We have often said that a key to our leadership in the Mustang restoration business is our exquisite attention to details. Even the details you don’t see. We have a car with us where corners have been cut, either through lack of knowledge or for a little cost saving. This can be cosmetic, hidden or mechanical. The latter being the biggest cause of concern.

Customers Cars

The owner of this vehicle wanted to have the door quarter light windows re-chromed. Nothing wrong with that what so ever. But, when you take the door cards off you expect to see a moisture barrier. This protects the door cards from getting damaged and sagging, protects the inside of the car from extremes, quietens the cabin etc.

This membrane is virtually never seen by customer, not fitting it saves a little cost, time and effort, but can have long terms effects. We will obviously install it when get to refitting of course. When people ask why we are little more expensive than “so & so” down the road? Simple, we do it properly and we know how it should be.

With the cards removed we can get to the glass, remove the main window, check the mechanisms for any damage or wear and tear. We will clean and lubricate to make sure there shouldn’t be any window issues going forward. The quarter windows are notoriously awkward to fit and remove, but we have a couple of little tricks we like to keep to ourselves for obvious reasons. With the quarters out, the glass is easily removed ready to be sent away.

When this gets put back together again new window seals fitted, and the little black window tip with the rivet and not a good old self tapping screw that we have seen before.

Suspension Issues

These older ladies require a little more maintenance than the more modern sealed for life type components. One of the most overlooked areas is the regular grease service. This is things like the suspension arms, steering linkages, prop shaft yokes etc. This car has not been serviced correctly and there is a little give away. That little giveaway is the grease nipples!

These had to be cleaned and flushed through with clean grease, not the cleanest of jobs but it has to be done.

The front springs also showed issues as well. The perches had worn, no perch pads, and the top of the springs were missing the rubber tops as well.

When the spring tops are fitted we apply a coating of copper grease. This makes sure there are no little annoying squeaks when the springs move under load. Our attention to detail.

All back together, moving correctly and greased.

We were asked to fit a modern Borgeson steering upgrade, which is a standard swap out for us. While we were at it we decided a good check out was required based on what we had seen. We found a bolt not seated correctly to add to the list.

The original steering removed.

The car was also fitted with exhaust headers. Again standard stuff and nothing new by any means. More often than not, when a car is fitted with large headers the steering ram mount has to be lowered as it sits to close to the exhaust. Bearing in mind that this long ram mount is not an expensive part and is a straight forward swap out part. So why would anybody want to fabricate a part and do this? The correct part for this modification also known as the ‘steering drop bracket’ is located here in our WebShop.

We simply don’t need to explain the dangers here. apart from the obvious packing of the bolts but there should be three bolts as well to stop the bracket moving sideways. We think the card handed out here was the Joker!

If in doubt NEVER do this sort of thing. In a worse case scenario it could fail, you loose steering and who knows what would happen in a crash, maybe your beloved car is mashed up or bent a bit. But this could also turn out to be fatal! We don’t know who did this, but this is more than just details, this is dangerous.

The good news is that the car is now at Mustang Maniac, we will sort this car out, it will be safe again and driving how it should and more with the new steering upgrade, and the suspension working correctly.