No sooner have we rebuilt The Onion Mustang and we made space for our next project. This comes in the form of a very nice ’68 Coupe Pro Street 302ci. We first saw this little lady in back in October last year where we made our first evaluations of the car. The car is in pretty good condition with a few rust issues like most of them at some point in their lives. The main painted part of the car has a few minor issue that can soon be sorted out without too much trouble. We say Pro Street due to the rear end being pretty much maxed out and tubbed, with some skinny front end tyres as being the first points to notice.

Both Yogi and Adam had a good look around the car with some recommendations depending on budget which would mean that there would be discussions later on between the owner and Adam on how best to proceed.

Some clever work was done on the rear chassis rails to move them over in order to cater for the massive rear tyres. Not a very common mod, but we have seen variations on this theme before.

The trunk was equipped with the race spec small fuel cell and trimmed out very nicely.

The guys were interested to see what was under the carpet when trying to evaluate this type of work. But, you can’t just rip out carpet on somebody’s pride and joy of course just to have a little look. So things like this can hide the odd unexpected bad spot.

Under the hood was neat, tidy, well presented and made a rather nice noise that got Yogi’s attention as she pulled into the workshop to be lifted up on the ramp.

The main reason the little lady came in was for some potential cosmetic work on the body. Like all these things, until you get into it you never know what you are going to find. A customer of our summed it up very well;

“Rust is like an iceberg, you never know what’s under the surface”.

The fenders were taken off the car and the inner fenders marked up for attention. Yogi got the car on the ramps and set to work on the problem areas that they had identified, pretty much they had expected, but certainly not the worst they had seen.

The chassis legs will need some attention as they attach to the floor and obviously we need to see what condition all that was in before final decisions can be made.

Like The Onion Mustang, the floor was made up of  a patchwork of metals, and the patches were more like tin foil in places. The trouble is when you get to this stage you have to keep going until you find a solid metal section(s) to start from.

With all the bad metal out the full extent of the repair can be seen.

This is nothing that we haven’t seen before and we will surely be seeing it again. With all the rubbish having been cleaned out it doesn’t look half as bad to be fair.

We have a couple of foot wells at the front to be replaced so far which is no problem, but we will need to go round the rest of the floor to see that all is well. If we have to patch too much it will be more cost-effective to swap out the floor pan itself.

As we have said so many times before, we are quite confident that this little lady will be back ripping up the road in no time. It takes a little time and a lot of knowhow that’s all.

Other News:

There has been a lot of work going on near the main offices and we will be letting you know all about that very soon. I’m not supposed to give anything away, so I picked this little pic doesn’t do that, but it gives you a clue!

It’s all very clever stuff!