent hardware supply houses stock spacers of varying sizes.

Installed with Grade 8 hardware, and a spacer top and bottom, the rear ShockWaves bolted easily into place.

Unlike most aftermarket Mustang II-based suspensions, the Chassis Engineering crossmember doesn't use conical upper shock mounts, as it features this neat threaded combined shock and coil upper mount. The top of the coil sits under the gray "disc" while the shock bolts through the hole in the center of the threaded portion. As can be seen in the background, the thread can be raised or lowered to adjust ride height. Very cool, but it posed me problems with mounting the ShockWave.

With the ShockWave temporarily bolted to the shock absorber mount on the lower A-arm and the threaded top mount removed, this is what I was faced with. The ShockWave is at full extension, but would only compress approximately 1 to 1 1/4 inches for optimum ride height. The lower arm should be level at ride height but was already sloping down toward the outer end, and the ShockWave was so far up in the "top hat" section of the crossmember that it would be physically impossible to access the air fitting. Hmm, time for some head scratching.

Here's the shock mount on the lower A-arm that I temporarily mounted the ShockWave to, despite it using a 7/16-inch bolt while the ShockWave uses a 1/2-inch.

This little Allen-headed set screw locates in a groove in the thread to lock it in place.