We have had a couple of cars this week that have come in to Mustang Maniac for their annual check ups and MOT’s. This makes a little change from the heavy panel work of the last couple of weeks. We start with a first for us, we have been delivered a car that we have been looking forward to getting our hands. This customer’s car is going to be a John Wick clone. The painted body was not handled by ourselves on this occasion, but we get to work with a freshly painted body. Yogi backed the lorry to the workshop so we could unload the dolly mounted chassis straight into the new home for a while until we start to fit the running gear back onto to the car. First of all a little about the John Wick car. The car is in fact a 1969 Mach1 and not a Boss 429 (7.0 litre) v8 as mentioned in the film. The subtle give away was the hood scoop not being big enough, also the Boss 429 didn’t have a rear spoiler either.

The Movie Car

The Clone 

We are looking forward to getting this little lady ready for the owner. We have also been delivered a huge selection of parts that had been removed prior to us taking delivery, some of which have seen better days though. We will of course inspect those parts carefully before re-assembly back to the car. We will be bringing you plenty of updates on this car as we go along.

1970 Fastback

This lady has been come into us for some tender loving care and check up. The fantastic thing is that the owner of this car has owned it since 1973. Perhaps one of the longest owned cars we have seen.

The interior of this car has red velour door cards and a matching velour headline in fantastic condition. The retro look that is quite sort after is indeed the real deal here and looks fantastic on this car we must say. Another nice touch here is from The Mustang Owners Club 1993 competition plaque mounted just in front of the gear shift on the centre console.

Under the car is very tidy indeed considering it has been in UK with our weather conditions as they are. The rear chassis even has the original tie down brackets still mounted which are virtually always removed by the dealerships when taking delivery. A very nice original touch. The wheel centres look to have been stencilled on to the classic mag wheels.

stencil wheels

tie down bracket

Big Block – Big Problems?

Here is a question for you. How long does it take to fit a pair of headers on to a big block? Well, out of the car we could do it with a couple of us on each side easily under half an hour even with the four bolts per port and not the standard two. But, the big block in a ’69 428 Big Block is tight, and we really do mean tight. In fact it had taken Yogi and Paul a complete day to fit the engine into the bay. The headers are ceramic coated long headers and is impossible to get into the engine bay with the headers attached. The process was to have the engine lowered in and the headers bolted on in stages to check the fit in the engine bay. It was noticed that the headers were resting on the inside of the shock towers, so some of the plating had to be very carefully cut away to allow the fit. We had to repeat the same process four times in total before we were happy with the clearance, all be it just tiny millimetres in places. As the engine has had a full engine rebuild we don’t expect any vibration, so the minimal clearance will not be a problem.

With the headers in place we will need to remake the exhaust to fit the new alignment of the headers.

Models:

DeAgostini – Shelby GT500 1:8th Scale

It has been a little while since we have updated the model progress, the recent ten or so issues has been the duplicate of the other door, seat, wheel with some single chassis components. So we skip a number of issues as it’s a little pointless to show the same thing again. But the latest set of issues now start to show significant progress with the build. These parts are now being screwed together and make some quite nice parts. You can see the rest of the build so far to click here.