While taking a close look at the trunk tonight I discovered two areas where fiberglass patch repairs had been performed prior to at least the most recent paint job. The car was white when it left the factory, a previous owner had a rusty brown sprayed over the white, then the most recent black was layered on top nearly 20 years ago.
Since I’m going to be stripping everything down to bare metal anyway I went ahead and ripped up the fiberglass patches.
That uncovered the worst rust damage I’m currently aware of on the car. The rightmost hole looks down into the rear frame rail where the passenger side leaf springs bolt to the frame. The rear axle housing is visible through the long skinny hole above the gas tank.
The driver’s side of the trunk, despite being a mess of three different paint jobs, looks to be much more solid.
With the whole floor likely being forfeit and the trunk pan being in such rough shape I’m starting to think that a full firewall-to-taillight replacement pan is going to be necessary.
Did the original white factory paint job include rally stripes? I don’t know if I’ve ever seen an all-white Mustang (without rally stripes).
No rally stripes, plain white all around. I’m not sure whether stripes were an option on the non-performance models (base V8 coupe) that early in the production lifecycle.