Yesterday I got the call from Herbie stating that he was finishing up my car.  He said he was doing some polishing and compounding of the car and that it would be ready for me to pick up the next day.  He gave me the price which I felt was very reasonable.  Herbie doesn’t do show car quality paint jobs although his work looks nice.  The price reflected that, which I was aware of and happy with.  I wanted a car I could drive rather than a show car that I could sit on a pedestal and worship.  I made plans and prepared for my trip to pick up the car.

Today I hopped on the subway and rode it into the city.  From there I rode a commuter train to the town where Herbie is located.  I had to walk the last 1.5 miles which wasn’t too bad.  I could use the exercise.  When I arrived I saw my car sitting in the driveway under an overhang.  I called for Herbie and we looked the car over.  He pulled it out into the sun so we could see better.

The car looked pretty nice.  I could see he had spent some time compounding and polishing.  If I looked close I could see some imperfections and blemishes, but the car really looks great from a foot or two away.  He added some red pin stripes along the body lines that are very similar to the optional accent stripes that Ford offered back in 1967.  Overall I was satisfied, so I paid Herbie and drove the car home.

Here are some pictures of how the car looked when I arrived home.  I still have a lot of work to do installing the trim and weather stripping.  The interior needs a really good cleaning too.  My Winter project awaits.

My Mustang still has the original style sealed beam headlights.  They were never particularly bright, but I had learned to live with them.  For years the only alternatives seemed to be halogen sealed beam replacements.  I never bothered to upgrade in the past, but decided to see what my options are considering the improvements that have been made to lighting since the 1980’s.

The sealed beam halogen replacement bulb is still an option.  It is probably better than my pair of old sealed beams, but based on some of my research it may not be much better than a new pair of sealed beam units.  A really nice upgrade is to the newer H4 type of headlight.  This is the same as used on my 1997 Mustang.  I know that HID and LED conversions also exist, but the legality of these conversions is questionable.  I also would like a stock appearing unit, so the H4 conversion seemed to be the best choice.

To upgrade to an H4 bulb I needed to purchase some glass housings that bolt in the stock location and accept the newer H4 bulb.  I found a couple that I liked.  One was made by Hella and the other was Cibie/Valeo.  Some research on candlepower forums revealed that the Cibie unit was a better choice due to their light pattern.  Also for me I liked the look better as it was less flat than the Hella, although they both look fine.  I also looked at bulbs and settled on the Phillips X-Treme Vision based on their performance and that I got a really good price on them.  I went ahead and ordered the housing and bulbs and continued to plan.

One of the issues with upgrading the lighting on older Mustangs is in the headlight wiring harness itself.  The current for the headlights has to make its’ way to the headlight switch and dimmer switch in the car’s interior, then back to the headlights.  With old wiring and the length of the wiring, voltage drop can be introduced.  That’s one issue.  The current carrying capacity of the stock wiring is the second issue.  The newer and brighter headlights can sometimes require more current than the car’s wiring is designed to handle.  The headlight switch contains an auto-resetting thermal circuit breaker to protect the headlight circuit.  The increased current can trip the breaker causing the headlights to turn off.  Once the breaker has cooled off it turns the headlights back on until the breaker heats up again.  This causes a blinking affect where the headlights turn on and off when in use.  This is obviously not acceptable.

The cure for this problem is to use the existing factory headlight wiring as a low current switching circuit and adding a new circuit to handle the increased current.  This allows the existing switches to control the lighting the same as it always has, but provide more current carrying capacity for the headlights.  The higher current wiring will also be much shorter decreasing the voltage drop from the original wiring.  The way to accomplish all of this is to install headlight relays that are turned on and off by the existing wiring.  The high current is switched on and off by the relays.  I also chose to install higher current circuit breakers to protect the new wiring.  The original breaker in the headlight switch would provide the protection for the low current part of the wiring.

My next decision was how best to wire up the new higher current circuit.   I chose to go with overkill and install separate relays for each side of the car along with separate circuit breakers.  I have seen many instances where one pair of relays is used to power both lights.  Two relays are required because there is separate wiring for the low and high beams.  I wanted to isolate the two headlights from each other in case of a failure in one side of my new wiring.  Looking back on it now I think this may have been unnecessary but that’s my thinking and approach.

I planned to install a pair of relays and a circuit breaker in each of two project boxes and then wire them into the headlights.  I also planned to run 12 volts from the starter solenoid to power the circuit.  Getting the 12 volts was easy enough and so was filling the boxes.  The question now was where to insert this into the existing headlight harness.  I had seen three different approaches used.

The first approach was to splice into the existing harness and solder in new connections.  I didn’t really want to cut up my existing harness so I discarded this approach without any more consideration.  Looking back on it now it also had the disadvantage of reusing part of the existing wiring for the high current portion of the circuit.  I’ll explain more about why I think that is a problem in a minute.

The second approach was to purchase an upgrade wiring harness that used the existing headlight plugs to trigger the relays and used new ceramic headlight connectors and bigger gauge wiring.  This had the advantage of using the bigger gauge wiring for greater current carrying capacity along with the ceramic headlight connectors with greater heat tolerance.  I have heard that the original plastic headlight connectors can sometimes melt from the increased heat of the upgraded lighting.  So from a safety standpoint this sounded pretty good.  The downside is that it takes a bit of effort to remove if the stock look is required for shows.  Not too bad but the third approach I looked at was a lot more “plug and play”.

The third approach is to insert the new headlight boxes I was building in between the headlight wiring harness and the headlight extension wiring.  This would make it very simple to install and remove the relay wiring, as I only needed to separate one plug on each side of the car and insert my new wiring.  If I needed to remove it for any reason I could just unplug my relay box and plug the original wiring back together.  This looked like a great approach and I made plans to build everything this way.  But then I realized that the original headlight extensions used smaller gauge wiring and a plastic headlight connector.  I really felt it was important to have the heavier gauge wiring and ceramic connectors for safety.  So I returned to method number two.

I have almost all of the parts in hand but won’t be completing the project until my car is back from paint.  I can begin building the relay boxes and some of the wiring, but I need the car here so that I can take some measurements and find where I have room for the relay boxes and wiring.  This project isn’t a really high priority at this point, but just a “nice to have” item.  I’ll continue to work on it as time permits and will come back and post some photos when I get a chance.  Hopefully I’ll have the car back from paint in the next week or two.

Time sure flew by really fast and the appointment for painting my car sneaked up on me.  I did make some time to remove the door locks, handles, and radio antenna.  I also drilled holes for and test fitted the moldings that go across my trunk lid and rear quarter end caps.  My skills at drilling holes in a perfectly straight line definitely could use some improvement, but I was able to enlarge and file everything so that it all fit OK.

I chose to drop off my car the night before the appointment based on the weather forecast.  It ended up raining earlier than predicted so I had to drive in a light rain.  That didn’t turn out to be an issue.  Since I had removed the outside rear view mirrors, lane changes were a bit challenging.  And without the door weather stripping the wind noise was pretty bad.  My family followed me in our minivan to give me a ride home.  They commented that my car’s exhaust smelled badly of gas until the car warmed up.  It sounds like I need to do some choke adjustments and carb tuning after I get the car back from paint.  I also noted that the car burned quite a bit of gas on the ride.  I drove about 75 miles and used about half a tank per the fuel gauge.  I don’t know how accurate the gauge is, but I would expect to be able to do a bit better than that.  It probably ties back in to the gas smell my family noted.

I’ll post updates as I receive them from the paint shop.  For now I just need to be patient and wait for the car to be completed.  I was told to expect it back in 2 or 3 weeks.  The date is contingent on how much body work is required after the car is stripped down to bare metal.  You just never know what is hidden under all the primer until you strip it all off.  Hopefully there won’t be any big surprises.  I will just have to wait and see.

I contacted some local body shops for estimates on painting the car over the last few weeks.  The results weren’t very encouraging.  Most of the shops i talked to were not even interested in painting a car.  The shops make more money doing insurance work fixing fender benders and didn’t want to consider a larger job that could potentially tie up one or more of their bays with a disassembled car for several weeks or even months.  I did talk to two shops that would be willing to paint the car.  Both estimate were way above what I was willing to commit to spending.  I would have ended up with a top quality or even show quality paint for that kind of money.  But my budget and goals were far exceeded by both of those shops.

I asked Val if he knew of any shops that would be willing to take on this type of job for a reasonable price.  He referred me to a small shop that does driver quality paint jobs, takes on cars one at a time, and finishes the job in a fairly short (2-3 week) time frame.  The paint is base coat/clear coat.  He doesn’t do the disassembly and reassembly of the chrome trim.  Just makes sure the body is stripped, straight, and then paints the car.  His paint jobs are equivalent in quality to what the factory did back in 1967, but with modern urethane paint   The painter’s name is Herbie.  I called Herbie and he said to bring the car by so that he could take a look at it.

I made the drive out to visit Herbie and he went over the car.  His prices were very reasonable and he was not only willing to paint the car, but would be ready to start the job in about a week.  He also recommended adding a pin stripe to the side which he could do for a fair price.  I’m not certain about the pin stripe yet, but everything else he said sounded good to me.  I scheduled the job with him and went home to start planning and disassembling the chrome trim.  I had been a bit discouraged by the estimates I had received so far and by several shop’s lack of willingness to even take on a job of this size.  It now looks like I can have the interior and exterior completed by Spring time.

I still have a couple of days left before the car goes off to paint.  So far I have removed the backup lights, tail light bezels, trunk lock, and the door upper weather strip.  I still need to remove the door handles and locks and the radio antenna.  Then I just need to decide what chrome trim I need to drill holes for and get any drilled that I need.  Today is Saturday and my appointment with Herbie is for next Tuesday so I better get moving.

As a side note I installed new rear lap belts.  They were supposed to be the same color as my front seat belts but they don’t match.  I didn’t notice until after I installed them so I’ll try to live with them for now.  I also got my molded headliner kit in but probably won’t be installing it until after paint.  No problem, I will have the next 2-3 weeks or so to plan my next steps and the best order to perform them in.  I’ll try to snap some pictures of the car just before it goes to paint, and of course I’ll take a bunch of pictures after I get the car back from Herbie.  I can hardly wait.

Just wanted to post a quick note regarding my deluxe steering wheel.   I installed the wheel and test fitted the center crash pad again.  It only required a small dimple to get it to fit correctly.  So now I have the deluxe wheel install completed.

I also did some thinking about headliners and rear seat belts.  For the headliner I decided to try the molded headliner offered by TMI.  The install doesn’t require removal of the front and rear glass since it tucks under the windshield gaskets.  It also fits up closer to the roof fo the car so I will gain an inch or so of headroom.  I placed the order for the headliner about a week ago so I hope to be receiving it shortly.  Then I can complete the interior update.

For the rear seat belts I looked at installing 3 point belts identical to what I installed for the front seats.  I sat in the back seat and did some quick measurements.  What I determined is that the upper mount for the retractor would need to be a couple of inches above my shoulder.  I’m not sure I like that positioning.  I ended up ordering lap belts for the back seat that will match my front seat belts.  They are also on order and should be arriving within the next few days.

Once I finish installing the headliner I can install the rear view mirror, sun visors, coat hanger hooks, and dome light.  The windlace comes next.  Then the interior is done.  After that I plan to pursue having the car painted more actively.  I’ve been in touch with a few paint and body shops, but none of them are interested in tackling a project car.  It seems that insurance work and fender benders is more lucrative.  Hopefully I have a few leads on some shops that are willing to take on a bigger project.