Half Price Mustang

Posted on June 7, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

We have got back into the swing of things and we have been completing a lot of service jobs and not too much on the restoration front. We decided this week that we will give you a lesson in Mustang advertising for something different.

We will start with a little quiz – What has a Poodle, 5000 litres of foam and a Mach 1 Mustang got in common?

The answer is: A Sony advert!

The need for the advert:

Back in July 2007 which wasn’t long ago but seems ages in the terms of technology, a new Sony Pan-European marketing campaign was launched to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the company’s HD proposition and to educate consumers about the intricacies of the new High Definition technology. While there was currently high awareness of HD, there was still a significant lack of understanding amongst consumers, with only 59% having heard the term ‘HD Ready’ and 13% knowing about ‘Full HD 1080’. The Sony HD marketing campaign aimed to educate and inform consumers about the benefits of HD which we now take for granted. The campaign consisted of TV / cinema advertising, in-store branding, a targeted online PR campaign, dedicated HD Flash microsite and a ‘Guide to HD’ DVD which tried to provide consumers with an insight into the full range and benefits of HD.

About the advert:

The ‘Experiment’ (as it was called) campaign, produced by Fallon London, consisted of a sixty-second film and a shortened thirty-second film advertisement and three print executions, this was supported in-store with materials developed by WAVV RAPP Collins. The soundtrack was set provided by Iron Maiden’s – Can I Play With Madness. The ad was directed by ‘Pleix’, ‘Experiment’ shows Sony testing its HD products to the limit with a variety of unusual and creative experiments. An Apricot Poodle, classic 1970 Ford Mustang Mach 1, custom-built industrial bubble machines, neon half-pipe and 5000 litres of foam all serve to create the craziest spectacle that only the very best HD equipment could capture. The ultimate aim of the ‘Experiment’ was to demonstrate how only Sony could offer High Definition like no other. The advert follows the progress of the test poodle inside the Ford Mustang as it passes through a series of experiments. Handycam camcorders record the entire process, Cyber-shot digital cameras photographed the key moments, BRAVIA televisions played back the live action while engineers analysed proceedings on their VAIO.

The Guardian Newspaper ran a story with Sony and this is what they had to say at the time:

“Sony has created an ad featuring a 1970 Ford Mustang, a poodle and 5,000 litres of foam to showcase for the first time in one film the extensive range of high-definition television products the company offers. The surreal-pan European campaign, set to Iron Maiden’s Can I Play With Madness, aims to educate consumers about Sony’s “lens to living room” vision of an HD future. In the ad various Sony products are shown capturing, or displaying, images of a bizarre scene featuring a poodle sitting in a 1970 Ford Mustang Mach 1 on a neon-lit half-pipe, while the car is covered in 5,000 litres of foam. Sony’s ad features a wide variety of products including the PlayStation 3, Bravia TV, Blu-ray discs, Vaio computer, Cybershot digital cameras and Handycam recorder. The ad itself, created by Fallon London, the agency behind the “Balls” and “Paint” commercials for the Sony Bravia, is called “Experiment”. David Patton, Sony Electronic’s outgoing senior vice-president of communications for Europe, said the company was dedicated to an HD future and that 70% of its revenues already came from selling HD-ready products. “HD is Sony and Sony is HD,” he said. “We wanted to show how across our range of products there is the ability to edit, record and watch using Sony HD products. Full HD represents the future of film, television and gaming and yet we’re finding that consumers are still unsure when it comes to understanding the relevance of key components such as HD1080 or Blu-ray disc,” said James Kennedy, the general manager for marketing communications for Sony Europe.”

The Advert:

Click the here for the hyperlink to the video on our YouTube Channel.

About the Car:

The car was a genuine 1970 Mach1 Mustang (5769cc engine) imported into the UK. The car was cut in half just for the advert. Little detail is know about the exact origins of the car, we do know that is was supplied by Carolina Classics and was supposedly first registered 27th august 1971. The company wanted to buy the car back after the advert, but apparently didn’t realise it was going to be cut in half. The differences in colour here we suspect are down to exposure and light, but the advert shows the car as orange and not red.

jgf23k Probable for the first time ever we are going to show you the car as it was genuinely cut in half.

The car interior shows all the details of how it works.

behind the dash

clock cut in half

The engine is held in place by a series of welded supports to stop the engine falling over or out of the car. There is no gearbox in the car, it would have been nice to see that cut in half as well.

hood closed

radiator

inside the rad

inside the engine

The car does indeed have four wheels, the two standard wheels on the left hand side, and two small wheels on the right hand side. The steering is fully functional to move it about.

A lot of people thought that the car was a CGI fake or that it never happened. We can assure you it did – because we own it.

The contents of this post was prompted by moving the car away from the way wall where it has stood for a number of years now. Chris T, came to see us yesterday so we told he that we had a genuine Half Price Mustang Mach1 up for sale. He looked quite excited – until he realised it was literally in half! But, he still eemed to like though.

Half price? Well we are not so sure, we were hoping that somebody could tell us, a car that featured in a famous innovative advert at the time and a true one of a kind.

Employee of the Month:

We have not run this category before, but congratulation to Mark AKA “Ruthless” hard at work. He often tells us that he is busy “knocking his pipe out!”

Late News:

Congratulations to Ken, a friend and customer of Mustang Maniac who was at American Speed Fest today at Brands Hatch. Ken has won the Classic American Best Mustang in show.

Even Later News:

It’s Herbie’s time once again. We have pencilled in 28th June for the usual beer and burgers and all things Mustang. Please feel free to join us. (Thanks to “Lob Monster” for letting us know).

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged American Speed feast, employee of the month, Herbies Bar &Grill, high definition, Mach1, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, ruthless, Sony | 10 Comments

The Art Of Painting

Posted on May 31, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

The week after the Enfield Pageant is always a bust week tidying up and putting things away where they should be. Cars being worked on were moved in order to prep the cars for the Pageant, trucks transporting the cars have to be moved around and given back to LAR & SMR again. While we were moving things around we got the call from our friendly top class painter Paul. A car he had been working on was now ready to be delivered back to us. A customer owned 1967 Fastback that needs a full rebuild from bare metal. Paul had etched the car ready for the primer. (Thanks for the pictures Paul.)

The car is painted in the classic and loved Highland Green, and for those that didn’t know, Highland Green is the same colour as Steve McQueen’s Bullitt Mustang.

Multiple layers of primer added to the cars and then blocked back down again. A light coloured coat is applied to check the high and low spots.

The bodywork is masked up and paint is built up before more fine block work. Again the attention to detail is unsurpassed.

The car in various stages

The car was delivered back to us and put on the ramps in the workshop where Yogi got to work on the rebuild pretty much straight away, almost before we managed to grab some pics.

The attention to detail here is that the side detail vents that are fitted have the gaskets missing, allowing water to cause issues on the bodywork and inside. We make sure we fit those gaskets, here the subtle difference is not really noticeable, but such is our attention to detail.

The classic mistake made my so many painters on these cars is the undersill, a concours fail, if you are going that route. From the factory the paint stopped at the underside and a visible black line should be seen. Such is Paul’s level of detail.

The customer is still a little undecided about just how much work we will be doing on the car at the moment. But, we have been told the suspension, steering, brakes and rear axle are to be fitted in order to make this into a rolling chassis.

The rear diff is a very nice special build Truetrac limited slip upgrade.

The steering is getting the Borgeson Power Steering Box upgrade too.

The interior is a work of art too, the roof, floors inner arches all painted, in fact where the carpet and body panels go the paint goes there too.

The last part of the bodywork is the rubber seals in order to complete the final gaps.

The next job on her we shall have to wait and find out in due course, along with the final engine spec too.

We are going to show you some rare pictures not usually seen as the hood is closed so you don’t think of it. If anybody has tried to fit a hood spring to the hinges they will now the power of the springs and that they are not easy to fit. When the hood is up the spring is retracted so little or no pressure, but when the hood is closed an immense leverage is used to open those springs. You just don’t want to mess with these springs!

retracted open hood

stretched and closed

hood down

hood up

Adam is seen checking more paint colours are what the customer required that had come back to the yard taken from another Fastback. The colour is correct so the rubber is going to fitted to the trunk and given back to Paul ready to final gap the car.

WebShop New Product:

Modern day engine oils have come on leaps and bounds without a doubt for modern cars. Yet the old classic still have particular needs. We recommend the 20w – 50 formula. We currently stock two oils we recommend:

Pennzoil – click here for link

Kendall – click here for link

However, we are pleased to say that we now have a distribution to agreement to stock Kroon-Oil Classic Multigrade Motor oils. This oil is designed to meet the exacting American specs and has also been developed for the Classic Car owner of the 60’s, 70’s & 80’s. The oil is cheaper than the USA counterparts, but in no way a lesser product. We like this oil and would recommend it.

Kroon – click here for link

We are in a nostalgic mood today so we thought that we would share and leave you with this great rare photo.

Posted in Customers' Cars, News, Parts, Repairs, Sales, Webshop | Tagged 20w-50, Bullitt, Enfield Pageant, Highland Green, Kendall, Krron, LAR, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, paint, Pennzoil, self etch primer, SMR, Steve McQueen, Yogi | 2 Comments

Enfield Pageant Of Motoring 2015

Posted on May 25, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

The Bank Holiday Enfield Pageant was almost upon us. We loaded the three cars up on the trailers, one was a drive on drive of for the Acapulco Coupe and the other was a double stack of the 65 “A” Code Coupe and KR GT500.

We arrived the evening before as ever in the motor home and made our stake on the pitch we have each year. We left the Coupe under cover for the evening just in case it rained. As the coupe has no glass in her just yet and we didn’t want a mobile swimming pool in the morning. We used a selection of the LAR and SMR vehicles to help us out for the weekend.

Bright and early the next morning the sun was out and the cars started to appear and park up in their allocated spaces. We started to set up the Media area which consisted of a large LCD screen in front of the motor home to show the progress so far of the Acapulco Coupe and a selection of “Music” from Chris’s iPod coming from a pair of speakers next to the RV.

We were promised a few cars of our customers to turn up and support us, we weren’t disappointed and over the three days we had a nice selection and was bursting at the seams at one point. We had our valour down to clean the cars to top showroom conditions. We promised him to get him on the net so promise kept. Thanks Paul for a great job as ever.

As if by magic our promised cars started to turn up one by one, almost as if they knew a little valeting was going on. So we just said carry on cleaning till they stop. Of course the guys will never say no to a little extra TLC on their cars.

Adam had his grandchildren come along to help out and keep an eye on the proceedings proudly displaying the corporate image and just in case anybody was in doubt who she was helping. 🙂

The guests and fellow petrol heads started to arrive and look at the cars and we had lots of questions and plenty of complements on the cars. We had great feedback for our WebShop and how well it was working, the increasingly popular Forum and of course our Blog.

During the days we even got up on the RV roof to take a few pictures.

John did say that he wanted a couple of pics of the “Workers”, we tried to find some, but we only came across these two suspicious characters posing for photos, Ken & John! 🙂

We had a lot of interest around all the cars on display. We had a car for sale which had a number of enquiries as the project Acapulco had a number of heads looking inside to see how they we put these cars back together even before we had fully set up.

Most Amazing Story of the weekend:

Paul’s AKA “Lob Monster” ’66 Coupe had a couple of visitors who were a little more interested than usual. When Paul went over and spoke to them. It turned out that they were the previous owners of the car of, 30 years ago! Such an amazing story that Paul struck up relationship with them and they should be sending him some photo’s of the car even before Paul got hold of it. Such a small world and what were the chances of that meeting? If they had of turned up on Sunday Paul wasn’t there for that day and they would have missed him. The owners kindly agreed to pose with Paul (on the left) for pictures with the or should we say “their” car. Incredible story.

The day started to cloud over at about 11am till 2 where the rain came down and only the die-hard petrol heads were about and us running around putting a cover over Marts Coupe. We all gathered in the RV and waited for the rain to go. Eventually the sun came back out and so did we continue where we left off. We had a wander around and took photos of just some of the other cars in the show. The main tent housed the music for the day with live bands and the prestigious cars. This year was another good year as Beaulieu Motor Museum provided a couple of great cars of the few days.

Original Race Spec AC Cobra:

Thanks to the guys at Beulieu who kindly broke a little tradition and let us behind the ropes to take some proper photo’s of this spectacular car. The last race this car was in had a bit of pile up and pretty much destroyed the bodywork. At the time AutoCraft were still making the panels under the official licence and rebuilt the body to the exact specs of the original of course. This all means that the car is currently valued at £1 to £2 Million GBP with its heritage! Yes, we have taken a few pics here but it warrants it we think.

Everybody recognises the outside, but ever seen inside the real deal?

The Next day the guys had the Original General Lee “Lee1”. Again this car needs no introduction and a few pics to do it justice with some interesting facts.

Some of the other cars that took our fancy over the few days. Some even had our sponsorship!

Sunday morning we had a treat of a full English breakfast. Eggs fresh from Adam’s chicken at his home and local bacon and sausages, tomatoes mushrooms – well you get the picture. How did it all go down? Very well and Adam’s culinary skills improve each year. The double yolker was a hotly contested conversation.

Double yolker

Enfield Pageant is not just a car show, there are the numerous auto jumble sales pitches and stalls of all sorts of things, you name it, they got it.

The American scene is quite large at these shows and we have a great relationship with many of the clubs that appear each year. We had this lovely Edsel next to us that had a few issues and wouldn’t start. Adam offered his expertise and sorted out the points issue and the car was soon on its way. The screwdriver wedged in the carb was to dry out the flooding prior to the proper fix.

Here’s a petrol head trivia question for you?

What did Edsel and Mustang have in common?

The answer:

The failure of the Edsel project enabled Ford to use the Edsel machinery to be modified to take the new tooling for the Mustang. The result was that the Mustang appeared long before the time it could have done!

As Adam was often away from his loyal dogs they were always on the look out for him. When he came back for a cup of tea the end result was obvious. A picture can speak a thousand words.

Last, but definitely NOT least.

A special “Thanks” to everybody who had supported us over the weekend and made us a success again. In no particular order they include:

Ken, John, Yogi, Chris, Paul “Lob Monster”, Lance “OCD”, Ian, Spence, Paul “The Paint”, Yogette, Martin, Paul the valeter, Mart “SatNav,” LAR and SMR. If I have forgotten anybody – I apologise, but it’s getting late and I need some more of those beers, that I hid at the back of the fridge!

A great weekend and thanks to all those that came to see us and made it all worth while.

See you all again next year.

Posted in Blog, Cars For Sale, Customers' Cars, Forum, News, Our Cars, Photos, Sales, Service | Tagged Blog, double yoker, Edsel, Enfiled Pageant, full English breakfast, LAR Traffic Services, Lob Monster, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, Mustang Maniac Forum, OCD, SMR, trivia, WebShop, Yogi | 3 Comments

Need Gas

Posted on May 17, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

We have been busy preparing our own cars this week ready for a yearly trip to the Enfield Pageant of Motoring. It’s held at Enfield Playing Field, Great Cambridge Road, Enfield EN1 3PL. we always try to make a point of attending and showing of some quality Classic Mustangs. We shall be having our over sized hospitality motor home there again, along with a selection of our cars and our Customers cars too. We are planning a little something different this year for our restoration projects in the form of some multi-media interaction, we hope it will work out as we plan it to. If you are planning to come to this great show that has all sorts of cars on display, we seriously hope that you will pop along to see us and make a point of saying hello. Mention the Blog and the Forum to Adam.

Unusual item:

We often have cars in the workshop that need a clean out and we find all sorts of things, dead rodents, birds nests, newspapers. We often find the odd Dime here and there if we are lucky. During a clean up recently of the trunk area hidden away, we found a real rarity that we hadn’t seen for a long time. This great little item was in the form of a fold out banner that was with some documentation. The Banner simply says “Send help” one side and “Need Gas” the other. We suspect that you would just fold out the side you need and leave it under the wipers or in the rear window depending on your needs at the time. There is also a few guides on the reverse of the banner on how to be a good driver etc. Fantastic item in mint condition. It looks like they were originally from Ford and came with the car from new. If anybody knows any more about these and where they came from how many etc, please drop us an email.

Customer Cars:

Not too much this week as we have been preparing our own cars and getting them ready. But we have done a little more work on the Acapulco Blue Coupe, We fitted an export brace to the car and used our custom designed bolts. Yes we know they are not correct, if you want Concours look then we have those too. But these bolts are very similar to the bumper bolts with a polished stainless steel head. The difference is that the bolts do not have a square collar at the top. these are rounded into a slight conical shape, they are tightened up and pulled into the holes of the brace. The export brace should be fitted to a strengthened part of the bulk head how they should be with an additional welded thick plate as we had done on this car. This saves messing around to file out round hols into squares, but this way still gives that look coach bolt look. We are pleased with this result and always nice to have for a little detail.

The HT leads and the rest of the wiring still needs to be completed of course, but we managed to start her up without any of the ignition wiring. Firstly we sent Mart on mission to get some fuel, and he even managed to returned back without getting lost for a change 🙂 In case you are wondering the petrol station was only 2 miles away! The car was fueled up and we drained most back back out of the tank from the drain hole to make sure no debris was in there. The car was cranked over a few times in order to get the fuel pumped up to the carb and check the starter was going to spin over under her own power. We then set the distributor to TDC for the timing and hot wired the spark to the coil. The car was spun over and she coughed into life. The timing was manually moved around in order to get the car running and warm up where she was comfortable. About ten mins later we set the timing correctly and adjusted the carb settings. The sound from the Flowmasters was a magical tone, the look on Marts face was a picture and said it all. We then left him to it to sort out the wiring again to make it look neater. Plenty more to do on her yet, but the first milestone has been reached – Flame on! If you are going to the Pageant we hope to bring this little lady along so you can see the progress for yourselves.

Hope to see you at the show.

Posted in Customers' Cars, News, Our Cars | Tagged banner, custom bolts, Enfield Pageant, export brace, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, Send Help | 2 Comments

Driving Us Nuts

Posted on May 10, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

This week as we had a random call with a customer who wanted some wheel nuts. Nothing odd there you might think, but this is a mine field when look into it, and to cut a potentially long blog post short, we didn’t send any out to the customer as he didn’t know what he wanted. Needless to say the comments were not flattering and we were deemed as awkward. In actual fact it was the exact opposite, let me explain. We could have sent a set of standard nuts out, charged him and thought no more of it, but we will not have it on our conscience that he had fitted the wrong ones fitted to his wheels or studs then had an accident, or damaged his wheels. Yes, you did read that right – accident. Think about this for a moment, in each corner of a car there is a wheel, that wheel is held on by 4 or 5 nuts or bolts, that’s it. If they come off then no wheel and you have an accident, or damage to the wheel which could crack it, fatigue it, uneven wear and tear all sorts of issues. In fact would you believe that most of the restorations we see imported to us, from various places around the world with after market wheels, they have the wrong nuts fitted for that wheel! Yes, everybody knows there are steel wheels, alloy wheels, mag wheels, carbon wheels, one nut does not fit all.

So here is an attempt at trying to explain basics without getting into too much technical detail, this will apply to new cars as well as Classic Mustangs.

There are 3 basic type fastener seats;

Conical Seat – cone shape
Spherical Seat – round or ball shape
Flat Washer – commonly known as Mag Type

Different seats for different nuts or fasteners, the angles of the seat must match the wheel in order to centre it correctly.

There are several different thread sizes used today by vehicle manufacturers;

12mm X 1.25
12mm X 1.5
12mm X 1.75
14mm X 1.5
14mm X 2.0
7/16″ X 20
1/2″ X 20
9/16″ X 18

When I mentioned about accidents here is an exaggerated view of what could happen. The wheels could get damaged as a result with movement, under acceleration or braking loads the holes on the wheel may elongate causing some serious issues should we say.

Two other things to remember;

1) do not put oil or lubricant on the threads of either the stud or lugs nuts/bolts

2) re-torque the lug nuts/bolts after 25-50 miles.

Proper Thread Engagement

This is critically important. Make sure you have a minimum thread engagement of the diameter of the vehicle stud (as recommended by SAE – Society of Automotive Engineers). An example is, if the stud size of your vehicle is “½” then you will need a minimum of “½” of threads into the lug nut. If for some reason you do not have this minimum then it is recommended that you use an Extended Thread Type nut (see illustration above).

Proper Torque (tightening)

This is also very important. Over tightening lug nuts/bolts can fatigue the vehicle studs or lug bolts. Use the SAE recommended torque listed below as a guideline for passenger cars and light trucks;
12mm, 7/16″, 1/2″ = 85 ft/lbs (+/- 5 ft/lbs)
14mm, 9/16″ = 115 ft/lbs (+/- 5 ft/lbs)

Mustang Specific Now:

We have a little table below that should help with the basics as fitted from stock.

At Mustang Maniac we stock a large range of wheels, stock, after market and specialist even racing, we stock an even larger range of wheel nuts, hopefully we will have everything you need for your wheels. The various guides above only scratch the surface, an example is that some washer based nuts also have the correct way round to fit them too, then there are the offset washers to enable various fittings that could be a generic fit wheel or custom wheels or where space is tight to the centre hub. Here we have a selection of our range of our chrome nuts where we try to show the differences side by side.

There are open-ended nuts, closed nuts, short nuts, long nuts, chrome nuts, steel nuts, alloy nuts, black nuts, left hand thread nuts, right hand thread nuts, long shank, short shank etc. ALL of which make a crucial difference to your wheels.

So as you can see when we ask what sort of wheel nuts you want – it’s a sensible question not us being awkward at all, we are looking out for you. Simple reason is that we do have a conscience and won’t just sell you anything, but we can’t validate what you order from our WebShop of course. So please make sure you have the correct fasteners for your wheels.

We will plan to copy this post as an article shortly too ready for easy access. Was this any use to you out there, please let us know.

Customer Cars:

Acapulco Coupe has taken some leaps forward again this week. Yogi has finished fitting up the custom exhaust and made a good job of the step down from the headers to the pipes. The only thing to be careful of here is the lowest point of the car is the flange fittings for the exhaust now.

The rest of the exhaust has now been aligned up correctly and fastened up. We are going to wait and see how she sounds and performs if we need to add a cross flow pipe.

We have also used something called copper-nickel for the transmission lines and fuel lines. Although they look copper now they will tone down and look more like steel as they age nicely. We use our own custom-made and design brass fittings to the bottom of the radiator.

She even has a new set of boots we have just fitted and balanced.

We even got to the point where we have filled her up with fluids to check for any static leaks before we fire her up.

Posted in Articles, Customers' Cars, Sales, Service | Tagged Acapulco coupe, chrome, classic, Conical seat, flat washer, Lug Nuts, Magnum 500, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, nuts, SAE, speherical seat, torque | Leave a comment

Waiting Around

Posted on May 3, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

This week has been a frustrating week with not being able to concentrate on any one thing for a period of time. For those that don’t know Adam also runs a recovery company, and sometimes to help out Adam has been on the road doing some recovery when needs must. Most of the time our Mustangs are picked up and delivered back to customers in our covered lorries or recovered on the flat backs if that is what’s required. We have provided this extra service for a long time now and works well, it can save miles on the cars, pick up dead cars or transport them for safety reasons. This week our own Mustang Maniac truck was called to a mission of mercy to recover a car that had got stuck following a SatNav. Although we like our SatNavs, if you follow them to the letter they can lead you to some random places and this was no exception.

All hands to the pumps can obviously have benefits and down sides, the up side is we can help those that need our services, the downside is that we are not always in the office to take technical phone calls. So in that respect we apologise if you have tried to get us without success, but sometimes we take our overalls off and put on our suits of shining armour on to save the day.

We will go a little more off piste now as it were, but a similar incident where the sister company LAR were called out to a second Sat Nav failure this week. This time it was a sewage lorry that got stuck in some “mud” should we say, the lorry tried to turn around but got bogged down so we had to pull it out, not a nice job but somebody had to do it. We also had one of our newer recovery vehicles at Trucks Fest this weekend, if you are there pop by and say hello.

Anyway, back to Mustangs now; we often have cars in that require finishing off due to difficulty of the task, problems or time constraints which we fully understand of course. The owner of this stripped down shell had been working on her for a while now and wanted it to be painted by us. The car has been previously prepped and primed which now sits waiting for the next stage in the paint process. We did have to replace a front panel and she should be ready to go to the paint shop as soon as there is a free slot.

A newish 289 engine needed some serious diagnostics as it was making all sorts of noises and rattles. The whole car was transported here for us to investigate. This was a pretty simple one diagnose – no oil pressure, when we say no oil pressure – there was none, it didn’t even register, so we quickly shut her down. We took the engine out and removed the sump of and could see there was the optional race oil guard fitted which was nothing to do with the issue we have now. We investigated the crank and the more delicate parts for damage where we could see that it had all worn away and was now small block scrap unit. We are not sure the full reasons why yet, but our first suspect could be a faulty oil filter, it’s rare but it can happen.

We strongly recommend to pay the extra few pounds to get a good quality oil filter, you may save a small amount short-term, but cost an awful more lot long-term!

Acapulco ’66 Coupe

The work on the mechanics has moved inside , Quite s specialised job of fitting a head liner in place. This has been fitted now and the fold marks will soon fall out when the head liner bows pull it a little tighter over time. Now you are getting a little taster of the inside colour scheme.

front

back

At Mustang Maniac we have parts to hand most of the time which are just collected from stock and noted on the system for invoice. Some of those parts can be stored in other areas that are locked away and can take a few minutes to locate. To try and work efficiently we aim to have the parts we need for the next day sourced from stock the evening before, that way we can just get on with the work when we get to the workshops in the morning. When we said to hang on a minute while we get the parts, we didn’t think we took that long at the end of a very busy day ! 🙂

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged '66 Coupe, 289cid, Acapulco, headliner, LAR Traffic Services, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, oil, oil filter, paint shop, parts, primer | Leave a comment

Twins

Posted on April 26, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

Walking past our storage garage where a coupe of cars that are waiting to be collected by their owners, we noticed that couple of them looked amazing in the afternoon sun. Same colour, but two very different schools of thought.

Given the choice which one these twins would you go for, the all time classic fastback or the lesser seen coupe?

Rust in Piece

We are pleased to say that the Rust in Piece is now finished and awaiting her owners collection. The car went for her first MOT in the UK and passed with flying colours. The car drives beautifully now and is a glorious sunshine cruiser, no outrageous exhaust note, just plenty of power from a single exhaust pipe that is whisper quiet. The owner is going to love driving this little lady around, a real pleasure to see her completed and another rare old Mustang is back on the road.

Acapulco ’66 Coupe

We are turning our attention to the full restoration ’66 Coupe again this coming week, we have had a couple of dry run of fittings of the exhaust to her during the past week. We are having to custom build this exhaust to fit the big 3″ headers that it already has. The bore of the pipe we are using is the recommended big maximum of 2 1/4″ pipes into Twin Flowmaster 40 Series Delta Flow muffler boxes.

The fittings are bare metal and so needed to be prepared so we got round to doing that while we waited for the pipes to come back. You did read that correctly, exhaust bending is not something we do for a large-bore exhaust pipes, but we do tend to cut and weld our own custom systems to fit. For this exhaust system Adam got hold of his mate, “Mike the Pipe” who has various machines that he uses to bend and shape various sizes of pipe work for their customers top quality, one-off exhaust systems.

The pipes were marked up on the car in marker pen from a template to note the centre of the bend and by how much was need. An art form in itself to make the big bore pipes bend without kinks and still make them look good. We got them back and as you can see the amount of work required for a single section of the pipe, they are a work of art in their own rights.

The pipes were pretty much spot on only need a few minor pulls on a pipe section to line them up so far. We are looking to make our own step down fittings to these newly made pipes.

The owner turned up on Saturday and was around more than happy to his hands dirty and help with final dry fitting. Yogi was on hand to show him how to cut the pipes and expand the turned down tips to fit the big pipes. We even got him cleaning and spraying clamps for his home-made exhaust.

Yogi trimming.

pipe expander

We also aim to have the head liner in this week along with the transmission pipe work to the radiator.

Souvenirs:

After the holiday things have settled back down again and we made time to put up Twin souvenirs from our epic road trip across America.

When it rains we look at the flags and think of the hot sunny days again.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged '66 Coupe, Acapulco, automatic transmission, convertible, custom exhaust, Flowmaster, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, Rust in Piece, souvenirs | Leave a comment

By The Pallets

Posted on April 19, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

The sun is making a difference and nice to be able to work on some cars in the open air rather than in a work shop, not everything can be done outside of course, just the more routine stuff. We had a little delivery of some parts during the week, not the usual stuff that is bubble wrapped, these parts came in on pallets. Part of a stash that we came to hear about and was offered to us if wanted it, so we thought about it and took the lot! These engines vary from some i6’s, 289’s up to some serious big block stuff too along with a couple of others we haven’t fully investigated yet. The blocks all look good and could well be used for parts or complete rebuilds for projects.

We will now strip down some of the rarer engines we know about and store those in a proper containers with their relevant parts. An ideal job to do in the sunshine.

Rust in Piece is coming along nicely and we are working on the interior and tidying up under the dash. It shouldn’t be to long before we Geo the suspension and take her for a road test.

Customer Cars

Duct tape Mustang has been fixed and was collect yesterday by the happy owner who can now go back to cruising Europe. The brake issue was indeed the servo, when we test that out on a road test it highlighted an issue with the master cylinder that had to be changed too unfortunately. Like all these things, a new part will show up the weakness in another. While we were at it Yogi done his bit with the brake lines and re-plumbed it back up how it should be in order to adjust the brakes correctly via the front rear balance valve.

The WebShop is going from strength to strength which we are pleased about obviously, so far the feedback has been nothing short of excellent for the in stock parts and dispatch process. We have had a little run on the Classic Tax discs this week for some reason, perhaps the hot weather has got a few cars out of the garage onto the road. We have even sent a couple more tax discs to the USA too.

Posted in Customers' Cars, Parts, Webshop | Tagged duct tape, engines, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, pallets, Rust in Piece, WebShop | 1 Comment

Basic Mechanics

Posted on April 12, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

Mustang Maniac is back to normal, well as normal as it can be, as I’m back from my Route 66 journey across the USA, and I’m still a bit jet lagged. It got to Saturday and we thought it would be a quiet day, but nope, it was one of the busiest days of the week for customers. At one point it was standing room only in the office which was a lot of fun. We had Martin who picked up his Bullitt green fastback after her yearly MOT, general service and lube service. We also had a another regular customer turn up with his ’67 Convertible that he has been using to cruise around Europe. To be honest we couldn’t think of a better way to do it either. While they were away recently the brake pedal was fine then there would be no servo with brake pedal travel. This ended up making the braking a bit interesting sometimes, the car would stop, but you need to be aware there could be no assistance from the servo. Another thing was that the driver side sill trim started to come away, then the demist pipe came away from the fitting under the dash for the windscreen. As a temporary measure, Duct Tape was used to fix the trim in place and hold the pipe to the underside of the dash. Derek didn’t mind us pulling his leg a bit by calling his car the Duct Tape Mustang. We have had the “Mastic Mustang”, “Rust in Piece” now we have “Duct Tape Mustang”. Joking aside what Derek had done was fine as a work around as it was not an important or safety related fix to the car. It will be simple to fix those parts though you can’t see the temporary repairs. They are still holding up fine.

As for the brakes Yogi started the initial investigation on Saturday and found that the servo was playing up. We are also looking at a potential issue around the plumbing of the brakes that we want to make sure is all OK too.

We would like to offer a piece of advice for everybody who may be looking to start their own mechanical repairs, prompted by Derek and his Duct Tape. Print this out and take it with you for a quick handy reference guide. 😀

Rust In Piece

The Convertible is coming along very nicely now as we have had the rocker covers and the air intake back from being sprayed their correct colours for the time. The rear seats are back in, the original centre console is back in as well as the carpet. It won’t be long before we geo set up the car and road test it for a while before we hand it back.

Question Time

Recently we had a car that was supposed to of have a rebuilt 289cid engine. The owner managed to get the car to us saying it rattles like mad and there is no power. We started it and shut it down straight away. The car sounded like somebody had put a handful of marbles in a tin can and was shaking it. We knew it was a strip down job to start with. We found out that the rebuild had not even cleaned the oil tubes to the top of the engine with no oil pressure, thus the hydraulic tappets cam followers severely worn as well as everything else that was in a bad way, now junk. We have here just one of the cam followers that should be flat and smooth at the top, they were all like this.

“Click Here” for the answer to see just how many miles this car has done on the rebuild.

Acapulco Coupe

The coupe has had a lot of work done to the gearbox and to get it ready to go back into the car. New seals, filter, sump pan and gaskets. Me and Mart cleaned up the flex plate and sprayed it, not that you will see it, but it’s all in the detail. We done a dry fitting without the engine plate to make sure all was OK before the final fitting.

We then removed flex plate, fitted the engine plate and refitted the flex plate and tightened it all up. We fitted in the torque converter into the bell housing and mounted the gearbox to the engine.

Tightening the bolts securely.

Gearbox mounted to the engine and the mounting brackets all in place.

The last part was to fit the prop shaft to the gearbox and the rear diff. And yes the Prop is white!

Posted in Customers' Cars, News, Our Cars, Photos, Repairs, Sales | Tagged Acapulco coupe, basic mechanics, C4 gearbox, cam followers, duct tape, Europe, gaskets, gibbs, jet lag, Mustang, Mustang Maniac, Route '66, Rust in Piece, torque converter | Leave a comment

Route 66 – Final Day

Posted on April 7, 2015 by Mustang Maniac

We’ve done it!

We arrived at sunny Los Angeles, California and found the end of Route 66 sign in Santa Monica and had the mandatory photos taken with it to show the end of our journey. A sense of sadness, huge sense of achievement and wonderful satisfaction of an ambition that had been completed all at the same time. Route 66 has been completed with our total mileage being around 3200 miles or so with about ten fuel stops during the course of the trip. However the official miles of the Mother Road is a total of 2451 miles. The reason for the extra miles is that my wonderful wife Lynn, wanted to stop off at each and every shopping mall that we came across, it’s nothing to do with the extra detours that I wanted to do of course, no way. Yes, I appreciated that we needed supplies along the way, but as for the other shopping stuff such as clothes and shoes, I’m not so sure about. The suitcases are full to bursting point and the credit card has had a good battering. But hey, it has all been worth it. Here we both are at the end of the (mother) road, literally.

We had a spot of lunch at Ruby’s Diner before we spent some time on the beach to relax and take it all in.

While in California the other thing that has to be done is see the Hollywood sign on Mt. Lee. In 1923 the Hollywood Sign is built as a huge, illuminated advertisement for the upscale real estate development, Hollywoodland. The Sign costs $21,000 and includes thirteen 50-foot high letters constructed of 3′ X 9′ panels and painted white. Using mule teams and tractors, the panels are hauled up Mt. Lee and secured to frames constructed of pipes, wires, and telephone poles. Four thousand 20-watt light bulbs are mounted on the letters and spaced 8″ apart. In late 1923 the Sign is turned on and the result is dazzling. The developers expect the Sign to last about a year. In 1949 the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce enters into a contract with the City of Los Angeles’ Department of Parks and Recreation to repair and rebuild the Sign and remove the “land” so that it would spell “Hollywood.” The cost is estimated at $4,000. The light bulbs are long gone and the City stipulates that any new illumination would be at the expense of the Chamber. The Chamber gives the Sign a complete makeover. Over the next 30 years the Sign would require constant repairs, and sometimes the celebrities would help. In 1978 after the Gloria Swanson makeover five years previously, termites have infested the wood and an “O” has tumbled down the mountain. Arsonists set fire to the bottom of an “L.” The City decides the Sign would have to be completely rebuilt at a cost of $250,000, ten times the cost of the original. Hugh Hefner steps in and throws a lavish fundraiser at the Playboy Mansion to raise funds for the rebuilding costs. To raise the additional funds needed to restore the Sign, celebrities and community leaders sponsor individual letters at $27,500 a piece. Alice Cooper sponsored an “O” in honour of Groucho Marx. Other letters are sponsored by Andy Williams and Gene Autry, among others. In August 1978 the old Sign is demolished and for the first time in more than 50 years, “Angelenos” are without the Sign for three months. Workers pour 194 tons of concrete to anchor the Sign, and helicopters drop a massive new steel frame in place. Placing on the corrugated baked enamel letters was the final step. In November 1978 the new Sign, four stories high, 450-feet long and weighing 480,000 lbs., is unveiled on Hollywood’s 75th Anniversary celebration in November 1978 live to a television audience of 60 million. Each letter is 45 ft tall and between 31 and 39 ft wide, the sign sits just over 1,500 feet up the side of Mt. Lee.

On our way looking for a good vantage point to see the Hollywood sign we found a Ford Galaxy tucked away.

That’s it, our monumental journey is over and we are soon to be travelling back to the UK. The memories will stay with us forever of all the fantastic places we have visited and seen, not forgetting all the wonderful people we have met along the way. We have had an amazing time yet again here in the wonderful USA, we can be very proud to say that we have genuinely travelled across America and seen some of the worlds most iconic sites. It only leaves me to say a couple of things to all the people who have followed our journey on Route 66 and left us kind messages.