The start of it all.

This project started many years ago. I’ve spent a very large portion of my life completing this project to the state that it is currently in. “Finished” my wife would call it. But what project car that you intend to keep and own is ever “completely finished”? You are only really ever finished with them if you sell them. Most women really just don't understand this concept.

I started with what I thought was a decent Mustang II Cobra II body. Young eyes tend to over look the “details” when looking at something so I was slightly less then correct when I thought I had something nice. I guess by some standards I really had something. I guess I did in the long run it just took a lot of time to make blossom into something that I could finally be proud of.

Unfortunately or maybe fortunately I didn’t have a digital camera and hence I didn’t take a whole lot of pictures at the very start of the project. But as time progressed I took many, many pictures. Most of these will be found in the Car Pictures section of the image gallery. Enjoy!!

The Next Step...

Things went different directions for a while, after my wife and I had settled in to jobs and such after moving home from North Carolina. The next stages I don’t have many pictures of but I had to get into things I had neither the experience nor the tools to do. With the help of a couple of great friends and neighbors I was able to learn some things and tackle some serious problems.

One of the major things was that entire cowl top had to be replaced. At some point in the cars former life, the hood had been opened too far with enough force to bend the top of the cowl from side. I was able to get another cowl but it was cut from a car at a local salvage yard and the person who did the cutting didn’t do a nice job and made my replacing the cowl a much more difficult job. With that said I replaced just the top of the cowl. My lack of experience proved itself yet again when we put the rest of the front end back in place and both the front corners of the cowl were a fair amount higher than the tops of the fenders. So we pulled things apart again and fixed the error. the finished pictures are in the Images Gallery. Refinished cowl pictures

I knew that the suspension and underside of the car need some attention. Not to bad as far as the body was concerned but the front suspension was in need of some rework. I removed all of the suspension and replaced all the bushings, ball joints, and swaybar bushings, and endlinks. As well as newer heavier front springs to deal with the extra weight of the 351W. At the same time I wire brushed the entire underside. Cleaned and converted any rust and primed and painted the floor pan and engine bay.

After all this was done I did a quick scuff of the existing paint and tossed a quick coat of primer on the car as it needed to be pushed into service as a daily driver for a time.

A real start.

Finally a real start... At this point in time I had the car more or less mechanically road worthy. It ran nice, and performed fairly well. Apparently a little too well one sunny September afternoon, after leaving a stop sign rather "briskly" I was confronted by one of the local “Keepers of the Peace” (Police Officer) he proceeded to write me a ticket for racing? I’m not sure whom I was racing but never the less I found myself a nice chunk of change lighter in the wallet and after I had paid the ticket I received a Notice of Suspension of my driving Privileges. NOT COOL.. I dealt with it and “served my time” About a month before I was due to get my license restored, my good friend Eric and I had decided that as nice as the car ran it looked like crap. The oil stained primer on the fenders and on the rest of the car needed covered. So we figured that a month should be plenty of time to get any other body work done and find a couple of needed parts and toss a paint job on in and I would be golden! Little did I know that just a few short months before in September I would be driving the car on the road for the last time in 6 YEARS.

We decided to get rid of the several layers of paint that were on the car and start from scratch. Without the funds and resources to get the body media blasted, we did the work by hand with chemical stripper and a PILE of razor blades, really not very fun stuff. I knew there was some body damage underneath the layers, and we found some ugly stuff. That just gave me all the more opportunity to learn. Baptism by fire so to speak.

Big ugly body work.

Well it was as bad as I had thought, and maybe even a little worse. The body line going along the right rear quarter panel was trashed. The body work that was there was rather pitiful and the line was almost nonexistent. I decided to but a reproduction rear quarter panel and patch the entire quarter. Well after buying a USA made replacement panel I was disappointed to say the least. The marker light hole was not punched and the body lines were no where near as “crisp” as the original panel. I was lucky in that I had saved a rear quarter panel from a coupe that I had bought and parted out. I surgically removed enough of the donor part and the damaged portion of the Cobra’s quarter panel. The work went much better than I had even thought it would. It took me jut a little while to make the seam disappear with filler but the over all job went much better than I could have ever dreamed.

Really nice fenders seem to be made of "unobtainuim" at least in the northeast corner of the US. I searched for some time to find the 2 fenders that eventually used. The one was in very nice shape. The other needed to have 2 patches into it to make it decent and usable. You have to do what you have to do. This entire project was done on a budget and the budget didn’t include buying and shipping super nice fenders from all about the country.

The joy of owning a Mustang II!

Any mustang II owner will tell you the availability of getting certain parts is not fun. Let’s say headers, only 2 companies make headers for the V8 Mustang II; Hooker and Heddman. The Hookers are preferred but are much more costly than the Heddman’s. The Heddman headers are cheap but for whatever reason the design engineers in a moment of stupidity run the #1 cyl. tube under the front cross member. Any one who has these headers knows the fear of an oncoming speed bump. I had other issues I also had to deal with, as the 351W is both taller and wider than the 302 that the headers were designed for. I got creative with a hacksaw, another set of headers from a junked truck (for the tubing bends) and a welder. I had very good results and made the headers to fit with the 351W and eliminated the fear of smashing the #1 tube flat.

Really any nice piece for a Mustang II tends to be difficult to get a hold of. With the exception of a couple of dozen pieces, and parts that are carry-overs from other year mustangs or other ford cars, the reproduction market for the Mustang II is nonexistent. If you want a part it’s either deal with a used piece of find an NOS part (New Old Stock, a part that has been sitting on a dealer or warehouse shelf for years waiting to be used). During the project, both by searching on eBay or various Mustang Supply, or NOS Ford part dealers, I managed to acquire all of the marker light bezels, tail light bezels, and headlight bucket parts all NOS.

Mustang II bumpers are notorious for being ugly and with time the process used to manufacture them left room for improvement. A piece of NON-galvanized steel with a thick layer of urethane molded around it, these are a pair of rust factories just waiting for the water and salt to be added to start pushing the urethane in different directions. Again, nice, even NOS bumpers can be had, but at a premium price. I chose to go with fiberglass reproduction covers that are usually made for race applications. My buddy and I mulled over several ways to make then work and still be a “Useful” bumper. The reproductions are not 100% exactly the same as the originals as the location for the factory trim that goes on the bumper is eliminated. I think is makes for a slightly “cleaner” look, but everyone has their own opinion on that. We molded steel strap with bolts welded fast into the back to the fiberglass shells and that allowed us to bolt the new covers to the original steel bumper support structure.

Hosed and hosed again...

Hosed once!
Things were going well a relative of a good friend agreed to paint the car. Little did I know that this person who had supposedly "turned over a new leaf", was right back at his old tricks("screwing" people out of their hard earned money). He had the car for a couple of months and accomplished little or nothing that was agreed upon. The car was wet sanded and a coat of sealer was applied. Then is when he got greedy and wanted more cash to fix this spot and that spot. After I had given him more money nothing was getting finished and the car was sitting outside not be taken care of. So I cut my monetary losses, went and retrieved my car and my materials and took it “home”.

Hosed again!
The huge garage that I and a friend had rented for many years was being sold. We met with the new owner, and he was going to continue to rent to us with a slight increase in rent and the loss of one of the 4 garage bays. No big deal. Major crisis averted, or so we thought. The new owner/idiot then gets the bright idea that we are going to pay his bills and he is going to increase the rent 300%. Sorry buck! We and all of our tools, supplies, lighting upgrades, central heating unit, and any other additions or improvements to the building that we installed left with us. I guess he thought he had us by the “short and curlies” The joke was on him in the long run. As the dope didn’t have the sense to change the electric bill changed to is name by the time we were supposed to be out. The electricity was turned off the next day. We were told to, “get our stuff out by the end of the month and leave the scrap behind”. Let me tell you we did just that. If we had left it behind it truly was scrap and worth nothing to no one! LOL

Light at the end of the tunnel.

The winter or 2005 I finally received an actual offer to paint my car from a good friend, Bob Civiello Jr. He works at a regular body shop during the day and offered to paint this using his own facilities on his spare time with my help. He looked over the car and a price plus the barter of some items was arranged and a deal was set. The car was moved to his work area in the spring of 2006. We started right away to fix the crappy work that the last shop had done (and not done), and to sand the entire car down to make things smooth and flat. We both under estimated the amount of work that really need to be done I guess, as it did take us a bit longer than expected to move along. Once we sanded the entire car down we fixed a bunch of small body imperfections and some larger ones that were found as well. After all the sanding was done a good coat of primer was laid down and we got to do more sanding (wet sanding), but the wet sanding is the precursor to the color so it was really starting to come together and look better almost everyday.

Color!

Now we are getting somewhere! The white went on first, but somewhere along the line something went amiss. The color white I had bought wasn’t even close to the color white I wanted. It was more of an “antique white” I was looking for a “bright hurts your eyes in the sun light... WHITE”. Well, we wet sanded the ugly white down, and then we got the correct white layed down. What a difference! We then laid out the stripes covering all of the white that would eventually show through. What a GIANT PAIN is it was to lay out and tape off the stripes! They turned out awesome, but it was a huge pain to get them all straight and to look right.

The interior.

With wanting to keep the car fairly stock looking I really didn’t make any major changes to the interior. Most of the original parts and panels were in decent shape with the exception of the rear plastic panels that stretch from behind the door all the way to the back corner of the hatch area. The panels were sun baked very, very bad, to the point that you could scratch off layers of plastic with your fingernails. Finding panels that are decent can prove difficult most are either in the same condition or worse being cut up for speaker installs at some point. I was able to find a nice set of tan panels but the color would not do. I used interior vinyl and plastic paint to recolor the panels. Unfortunately the color I used was a little off for the rest of the interior so this made painting the rest for the interior panels as well.

The good thing is that the color I choose to repaint the interior matched the new headliner almost perfectly. My neighbor and good friend helped me pull, tug, stretch, glue, and clamp the new headliner into a drum tight vision of perfection. I couldn’t believe how bad the original one looked are pulling it out and looking at it, but the new one looks as close to perfect as I think you can get.

The seats are still the originals and are looking quite worn. After searching and being unable to find something that I liked I decided to just put some slip covers on them until I could find something nicer and more comfortable, or I can get them recovered.

The next thing was to do something about the seat belts. These were BAD! The sun had baked these as well as the 30 odd years of wear. I looked into getting the professionally redone. That was way out of my price range, at about $350 to just have the front belts done. I decided to take matters into my own hands. I had my same neighbor that helped me with the headliner stitch the “new belts” together with his heavy duty sewing machine. I bought webbing that matched everything else at one of the local shops and I disassembled the retractors and put the new webbing in and reassembled everything.

The carpet was the last thing. I had ordered a brand new molded set of carpet for both the passenger area and the hatch area. I had an original hatch area carpet and it seems that at some point in the 5 years of production that the hatch area carpet changed. My original 76 carpet had a vinyl “hinge” where the rear seat hinge fold was. The later models apparently and the new reproduction carpet didn’t. With wanting to keep things original looking I decided this had to be fixed. I purchased a small piece of dark blue vinyl and proceeded to cut my brand new carpet… I sewed the small 1½ inch piece of vinyl in place and was finished.

The Finished Car

After working on the car most of the summer we finally the got the paint finished up and the car reassembled in mid August. I took these pictures in early September on a grey day by one of the local lakes.