restoring a 1965 Mustang
The best part about buying a bunch of reproduction sheet metal from the same manufacturer and vendor is that none of them fit together. The latest example was the rear bumper mounts that sit flush with the back side of the tail panel. Each mount has a couple holes for the rear bumper to mount […]
With the frame rails prepared and the alignment with the quarter panels looking good I slid the trunk floor into place one more time to mark out the layout of the frame rails onto the bottom of the trunk with a Sharpie. I wasn’t particularly worried about exactly matching the weld layout of the original […]
The complete trunk that I ordered also came with a new rear shock mount bracket that runs underneath the front of the trunk just behind the rear seats. Originally I had not planned on replacing the bracket as the current one was in pretty good shape, if covered in a ton of sand that had […]
With the tail panel out I figured it was time to slide the new trunk floor in and see how it fit. A significant piece of the car getting put back in place, if only to check fitment. Neat! Except that there was no way it was going to “slide in” because the forward most […]
After coming to the conclusion that the quarter panels were going to need to be replaced I decided to switch gears and finish out the work in the trunk first. My thought was that while I still had the old quarter panels on (and most of the wheel wells) they would serve as useful guidelines […]
The primary reason for this entire restoration finally arrived – addressing the rust. I decided to start with the trunk since it was both the most severely afflicted and the least likely to be visible at the end of the project, the perfect place to make inevitable mistakes as I learn how to do this […]
The first order of business was getting the remaining gas out of the tank. Due to a lack of foresight I started the disassembly with about a quarter tank of fuel left. As luck would have it the tank didn’t have a drain at one of the low points, my only options were the sending […]
Unfortunately with two other cars wanting to park in the garage space is at a premium and I couldn’t leave the fenders laying around, so I mounted them on the wall to keep them out of the way for now. With the floorspace reclaimed my wife helped me remove the taillights, trunk latch, and rear […]
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 […]