We had some good stuff for you this week and we decided to swap things around a little bit. Those items we had planned will be next week or so as we decided this was more important. Mustang Maniac has launched their new WebShop still the same address; www.mustangmaniac.co.uk This now has much easier browse function but more on that a little later in the post. 🙂

Park & Pic

We have Mart’s ’66 Coupe back into us with a suspected problem. The car was brought down to us with “Somethin’ ain’t right with the steering, I also have a squeak that I can’t get rid of and it’s driving me nuts.”

This car was with us many moons ago for a Full Restoration over four and a half years, which we featured quite heavily on our blog at the time for the full process. Mart is still a long standing loyal customer of ours and good friend and part of the exclusive ‘inner sanctum’ of friends. He likes to quote; “I won’t let anybody near my car unless it’s Mustang Maniac. They are the only ones who know what they are doing”. We’re sure he won’t mind us repeating that.

As a precaution he wanted us to take a look at his car and let him know what we thought. The upshot of which was Adam took the car to the round about and back, less than a mile test drive. There was indeed something wrong. Adam explained; ‘if you drive a car all the time and things get worse over time you tend not to nice it, as you just get used to the degradation that comes with it. That’s what the MOT’s are for too, to make sure stuff hasn’t fallen apart’.

We dropped what we were doing and Yogi came up from his cave to have a look with Adam on the ramp. There was a fair bit of car swapping around first though to make space on the ramps. The car was lifted up and Adam & Yogi got to work checking things out and spotted that there was play from the idler arm. Mart asked ‘do you have them in stock with the shortages going round?’ Adam replied; ‘nope – we don’t have one. We have about twenty to choose from!’ 😉 Here’s the proof:

Over time these bushing perish and this can happen when the cars aren’t used. They then collapse when driven after a long time. Below are the new on the left and old arms on the right of each picture.

The idler bracket was checked for damage and wear and the arm itself was swapped out, before grease and adjustment.

This would cause the play or vagueness in the steering. As for the squeak this may help. Mart took it up the road and couldn’t believe just how bad it had gotten and was ‘OMG, it’s a different car, what an improvement.”

But, he reported that the squeak was still there. The next step was to take the left side front wheel of and investigate. Adam had already noted where the noise was coming from earlier.

There was nothing touching or dragging on the wheel, no stone in the brakes pads, no scoring etc. The guys listened intently as the rotor was spun and they decided to check the bearing. Yogi removed the outer bearing and by experience alone, Adam didn’t like the ‘feel’ of the bearing and Yogi concurred.

The guys checked the tracker for damage and that was all fine. The inner bearing was still fully packed with grease.

Yogi repacked the new outer bearing and refitted everything back in place. Yogi went round and checked that everything had grease in it and was pleased that it did.

A second test drive confirmed that the ‘squeak had gone’. Mart was a happy bunny again. Adam rechecked the old bearing and still couldn’t see anything wrong but just ‘felt wrong’. Adam filed in the storage area marked scrap. Now it was time to perform a little magic on Mart’s wallet. LOL. We have given Mart the pictures we took at the time and we suspect you will see them on his blog soon as well.

Moral of the story: Get the MOT done even on these old cars even though you don’t need one. If you think something isn’t t right get a professional to check it. We know exactly how these cars are supposed to drive. On the other hand the owner has nothing to compare it to. A two minute road test (literally) could help you avoid an accident or some big bills. The saving grace is that this owner drove it to us carefully just to check it out with us.

He went home happy and messaged us to say all was good in the world with the car on the trip home. Those that know him, he said “I had to clean it before I put it away and cover it back up. It was filthy by the time I got home!”

Customer Cars

‘The Pear’ has had some work doing to it and and we are now starting on the parts we can put back on it. The owner want to reuse what he can and is not precious about new parts, he just wants to drive it. The headliner was refitted from the donor car and went back in very well.

We are waiting for our glass guy to come and fit the rear and front windows.

The door glass has gone in now, but yet to be aligned fully, that will be done once the weather strip is fully fitted.

Work has started on refitting the wire loom. The old one was checked for damage and then re-wrapped to give it that OEM look (not that Ford bothered in the first place). This helps to keep everything neat when re-fitting.

The engine is now undergoing a strip down to see what is going on. All waterways look good, but there is a tiny leak on one of the core plugs. So we will replace the whole lot while we are at it.

The oil pump will be changed as a matter of course. The filter had some debris in it and will also swapped out as well as standard practice.

WebShop

All New WebShop – Website has been upgraded

We have listened to more customer feedback and redeveloped the website.

We are still making changes behind the scenes on how you can find your parts much easier. So you will have to bear with us while we fine tune things and make it better and better.

Hopefully you will enjoy the new look and feel of the new website and hopefully make life just that little bit easier and slicker. There has been some massive changes behind the scenes to improve performance and stability. The upshot is that front end user interface has been simplified and cross referenced to other sections which may help you.

Where the manufacturers have supplied a set of instructions for the fitting and parts, we are now also adding those the stock item in the form of a PDF document download. Hopefully that should help everybody if you lose the ‘book of words’. Not that most men read them anyway! This will be an ongoing process and we will add them as we go along.

We dare say that some of our fellow suppliers may well be downloading the documents from us going forward and passing them of as their own. We will be able to tell 😉

We have recently seen some comments on various media that Mustang Maniac is not showing sheet metal for the general public. We can confirm that this is correct by intention. Unfortunately these people hadn’t noticed that we have for the best part of this year advised that sheet metal is only available to the trade and is in very limited supplies. It even says it on the front pages of the WebShop.

Yes, we have plenty of our own sheet metal in stock which we are using for allocated projects. We had mentioned in the past that we are now fully booked up for two years for a full restoration service. A good amount of our sheet metal stock has been allocated to what we know is coming up. Yes, we are getting additional sheet metal as we posted last week. We will be notifying those customers as and when we get their items.

For all our friends across the pond:

Happy 4^th July – Independence day.

Stay Safe & Take Care!