A follow up from the post a few hours ago – we have sold two Leed Brake kits to the following lucky customers:
Gary – for his 1964 Mustang
Paul – for his 1963 Falcon.
We will be bringing you pictures as soon as we get the cars in and do the conversions.
This week will be about our new product range that we mentioned last week; Leed Brakes. Mustang Maniac are excited to be a UK supplier for Leed Brakes. We have now received the first of our deliveries for stock and when we inspected the products, everything was exactly as we expected. Premium parts and very well packaged.
To celebrate this new product launch with us in the UK, we are offering the first TWO customers who purchase these kits to be fitted FREE by us. Yes you did read that correctly – FREE. Mustang Maniac will fit the Leed Brake kit of your choice to your car, check it, road test it and if needed the tracking also set up for you too. That’s a days work for us from start to finish with our unbeatable very high standards. So you get a top quality product and then fitted by the premium Mustang Maniac restoration service. Need we say more? The only caveat is that we would want to post a few pictures of you car with the kits fitted on our blog here, just to show any doubters that we have actually done what we said we would – fit them for free to our customer’s car!
To buy these kits there are various options, standard (which we will be showing here below), you can have slotted, drilled or both etc. Just visit our WebShop for the kit details. The kits come in three boxes and are they are heavy, keeping that in mind, the shipping is £35 delivered to your door. Alternatively you can always make your own arrangements to collect the kit from us which will be packaged up ready for collection.
The booster and the reservoir and already assembled:
The attention to detail is amazing, even the supplied pipes have already been double flared with the fittings already in place, just fit them on and tighten up.
The quality of the zinc is worth just opening the hood for at a car show, should you be inclined also offering exceptional corrosion resistance.
Adjustable push rods, proportioning valves and other parts we also sell separately too.
These rotors are the standard versions which are vented and with more attention to detail such as the slight bevelled edges.
The four pot callipers have powerful functionality as well as a work of art. Pipes are already fitted along with the pad and retainers.
The supplied hardware, bearings, bolts and seals are the quality you would expect, correct looking parts, polished or zinc to not only last, but also look good.
Instructions:
Clear and precise set of instructions are supplied to walk you through the conversion process.
Our WebShop is open 24/7 – 365, so if you want the upgrade, but don’t want the hassle of fitting the kit, get in quick. We will be posting pictures of the cars once their kits have been fitted, you can even be in the photo with your car if you wanted too.
We appreciate that these kits fit Mustangs and Ford based hot rods or rat rods, but there is no need to feel left out if you are a Chevy Mopar guys. Just drop us an email via the WebShop and we will make a special order for you and get the kits into the UK. There aren’t many companies out there that will go out of their way to do that for their potentially new customers either.
We have some exciting news about our two NEW partners for Mustang Maniac, but more on that a little later in the blog. First we have an update on a project car.
Shelenor project has taken on some new bodywork. The rear end duck tail and quarter ends along with the light panel. The is a case of build up, sand down and build up again. A relentless process that Yogi likes the end results and sees the gapping as a challenge. A skilled job and taking your time is key.
The parts used for the transformation are all from our own very own Mustang Maniac Eleanor moulds.
The secret is to make the joins seamless with existing metal, so when repainted there is no visible join. In order to do that the existing paint needs to come of down to bare metal.
With the extra parts fitted, it was time to blend in the parts with the filler.
The wheel arches were fitted to how much adjustment will be needed. In this case, not much at all.
A weeks work in a few pictures, but you can’t rush a work of art from a bodywork master, Yogi!
Two new stock lines are about to be launched on the WebShop. These are something we have had on the go for a little while now. Covid has not been our friend here, but we are now ready to supply these great products to the UK.
We are pleased to say that our first delivery of ‘Leed Brakes’ conversion kits will be with us early next week. Mustang Maniac is now proudly an official retail partner of Leed Brakes for the UK.
Once we have some photo’s of the delivery, we will post them on here for you. These kits are designed to supply everything you need for a straight drum to disc swap out conversion, or you can buy just the bits you need for an upgrade if you wish. These kits aren’t just for Mustangs, if you have a hot rod in mind, these kits are an easy time saving option. These kits are designed to stop you safely with peace of mind that they will.
We are excited about this partnership as the quality of the kits compared to the other kits out there has just stepped up a notch. We will still have our other kits in stock of course for now, which are absolutely fine and we use them. However, we may be phasing those out in order to provide the superior products that we can for your Mustang. What we will stock will depend if we still get orders for the other kits we stock, we suspect our clients will want these products, once these kits hit the UK market!
We have been running some trials on our own cars after researching into the Lanoguard products. We were that impressed with the products – we are now a UK supplier of Lanoguard! What else do we need to say?
Lanoguard have spent over 35 years innovating and perfecting their products to help make things last longer, work smoothly and not corrode to save time, money and hassle for their clients. Lanoguard have now become and international company with some extremely good reviews.
The Lanoguard product dries to a satin clear finish and is pretty much undetectable. We have some photos here, unfortunately the pics don’t really do the product justice. Just spray it on what ever you want to protect with little to no prep work, it’s as simple as that.
Once we get the rest of the order in from Lanoguard, we will post the range on here too as well after the WebShop has been updated with the product lines.
We would like to thank those of you that took time out to send us emails and messages of support about last weeks post. The point that was made seems to have gone away, and we removed a few new ‘troll’ comments from our YouTube video where they were trying to sell similar products on their own websites and other companies on their behalf! We don’t think those people see the irony of it all? Anyway, it’s great to think that we have lots of support within the community apart from the odd few that will never be satisfied no matter what we do.
We may not be the cheapest out there, we never claimed to have been. But, our customer service and knowledge is second to none. Our parts are in stock, that is the convenience of next day parts and privilege that you pay for. That includes the parts we only sell one of every couple of years. We still need to stock them, not only that we stock not just one product line of the parts we stock, the multiple manufacturers covers concours, our ‘Enos’ range for those on a budget and everything in between.
The Pear
This week on the “Pear” we have been trying to fit the other parts from the donor car. There were in fact only ten parts that we could use, and they were the smaller parts. When we removed the larger panels and checked what was under the paint there becomes a point where you have to weigh up what is the most economical and best for the customer and the car. We could spend hours stripping, patching and fixing the panels to fit correctly, or just swap the parts for new ones. In this case that was the best cost vs time scenario. It’s not a decision that is made lightly by any means. The other option is that the owner could then sell these donor car parts on recoup some of their money back for the new parts. Scrap, is not the right word by any means, more like recycling back to the community some OEM parts that need some TLC back to the community, who still crave these original parts, but don’t mind spending a little time on the repair and a price that reflects the effort required.
So we have the shell now in a place where the gaps and panels are being aligned before being removed ready for paint.
Some of the front end parts looked OK on the donor, but once we removed them it showed the cracks and thin metal we would have to try and salvage, which again didn’t warrant the time and effort vs a new part or two. There will be an amount of panel filler work and building out of the panels to fit how we want them to gap and fit, only the way that Mustang Maniac knows how. 🙂
Watch this space for more updates.
Yep it’s that time of year where men just can’t seem to get anything right, we buy flowers from the petrol station on the way home – they are the wrong sort. We buy chocolate from the petrol station on the way home – we get told that our better halves are looking after their figures, but still eat the chocolate anyway. We take them out for a romantic meal to McDonalds drive through and yet we show no thought. Don’t worry we’re not going to go all soft and show our sensitive sides here, we drive American Muscle Cars after all! What could be better than having your loved one with you in your much loved muscle car? 😉
If you didn’t get what you were hoping for, how about some of our vouchers instead?
You could always get the other half to return the unwanted stuff and get credit for what you do want from our WebShop!
Not many pictures are aimed at the Petrol Heads (Gear Heads for our USA friends), on Valentine’s Day to be honest, but we did find this one which we think looks cool enough to post.
Over the Christmas and New year period some staff at different times have had the dreaded Covid. Thankfully they have fully recovered and taken the full isolation and guidelines as required. In the mean time we have already implemented our contingency plans in order to keep our WebShop open. We would like to point out that as we are almost self isolated in our unit we have no need to go out from the yard. Our only assumption can be that the virus was brought to us. We take this pandemic very seriously and everybody’s safety is major concern for ours. Hence why our offices are closed to visitors at the moment.
With the global pandemic and restrictions in place, Mustang Maniac has even had some trouble getting parts to complete a couple of projects. To make things worse container prices have double within the last two months due to the container shortages. One reason that has been pointed out to us is that 8000 containers full of PPE are stuck at Felixstowe not being allowed to go anywhere. These containers would have been emptied and gone back to the far east again.
As you know Mustang Maniac has led the field on social media starting with this trade leading blog which was unheard of a number years ago back then, where a company shows their work as they go along. Our blog then in turn gets posted to the Facebook and rarely do we post directly to Facebook just for our business news in isolation, that’s just how we like it as a company. We often look around the other various groups and posts we spotted a post on social media where another supplier was offering for sale all sorts of body shells. Nothing wrong with that and good for them to be honest. But, when it was mentioned that Mustang Maniac had been stocking the same shells for the last 10 years or so certain people thought we were trying to hijack their post, which is simply not true, we were just saying it’s not a new product.
If you don’t believe us about how long we have been stocking shells for the public at the time? Check out the date on YouTube link for yourself here – 21st July 2013. This was after we had been using them for a few years before that. That same video is here:
This followed a flurry of activity on our website looking for body shells. However they wouldn’t find them as we only sell sheet metal and shells to the trade as we have via their trade account log ins. These people then went back onto the chat and started to say that we (as in Mustang Maniac), don’t actually sell the body shells and we took a bit of a verbal bashing over it. A point to note here is that we even posted a number of pictures of the three shells in stock on the previous post – 31st Jan 2021! It was then pointed out that not everything is listed on our website; things like cars, cars for sale, project cars, full body shells, skeleton body shells, engine rebuilds, transmission rebuilds and bespoke builds, drive train and axle rebuilds to name some.
Only this week we completed this bespoke build to strengthen up an axle up for a project where the standard axle wouldn’t cope with the power output we intended to put through it. Do we offer this to the public? Nope, but we might if it was part of project build assigned to us for their car.
Back in 2013 most “Fred in the Shed” most customers didn’t want or couldn’t afford to buy a full body shell. We found that the shells we sold were to companies wanting to save precious delivery and wait times, or to other businesses who wanted a bespoke project for themselves.
We know for a fact that the lead in times for these body shells from Taiwan is quoted as six to nine months. This invariably turns into nine to twelve months for a £15,000+ once it’s been properly priced up for you! Even companies like us will have their money tied up for the any amount of time that it takes to sell the shells, in the mean time storage of these shells takes up considerable space. Space is a premium and costs money.
We then decided to take a shell to some shows. Everybody seemed to like looking at them, the odd person would criticise them of course. Hardly anybody wanted to purchase them due to the initial (then) £15,000 odd outlay. the odd thing is that people would be happy to spend £20,000+ and three years of their time in a shed trying to do the same thing.
We had once given a customer a price of £50,000 to complete the project that he wanted, he then told us that “We were crazy” at the time. He came back to us three years later to say “You were spot on with the costs, I can’t believe it”. We don’t just pluck figures out the air for these things.
Our business model now is that we don’t sell sheet metal to the general public. The main reason was some people didn’t know what they were doing, didn’t have jigs, or simply made a real hash of the build and started to blame the products. This gave a perfectly good product a bad name for all of us. I you think about it, when we sell to trade, we are potentially selling to our competitors.
Our business ethics on these shells is that we have a golden rule; we will only do a like for like body shell swap out. For example, if you own a ’67 fastback and you want a ’67 fastback shell, we will do it for you, if you got a ’67 coupe you want a ’67 fastback body swap – we won’t do it. That way you are not trying to pass a coupe VIN number of as a fastback.
Mustang Maniac have a few shells in stock, customers can come and see them, touch them and make their own minds up if they want to have the project built by us or buy the shell elsewhere. With this in mind most companies can’t afford to have that amount of money tied up for a year, before they even get paid with very little gain from it. If you want it now, that does come at a premium. Like if you had to order a Rolls Royce you have to wait, but if you want to jump the queue, then there is that premium to be paid for the privilege.
When we import the body shells you can only get two in a forty foot container, we also order another three or four shells in kit form. This is for few reasons:
For one customer, we have even replaced every single panel on a car except for the roof, so that in the owner’s mind they thought it was still the same car. That would depend on how you look at it and your point of view of course if it’s the same car or not.
Over the next few posts we will try and get into the how and why the panels are made, as Adam has been to Taiwan and has seen the full process. We will try to cover the expense that some companies go to put in place for the tooling to make these parts. Mustang Owners are really a lucky bunch of owners in order for these companies to keep producing these readily available parts and metal work.
Did you know that Mustang Maniac actually produces some of their very own parts that are made in the UK. We are proud of this fact in order to keep British jobs going over here and not in other countries, especially in the pandemic. Things like brass fittings for brake blocks, hardware for panels etc.
Mustang Maniac is regularly asked to export to Europe, but we have stopped due to few idiots ruining it for everybody over the past few years. There has been such a demand for European shipping that Adam has been thinking of opening a branch somewhere in Europe. There has been serious meetings about it, especially now we have left the EU.
When we post about our work, that’s the work we can show you, some customers don’t want their projects on our blog for the world to see. That is absolutely fine with us of course, but it’s a shame when we can’t show the final completed thing and we won’t talk about it either as the customer wishes.
The Pear – nickname given to it by Adam for a couple of reasons. There is a new body shell and a donor car to make one great car. Hence a pair – pear, get it?
Then there is this one, (my personal favorite); the customer told Adam the the car has only has one previous owner. Adam’s response was “did he park it in a swamp by any chance? It’s rotten as a pear” Hence the “Pear” nickname has stuck. Typical of Adam dry sense of humour. 😀
We are not going to be showing VINs and colours of the original car by request from the owner, which we shall honour of course. Like we have said in the past, it may look bad now, but this will be a beautiful car once she is done. How do we know? Because we will make sure it will be.
So we have the original donor car, which from ten feet away looks greats. Some parts will have the parts taken off the donor and put in the skip, others will be reused onto the new shell where we can, to keep as much original as we can. We have some spare parts with the car to also take a pick from too, which makes life a bit easier. We are going to store the parts we can use until we are ready to use them.
The Donor:
Within a a day or so most of the inside was out and front panels off, but where are we going to store all the parts? Reusing these storage crates in the mean time.
The Shell:
We have already had a real quick test fit, just to see which jig we need. Even without the jigs we are pretty pleased with the general fit and the gaps will be workable with a few Yogi tweaks and know-how.
We start this post with some sad news; a customer and friend of ours, Gary Meekings sadly passed away from Covid. We offer our condolences to all his family and friends.
Not much has been happening mechanical wise at the yard as we have been working on shoring up the the little river which has risen dangerously high and we didn’t want any of that water in the yard. While Adam was checking all the workshops and sheds to make sure that they were all OK, he opened one at the back in the corner of the yard. This workshop water tight with a huge roller shutter, it’s metal lined, it’s warm, dry and damp free with it’s own heating. All that means that everything is kept rust free at an ideal humidity. When Adam opened his water tight garage he found lurking in the back behind a rather large lorry, a full ’67 body shell. What did he say? “I forgot about that.”
Just after new year he had ordered two skeleton Mustang shells, yes TWO. These are intended for future projects and he was looking to put them somewhere out the way until they were needed towards the end of the year. The workshop was ideal, with a little moving around from the forklift, we now have a dedicated storage area for body shells would you believe.
Adam had us in fits of laughter that he could “loose” a full body shell. He took the banter very well and stick we gave him. In his defence he did say “I knew I had somewhere, but couldn’t remember where I stored it that’s all. It was either here in the yard, or one of the other car storage locations.”
After the cars were in place, Adam said; “Some people can talk the talk, we also walk the walk, then we drive the cars afterwards!” Fair shout if you ask me.
Some say they have them in stock, but they don’t. We on the other hand don’t say we have them in stock – but we DO! Three of ’em in fact.
On the subject of these body shells; one of the skeletons could be for sale, the other is allocated for a customer’s project. We doubt that Adam will put these shells on the WebShop to be honest, but you never know. If you are interested drop Adam an email and you can discuss it with him.
We are in the exciting stages of being the UK supplier of some rather awesome kits. We can’t say too much yet. Watch this space and all will be revealed very soon. 😉
Many customers like the idea of manual gearbox in a big block car, but the reality is that unless you drive it in anger with all the benefits of being in control, it can be a little tiring. No more so when stuck in traffic which is typical for the UK, or just going for a relaxing drive. One of most loyal customers has decided that although he loved the manual in his car, it was time for a “more relaxing” experience, but with same amount of fun!
Technically this car is not under our Pony logo at the yard as it was driven straight to the workshop bypassing the photo opportunity. So we have decided that as the car was parked in the workshop that sort of qualifies! More on this car below.
The car is being drag prepped and we were given a list of things that had to be done as part of that spec. The new automatic gearbox has been custom spec’d, hand built, a bespoke one off build in fact. We have been asked not to reveal too much about it, so we won’t, but we will show and tell you a few selected highlighted bits and pieces here.
The car was raised on the new lifts so we could get to work removing the prop shaft. Adam was up the ladder here to check that we can get as much height as possible, in order to calibrate the max stopping height for the lifts in the newly kitted out and facelifted workshop.
To make the full drive train work between the new gearbox and the differential, the original prop shaft has to be shortened and re-balanced so that was sent away as soon as we could to avoid delays.
The diff itself is a new limited slip design which has arrived on the market, which is nicely paired with some new gearing based on the specifications given to us. Both were special orders placed a week or so ago from the USA and arrived within the week to be here ready for the work to start on the change over. (We’re being deliberately vague here by the way.) Out with the old diff and gearing:
In with the new (not showing the new diff in full again):
The drive (half) shafts have also been replaced with an upgraded pair while he was at it. The old shafts before being removed. The rear brakes will also be receiving some ‘attention’ during the refit.
Moving up to the middle of the car, the old and working perfectly fine 5 speed gearbox was dropped out:
The old bell housing, flywheel, clutch assembly and gearbox waiting to cleaned, refurbished and then ready for storage.
There were a few dummy fittings of the new gearbox once the new automatic flywheel was fitted to the back of the engine. A stock looking gearbox – but far from stock inside after the updated modifications were made! 😉
The stick shift and auto selector are in different locations on the tunnel. Yogi fabricated a new filler plate section and then cut the new hole for the auto selector. There was some fabrication, welding and seam sealer to complete the new shifter opening.
Gearbox mounted and in located in it’s final position.
The gearbox must have some oil cooling pipes fitted with the new spec gearbox. The new lines were fabricated and routed to the new transmission oil cooler at the front. More bespoke Yogi works of art made with pride, not just for functionality, but also for the appearance of something that nobody will probably see. All the parts apart from the gearbox itself were taken straight off the Mustang Maniac’s stock shelves!
The final part of the equation is keeping the power on the floor. That is being handled by some new boots in each corner; 235 x 60 x 15s at the front and some bigger tarmac ripping 255 x 60 x 15s at the rear:
The car will be serviced while we are at it, filled up with oil, both engine and gearbox, brake fluid changed, bled and checked.
The front valance had to be removed to fit the oil cooler, cosmetically it had seen a bit of road rash, so it was sent away to our painters for a refresh to remove some stone chips and a minor dent etc. Once it’s returned back to us we can refit all the front end properly.
The interior will need to be put back together again, carpets, console & dash all made to fit with the new shifter.
Road testing will be fun we’re quite sure of that, maybe a few tests in fact, (just to be sure) as we will need to recalibrate the carb for the auto gearbox, kickdown etc. We have been told to make sure it does what it has been spec’d out to do. There will be some 11’s rubber black lines laid down (in the yard of course) for be sure. We will take it out for a “bit of a thrashing” as requested before we hand it back.
So if you see this little lady at the lights, don’t bother trying to race it, unless you really want to see the back of it.
We have also been told this car will be given some ‘drag strip time’ when we are all allowed out to play again. What we are looking forward to is Yogi’s reigning drag strip king car pitted against a new kid on the block.
First post of 2021 and we’re not sure where 2020 went, apart from down hill rapidly without brakes! It looks like 2021 is going to continue vein for now at least, so to wish people a “Happy New Year” (although wished of course), seems a bit out of place at the moment. So we will wish everybody “A better and safe New Year” instead which seems more appropriate in the current Covid climate. We have done quite a bit behind the scenes in the WebShop over the holidays to make things a little slicker, and to make some of the public offices safer too.
We can now start on our projects booked in with us, most of which we will share with you, some we won’t as requested by the owner of their cars, which of course we will respect.
We start with a Eleanor. We have a project conversion to make a ’67 into the screen Icon that is Eleanor. The front section is by far the easier as it’s a replacement as such. But will still need a lot of fettling to get the kit to fit correctly.
The rear end is a different ball game with the light panel and the boot spoiler and end quarter end caps all needing some modifications. Considering the amount of filler on this little project we suspect this will take some time and effort to get right too.
Project Restoration has been moving along as the first part of paint has been applied to the engine bay.
Traditional black as you would expect.
The Inside panels have had their first licks of paint to colour coordinate with the plans we have in mind.
We won’t be showing to much more of this – just yet anyway. We have a few little secrets to hide as we have done the hard work and don’t want to give to much away. 😉
We have been asked to send one of our bespoke LED upgrade kits to Classic & Sports Car magazine for them to upgrade one of their cars. The result is a section in the February Issue. We were kindly sent this preview page which we will share with you. They were impressed by the replacement which was a straight stock swap out.
Click the image and enlarge for the full size if you want to read it.
If you also wish to try our various LED lighting options they are all available on the WebShop. Or click here for the link.
We just wanted to wish everybody a Merry Christmas & Happy New Year.
Adam has been working hard right up to Christmas and he has had a late delivery in;
This crate is huge. We asked him what it was, he just said Santa’s little helper brought it in for him! We went to have a sneaky peak and he has put a tiniest little padlock on it. the sort of Christmas cracker sort. Just to stop prying eyes. He knows us all to well. 😉
If you are reading this on Christmas day then you really should go to the fridge crack open a cold beer instead.
There has been a change of plans for the WebShop as we were going to be open in between Christmas and New Year.
With the latest events of Covid and the tiers moving up for safety we have decided to take the unusual steps of closing.
Mustang Maniac will be doing a stock take and reorganisation during the closure, so when 2nd January 2021 arrives we will be ready to deal with the orders. There will be some limited access to emails, so if you order please be aware that if you order on Christmas even you will not get the order until the new year.
Thanks for your understanding and apologise for any inconvenience caused.
Mustang Maniac 
