I continued to drive the car in this condition for a few more years.  There were a few repairs here and there.  The interior and paint began to both deteriorate from usage and exposure to the environment.  I started planning for another “restoration” process.  This time I planned to restore the car to fairly close to stock condition.  I brought the car to a restoration shop known for doing quality work, but they turned me away.  I gave it some more thought and decided to not do a full restoration, but that I would rework the areas I was capable of doing myself and hire a shop to do the bodywork and paint.  I began collecting a few parts here and there when the parts vendors had them on sale.  My next great idea turned out to be my downfall.

I wanted to have the original engine rebuilt and returned to factory stock.  I searched for a local shop to handle the job and found one that had a good reputation and sounded excited about doing the work.  They stopped by my house and picked up the engine.  I spoke with the owner after the engine had been disassembled and I thought I could expect to have the engine back in a few weeks to a month.  That meant it was time for me to get busy.  I had purposely had two engines to minimize my down time.  So I yanked the high performance engine out of the car and contacted a local body shop to strip and repaint the engine compartment.  Once that was done I had the car towed to my parent’s driveway in preparation for installing my newly rebuilt engine.  I stayed in touch with the machine shop and spoke with them at least once per week.  There was always some kind of hold up. Other jobs ahead of me.  Waiting for parts.  As a consolation they permitted me to use their glass bead cabinet to clean up some of my old parts.  This dragged on for, believe it or not, about 5 or 6 years.

When I first contracted to have the engine rebuilt I was dating a woman who really had no interest in cars.  We got engaged to be married, but she requested that I be done with fixing up the car prior to the wedding.  Unfortunately the engine wasn’t completed until long after the wedding date.  So that caused a big problem, effectively halting the project.  So now I had a roller sitting in my parent’s driveway, a collection of parts at my house, and a newly rebuilt engine.  I eventually bargained for some time and money and got the engine installed.  I also installed a bunch of the parts I had been collecting.  This included the metal brake and fuel lines, the braking system, the front suspension, the clutch, and the steering.  So mechanically the car was in pretty good shape.  The bad news was that after sitting outside so long the front cowl and floorboards had rusted through.  Rust was also starting to show on the doors and tail light panel.  A couple of steps forward and one big step back.

I knew I didn’t have the skills to fix the rust, and I didn’t want to trust the work to just any body shop considering all the problems I have had in the past.  What I eventually learned was that the parts shop I had spent so much money at had expanded and now did paint and body work.  I called them up and made an appointment to have my car worked on.  While they were working on the front cowl and floor pans they went over any other rust they found on the body.  They also permitted me to start the engine and break it in while the car was in their shop.  They also fixed a few mechanical issues that they found.  Then it came time for paint.

I don’t know what changed, but all of a sudden the whole situation became adversarial.  I spoke with the owner and he said “You don’t want us to paint your car”.  He repeated this to me several times even though I told him that I did want the car painted.  At that point he threatened to place a mechanic’s lien on the car and take it from me.  When I asked him what the basis was for him taking the car, and that he hadn’t even given me a bill yet and i had paid a sizable deposit, so he couldn’t say I wasn’t going to pay for the work.  He then tried to say it was because I wasn’t communicating with the shop and had just left my car there.  I then pointed out that I had a detailed log of every conversation I had held with him, and that I had called them at least once per week, and usually several times.  At that point he backed off and said they would not paint my car and that they would get it ready for me to take home.

When I came back to pick up the car the entire interior was still disassembled.  All the exterior chrome trim was removed, The car had no bumpers.  The fuel filler neck was inside the trunk with a rag stuffed in it.  The engine air cleaner was missing.  And when I started the car the charging system didn’t work.  When I pointed these issues out I was told that they had prepared the car for paint and there was no point in reassembling the car.  That put me in the position of having to have the car towed back home.  They agreed to make the car drivable.  The next weekend I returned, paid the bill, let them load the car with the boxes of parts they had taken off, and drove away.  When I got home I discovered that several parts were missing, the air cleaner they gave me was not the one on the car when I brought it in, and most of the fasteners for the parts they did return were missing.  The speedometer had stopped working half way home.  It turned out they had removed the instrument cluster and not tightened down the speedometer cable when they replaced it.  I called the shop back the next day and got apologies and was told they would ship me the missing parts.  I never received the parts and the shop eventually went out of business.  Shortly after that my wife and I purchased a new house with a two car garage.  The car was parked in the garage and didn’t see the light of day for the next 15 years.  Hopefully that will change in the near future as I am now retired and have the urge to start working on the old car again.

This and the previous posts were an attempt to sum up 40 years of owning the car.  Obviously a lot of details were left out, either because they weren’t that interesting or I couldn’t remember them.  Most of my old friends no longer have their muscle cars.  I rarely see any of those people anymore either.  We all grew up, started our own separate lives, and grew apart.

I have been planning to start working on the old car once again.  This blog was originally intended to document that process, but I couldn’t resist telling some of the history of this car and remembering some of my friend’s old cars.  I do still have several challenges to getting the car running again.  I live in a neighborhood with covenants that prohibit working on cars.  I’m missing many of the fasteners and a number of the interior parts.  The engine hasn’t been started in 15 years and the gasoline in the fuel tank has turned into some new organic compound with no resemblance to gasoline.  Sitting in the garage has caused the tires to dry rot and go flat.  The exhaust system has rusted through.  And there is some new rust developing.  So I do have my work cut out for me.  I’ll write some new posts as the work progresses.

At this point I was happy driving the car around as it was.  I was enjoying the car but there wasn’t anything really significant to discuss.  So we need to fast forward the story several years. But before I get back to my car, I have another friend’s car to mention.

My friend Jimmy had always wanted a 69 Charger.  For anybody not familiar with a 69 Charger, it is the car that was the star of the old Dukes of Hazzard TV series.  Jimmy wanted one of those cars, but not painted to look like the TV car.  I remember searching through the want ads at his house trying to help him find a car for him to fix up. He eventually found one and bought it.  Since he was employed at a Dodge dealership, he had access to parts, equipment, and people with the knowledge of those cars.  He had a 440 engine built for it along with an A727 automatic transmission.  He put in 3.91 gears, had the interior redone, and painted the car red.  I think it looked better than a Dukes of Hazzard car could.  Here’s a picture of Jimmy’s car.  As far as I know he still has it.  Maybe more to come on that in another blog post once I get back to work on my car.

One evening on my way over to Jimmy’s house I was involved in a minor accident.  Some damage to the front bumper, grille, and hood.  Nothing that couldn’t be fixed, but it was fairly upsetting at the time.  Here’s a picture after the accident showing some of the damage.

One thing you might notice is that there is no engine or transmission in the car.  That’s because I had already been planning an engine upgrade before the accident occurred.  I had a 428 crank, Mercury 410 pistons, 428 CJ heads, and an old tri-deuce intake manifold and carburetors.  I was building what today would be called a stroker motor.  The 428 crank combined with a 390 bore resulted in 410 cubic inches.  The 428 CJ heads flowed a bit better then the 390 GT heads I had been running.  I had the machine work done on the parts at a local machine shop.  Then I bought a clutch and flywheel and had the engine balanced.  After that I assembled the whole thing in my parents garage.  Here’s a couple of pictures taken just prior to installing the engine in the car.

Unfortunately just after I had everything installed but before I had even been able to start the car the intake and parts of the valvetrain were stolen off of the car.  This happened on a week day while I was at work.  Nobody was ever charged with the theft, but I have an idea who did it.  I ended up getting very little from the insurance company, and spending a lot to replace the parts.  Unfortunately the replacement manifold didn’t fit very well and leaked oil from the back of the intake.  This contaminated the clutch enough that it never really ran as well as I would have liked.  It was still a lot of fun seeing the looks on people’s faces when I opened the hood.

Once the bodywork and paint had been completed, it was time to turn my attention to the interior, which wasn’t really bad, but needed quite a bit of help. The front seats had ripped along the seams. The back seat had a cigarette hole burned into it. The carpet was pretty well worn. The dash pad was warped from the sun. And the plastic “chrome” had peeled off of the dash. And the steering wheel was an aftermarket wheel that never fit correctly. After a lot more trips to Pony and Corral and Mustang Magic I was ready to start work on the interior.

I had never done any kind of upholstery work before.  But my mom has always been very handy at activities like sewing, knitting, and crocheting.  She said that if I was able to get ready made seat covers she would be able to help me install them.  Luckily several Mustang parts vendors carry the seat covers so I ordered a full set which includes the front buckets and rear seat.  I also learned that installation of teh seat covers required the use of hog rings and hog ring pliers.  A local automotive upholstery shop gave me a handful of hog rings, and my friend Jim ordered the pliers from the local Mac tools salesperson.  In order to remove the old seat covers I first had to disassemble the seats (after removing them from the car).  This was the easiest part of the project.  Then I had to cut out the old hog rings using side cutting pliers.  This required a fair amount of physical strength and I eventually ended up breaking the pliers by the time I had completed the last seat.  Nowadays the Mustang parts vendors sell a pair of pliers that cut the hog rings much more easily.  I wish I had a pair of those pliers back then.

In case anybody wants to know what hog rings look like, here’s a picture of the rings, hog ring pliers, and the cutting tool I mentioned.

Once the old seat covers were removed, we transferred the listing wire from the old seat covers over to the new seat covers.  I was later told that I could have cut off the old seat covers with a razor blade or scissors, leaving the old listing wires in place.  Then I could have made a new wires out of coat hangars and hog ringed them to the old listing wires.  Whether I reused the old listing wires or made new ones, the next step was to stretch the seat covers over the seats and attach then using the hog rings.  This step required a whole lot of stretching and pulling to ensure the seat covers were aligned correctly and that there were no wrinkles.  Here was where we employed a combination of my mom’s experience and my strength.  The finished product came out pretty well.

While the interior was stripped out of the car I took advantage of the opportunity to repaint the doors, dash, and interior trim panels. Once again the Mustang parts vendors supplied me with the correct color paint in spray cans.  I used a wire wheel in a drill to strip the old paint.  I was afraid of using paint remover, although that would have worked well in combination with the wire wheel.  There was dent in the glove compartment door, so I patched that with some body putty.  Then I sprayed on the paint.  Most of it came out fairly decent, but a few areas could have used more surface prep.  Still I was happy enough with the result.  I wasn’t building a show car, just trying to make my daily driver look nice.

One of the upgrades I planed to do at this point was to install an instrument cluster with a factory tachometer.  This required a bit of rewiring to make it work. I had a shop manual but it didn’t show the differences between the standard cluster and the tachometer cluster.  I did eventually find the correct wiring in a Chilton’s manual I had.  The differences were fairly minor and I was able to make the changes without much difficulty.  Interestingly enough, all the Mustang parts vendors and repair shops who saw the car after I had made the change said it couldn’t be done or that what I had done would never work.  Sometime this was even after I had been running it that way for 10 or more years.  Apparently automotive wiring is a mystery or black art to some people.  I did make one mistake that I shouldn’t have.  I needed to run a wire to the alternator, but didn’t have a handy opening in the firewall.  So I snaked the wire through a small hole I made in the grommet for the clutch linkage.  If the wire had ever shorted out on the firewall I could have had one serious fire.  I was lucky and that never happened.  But ti was a rookie move on my part that I should never have done.

The rest of the interior was fairly straightforward.  Parts that were available new I replaced.  Anything not available new I cleaned up and painted or polished.  One item not available new was the seat belts.  There was a company that would refurbish them for me.  But Instead I chose to clean them with laundry detergent and re-use them.  Next time around I do plan to have them professionally reconditioned.

At the time I was first getting my car painted there were several types of paint that were in common use.  Most people either used lacquer or enamel based paints.  Polyurethane based paints were just starting to become popular.  I am not a paint expert, but I will share my understanding based on my friend’s experiences with painting their cars.

Back in those days many people painted their own cars in their garage.  Lacquer paint was pretty popular for this purpose.  It is a fairly soft paint and needs to be polished to get a really good shine.  For a home painter this was good because any runs or imperfections in the paint would be removed during the polishing stage.  But the polishing took a lot of work.  Charlie, my neighbor who worked as a mechanic owned a Camaro that he did all the work to, including paint.  Charlie’s Camaro had a Chevy small block and a 4 speed transmission along with some healthy gears in the rearend.  And Charlie didn’t baby his car.  He always drove it hard, including running it at the local drag strip.  I remember when he painted the car light blue in his garage.  The paint was lacquer and it had a nice shine to it after he got it all buffed out.  Unfortunately he also managed to chip the paint in the process.  That was the issue with lacquer.  It chipped fairly easily.

Enamel paints were supposed to be harder and could hold up to chipping better.  But being harder it was also more difficult to polish to get it to shine.  Professionals had the equipment, but most home garage mechanics didn’t.  So it had to be laid on pretty much teh way you wanted it to look.  Also, lacquer was very popular at the time for show cars.  Custom painters liked it because they could polish for that perfect shine.  So even though some car manufacturers used enamel at the factory it didn’t seem to be as popular with the people I knew.

Charlie’s brother Pete had a 1965 GTO that I really liked.  It had a few issues now and then.  When he bought the car it had wheel locks, but no wheel lock key.  Another friend who lived in the neighborhood, John, was just the guy to solve this type of problem.  I could probably fill a whole blog just with stories about the trouble John used to get into.  Anyway, John made short work of the wheel locks using a chisel and a hammer.  I helped Pete with some wiring issues on the car.  I remember being stranded with him one day when the car stalled and wouldn’t start.  Looking under the hood we found that the wiring harness had somehow gotten wrapped around the steering column.  Between the two of us we got it unwrapped enough to get us home.  But the reason I mention Pete’s GTO is because he planned to paint it red using this new type of paint made by Dupont called Imron.  It wasn’t lacquer or enamel based, but was polyurethane.  It was supposed to shine and also be extremely tough so that it could hold up to parking lots and everything we put our cars through.  Pete did get it painted and I thought it looked pretty sharp.  Pete sold the car when he removed everything from the trunk and discovered that he could see straight through to the ground.  Rust had taken its’ toll on the old GTO.

When I discussed painting my car with the painter I had found, he stated that his preference was to use enamel paint. He mixed in a hardener so that it would be even more chip resistant.  This all sounded good to me because I intended to use the car as my daily driver.  I left the car and new chrome trim at the paint shop and patiently waited to hear back about my car from Rick.  I was invited to come visit every once in a while to see the progress being made.  To me everything was looking good.  Years later I discovered that some of the body work involved using pop rivets to hold metal patches in place.  But you couldn’t tell from looking at it.  The paint was shiny, the body was fairly straight, and the new chrome trim looked great.  Unfortunately a fly landed on the hood while the paint was wet.  They promised to fix ti for me but they never did.  I also requested they give me a receipt for the work so I could prove the value of the paint job to my insurance company.  Apparently this was a problem for them.  Eventually I got a receipt with completely bogus signatures on it.  It seems that standing behind their work was asking too much from them.  I ran into the younger painter a couple of years later and he said he now understood why I wanted a receipt for my insurance company.  Turns out he was in an accident and was having a disagreement with his insurance company on the value of the car.  Some people have to learn things through hard experience.

Here’s how the car looked when I got it back from the painters. I took these pictures on a fairly cloudy day.

Looks like I hadn’t gotten all of the trunk letters back from being re-chromed yet

In the background is my Mom’s 1976 Camaro. In the driveway way in the background is James’ Camaro. I think it was 1967 but i may have that wrong. That car was painted blue and had the stripes on the hood. Wish I had a close-up picture as that car really looked nice.

At this point I was making fairly regular trips to purchase parts.  The store I was buying from was Pony and Corral as they were the only Mustang parts specialist store in the area at that time.  It was run by Bill and I found him to be fair, honest, and trustworthy, unlike the prior Mustang specialist I had worked with.  Most of what I was purchasing were trim pieces.  My car was missing the grille and some of the trim.  Much of the other trim was rusted or scratched.  And a good deal of the weatherstripping was worn out and needed to be replaced.  My plan was to install the GT emblems and stripes in place of the standard Mustang emblems.  I also ended up purchasing front and rear valances, the other front fender, and a used trunk lid.  Most of these last body parts I installed myself in the driveway.  The trim and weatherstrip I put away until after the car was painted.  Finding a shop to paint the car was my next challenge.

After having been burned by the previous body shop, I was confused as to how to find a decent body shop I could trust.  Right around that time a friend of mine named Rick started working for a golf car company.  Rick did mechanical work, but the company also had a body shop.  The body shop repaired golf cars that had sustained body damage, presumably by drunken golfers who crashed them.  One of Rick’s friends was interested in painting my car.  We arranged for a date and time when I could bring the car by for him to look at and work up an estimate for body work and paint.

The day arrived and I drove over to the golf car shop and met with Rick’s friend.  We talked for a little bit to discuss my plans for the car.  Then he looked the car over.  I was careful to point out any rusted areas I was aware of.  He ended up giving me an estimate of around $750 to do the bodywork and paint the car.  I also noticed that while we were talking somebody else in the shop was watching us carefully.  In the end I felt that the price was fair for the work to be done and we agreed that I would bring the car back in a few weeks after he could give me a firm date.  I left and went home to wait for Rick to let me know when to bring my car in.

A couple of days later Rick let me know that the arrangement for painting my car needed to be modified.  It turns out that the man in the shop watching us was the boss of the paint shop and he wanted in on the deal.  Rick said I needed to bring my car back and have him look it over and give me a revised estimate.  So back I went.

When I brought the car back I was told by the boss that any agreements I had made with his employee were off the table as he wanted to renegotiate.  I repeated the discussion regarding my plans for the car and then he proceeded to inspect my Mustang.  In the end he came up with a price of $750 to paint the car, which was the same price I had gotten before.  We set a date for me to deliver the car to him and I went home to patiently wait for the day to arrive.