We start this post of with a fantastic picture kindly sent to us regarding the “French” car and how she got on going to her new home. The car arrived there with no problems at all and the car just looks amazing against the house too.

We were also asked about the horizontal line on the back window. This is pretty cool idea as that is a join for two pieces of glass. You did read  that correctly, the glass actually folds away with the hood. No more crinkled up plastic that fades and cracks that you can’t see out off. The more solid approach gives the hood a fuller look too. (Sorry we forgot to mention that last week, so thanks to Dale for asking us.)

WebShop, Email & Phones Updates:

You may not think so, but the restoration business can be very seasonal. At Mustang Maniac we are subjected to the same influences. We are now in car show season and we get more than average number of cars entering our workshops for check overs and MOT’s etc. So, with all that in mind we are running flat out to look at the cars and get them all ready within the time scales we can comfortably cope with. Sadly on Friday we had an email from a potential customer who wanted to ask us a few questions about a car he wanted to buy, he went on to say you “don’t answer your phones and I wanted to know what to look for”. We will come back to this in a moment.

From Friday morning to mid Saturday morning (less than twenty-four hours), we had 354 unanswered phone calls. We made a difficult decision to turn the phones off so we could work on the cars. We had promised a couple of customers that we would get their cars to them ready for Saturday morning. Now with the best will in the world if we ALL sat in the office to answer the calls we would have still missed some of the calls and the cars would not have been ready. So, we are in a catch twenty-two situation which ever way we go. We have just upgraded the WebShop to show the cars by years and compatible parts which will cross reference all the items we stock. We know this is a big improvement on the old WebShop from the great positive feedback we have been getting.  

To get around this we are going to trial our email out hours service, if you need to order a part, but you are not sure what you need; send us an email via the WebShop with a photo of the item and as much detail as you can so we can try and identify it for you. We will then respond back to you when we can to help out. Nobody else as far as we know offers this type of service. We think that is a great compromise rather than trying to talk to us on the phone, again let us know. We managed to answer a few calls early Friday, we was asked by one customer if an item on the WebShop was in stock. We told them to check on-line to see what the stock status was as we were at the workshop at the moment. They informed us they were “looking at it (the WebShop) and it says; In Stock”. There is your answer we responded; “they are in stock”. Our stock control computer is very good, it took a lot of time and effort to get in place as it’s an instant update process. If the last item is sold, the stock is updated instantly on the website, there is no delays, no overnight updates, it’s instant updates because that is what our customers wanted. Turning our phones off will still allow you to order the parts, and the parts should be dispatched same day or the next day depending on the time of the order. Getting back to the first point, we always try to help out our customers and we don’t make promises we can’t keep. But, this person didn’t want to order anything from us, or even book his car in with us, he just wanted to pick our brains on whether the car was any good or not as he couldn’t get hold of his mechanic friend to ask him. We wondered if this guy emailed his “mechanic friend” to say how poor his service was too. We thought his response to us was a little unfair to be honest as we are a trying to maintain our business at the end of the day, not a free advice line. Now onto something much more exciting.

Customers Cars:

We often take cars back to their owners and collect cars when they are non-runners as you would expect. On this occasion we dropped a Ford “LTD” back to the owner and picked up his Oldsmobile 442.

ltd

ltd

442

442

We don’t always work on other makes of car, but sometimes we do. We have agreed to look at the 442 for a service and tune up as we had just done his Ford LTD for him.

Crate Engine Swap Over:

More often than not it’s just simpler to replace a damaged or worn engine with a direct crate engine replacement. Most common of these is the 289/302 engine small block where the dimensions are exactly the same on the outside for both engines.

Here Yogi has taken the old engine out of the ’67 Fastback and mounted onto the stand to remove the parts we will use again.

The new crate engine is painted and fitted on the test rig and given a run before fitting.

Before the engine is mounted back into the car Yogi did his thing with the brake pipes, every car is unique that he does. Yogi often tells us that “his cars are a work of art”, we’re not sure what he had in his tea this morning though, but we can’t argue with that really. We was asked to swap over the shock tower tops to billet, voltage regulator top cover and the brake master cylinder while we were at it too. Relays were mounted for the front lights to the inner fenders and tidied up the wire loom for a much cleaner organised look.

With all the pipes connected the finished article will look like this with the attention to detail that you can only get from Mustang Maniac.

Bolts:

We have had a number of people asking to have a little engine dress up done on their engine bay after we featured this upgrade a while ago now. This is a change from the standard export brace bolts to our own dome headed bolts. The effect is instantly visible and so much neater with a little extra bling. Often the Monte Carlo bar bolts are swapped out too so they match. Here we have Paul who completed the export brace bolts at the back and is in the process of swapping  the Monte Carlo bar bolts over.

One of the cars that was being picked up on Saturday morning waiting for her owner, a nice early 260ci.