All Change…

Here at Mustang Maniac we pride ourselves as an evolving company; We have listened to few comments and we are working to improve things. So we would like to say apologise to our customers that have tried to get hold of us via the phone to find it takes a while or have try again later. We don’t mind making the apologies as we know it’s short-term. I will try to explain, the WebShop is steadily increasing in popularity and orders are increasing we’re pleased to say. Taking orders over the phone means we then have to get the order, update the stock and then prep the order for dispatch. Sometimes both Yogette and Adam are sorting and dispatching orders, sometimes Adam is dealing with customers cars so that only leaves Yogette to man the phone and prep the orders. Both of these examples can mean delays in answering the phone. So to help this situation we are investing in some staff, we are going to be creating a Dispatch room with access to our computerised stock location and management system. Someone will be dedicated to getting the WebShop orders together, wrapping and dispatching them to our customers. We will have some pictures of the new room and staff soon, once it’s all up and running of course.  In order to get this done some very long hours have been put in over Christmas and the New Year. Stock has been moved around, massive stock tagging and organisation has been undertaken in order to make this work. We have even found stock we never knew we had. 🙂 We are also thinking of upgrading the phone system to try and help out. We have a few pictures of one of the rooms that has been reorganised so far with the new bin locations now been updated on the WebShop.

Customers Cars:

We are working on a few cars at the moment, but the main job has been to get Mart’s car off the trolley and onto some ramps properly to work on her. Yogi has been doing a good job on the fuel line before the major parts get fitted and make it awkward. How do we know? Because we have done it so many times before, past experience that’s how. Stance of his car needs to be considered at this early stage. Traditionally the Mustang has a slight up in the air stance at the front, over the years as the leaf springs sag at the rear and the hood up stance becomes more pronounced. Mart wants to have a more neutral look on stance, so he has gone for our top of the range 1″ lower high performance springs at the front compared to the stock stance springs to help him get that look. These are not cheap springs by any means, but boy do you get what you pay for and these springs are well worth the money for the extra handling alone.

stock vs perf

The front of the car has had the suspension fitted, which is the new upper and lower control arms, spring perches, 1″ anti roll bar and all bushes, tie rod bushings etc. At the rear the new leaf springs fitted, the stainless steel leaf spring shackles and bushes, the new shocks from a little while ago and all the bushings. The axle has been mounted and bolted into place with new U-Bolts.

New heights:

While Yogi was working on Mart’s car a visit from Terry & John at the end of the day for a chat and catch up turned out to be a good laugh. During this sequence of photos we are wondering how Terry’s height has improved. Now we are not saying anything was amiss here, but suspicions were raised when a number of different sized boxes were strangely stacked where he was standing! Needless to say a good way to end the day – on a high if you know what we mean. 🙂

Blog:

We have added a new Menu item called “Cars for Sale – WebShop“. This will have links to cars that we currently have for sale and we start with a mighty beast – 68 shelby KR 500 ‘tribute’, click here for the quick link and all the photos from this series. This car is just more than the “Tribute”, as it has modern components and put together by us from the ground up. A spectacular car to drive and not for the faint hearted. From the turn of the key to the last roll of the wheel this will make the hairs on your neck stand up.

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Back To Work

First post of the year so it has to start with Happy New Year of course, we hope you all had a great Christmas. While we are on the subject of Christmas we would like to share our amusing gift of the year. We won’t say who bought Adam the T-shirt, but it has been his favorite item of clothing since. Anyway moving swiftly along!

 Customer’s Cars:

We have had a customer’s car come into us which he has bought for his partner as a present. The car needs a little tender loving care and an MOT of course. Most people tend to get a puppy or a kitten for Christmas, but this lucky lady owner got a 5.0 v8 Pony. The interior is in excellent condition and the paint should buff up just fine. We are having a look over the underside and mechanics for any work that may need doing. From what we have seen – so far so good. We don’t mean things like broken headlight etc. as that is a simple fix before anybody mentions that!

For the last proper post before our Christmas break Mart’s Coupe (from one man and his Mustang), had just come back from paint as an early Christmas present. Yeah we gave him a surprise as it’s always nice to see the smile on the owners face when they get their pride and joy back. this was a little different as a lot of the hard work was all done by hand, and the fruits of that labour intensive job are wheeled back into a work shop. As promised we have a few more pics of his car taking her to a temporary new home.

As Mart’s Coupe was returning we swapped it out for our ’67 fastback shell that was ready for another top class paint job. The customer has told us what colour it will be, but we will keep that a secret just for now, only untill it comes back completed of course. We will of course post some updates of this one being completed too.

To sum up the end of the year, we were busy with projects and the WebShop is getting busier all the time. We have already had some of the vouchers used online and so far they have proved very popular. The emails So much so that we are going to have to create a dedicated dispatch area as the office is no longer suitable. That is in the process at the moment and we will bring you pictures of that soon. We tidied up the yard yet again which seems to be never-ending job at the moment, but during the clean and tidy up we just happened to look over to one of our workshops and took a couple of pictures of our customer’s car at different times of the day. Very sinister looking in fact!

Video:

We have uploaded a new video to our YouTube account of the 1964 Ford Mustang production line. The video for Martha Reeves and the Vandellas – Nowhere To Run was filmed at the plant, due to production requirements Ford refused to stop the production for the video. The result was during the 2 minutes and 45 seconds it took to film Ford made a new car! click here to go straight to the video or click on the YouTube logo below for our channel. We have taken some screen shots of the video for you to look at here. It’s worth watching just for the great song anyway.

Quick link to our YouTube Channel click the logo below.

youtube

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Merry Christmas From Mustang Maniac

At Mustang Maniac we love our old cars, and we know that Santa has his trusty old sleigh. Now we think that he should move with the times a bit. So what would he think of his new sleigh?

Old School – 8 reindeer power – but it can fly.

Around the whole world on a dozen carrots and a couple of mince pies.

Santa old school

 

Modern Day – 500 horses and it sure flies of the line!

Around the world at 20 mpg roughly that’s 1243 tank fills for start on a single axis at 24,860 miles. We’re not sure that even a Super Snake Cobra could complete the task in one night.

But what fun trying though.

Santa new sleigh

The down side is unlike like Santa’s sleigh the trunk is limited. But we see it as an excuse to drive it more and faster to catch up the time!

Santa new sleigh2

We wish you a very Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from all of us here at Mustang Maniac.

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Getting Your Money’s Worth!

Now there is an old saying about getting your monies worth, sometimes it’s true and other times you can take the chance. We have been asked to look at a strange noise coming from the brakes. A quick visual inspection told us the brake discs and pads were shot to bits. We were surprised they hadn’t exploded to be fair as they were so thin on the inside of the face plate it was like a razor blade. Yogi thought about a skim to face the plates up at first until they were inspected properly. Yogi noted that there was nothing left to skim.

The pads tell the story on their own – they had gone through the rivets to the plate, so much so that the hot metal had stuck to the wheels. Yogi had a great time trying to remove the debris to make it look respectable again.

New rotors and pads in place

If you hear strange noises get it checked out to save a potential accident. This story ended up with a larger bill than expect for replacement parts luckily, it could have been much, much worse.

Exhausting work:

You often here the term custom-made this or that, but we genuinely do make custom parts, here is a good example of just that. A car needed a new exhaust and from the headers to the baffle boxes. The part that was supplied for the 351ci Cleveland didn’t fit as the angles were wrong to the header itself on the left hand side.

The answer was to cut and remake the exhaust to fit the car. Here we have plenty of pics of the welding and cutting that took place. Longer section of pipes have been inserted and the original flange fitting kept. Small sections of angled pipe were made and welded into place to make the fitting angles correct and allow the maximum gas flow as possible.

Full welding finished for strength on all the joints.

A few arty pics of the welding from the inside of the pipe.

The final stage was the fitting of the original flange back to the reshaped pipe using more angled pipe to make that all important fitting angle. Once all welding was completed the pipe was cleaned up and rubbed down and a light dusting of paint.

The finished result is pretty awesome and you would never know the exhaust has been made the way it has.

Early Christmas prezzie:

We had arranged an early Christmas prezzie for Mart from One man and his Mustang blog (click here for link). Mart was lead to believe that the car was having all sorts of issues, which of course it wasn’t. Things like the paint reacted badly or the primer has to come back off in places – all little white lies to throw him of the scent as it were. I’m sure you will see the full pictures on his blog very soon. We wont steal his thunder from his blog this week as he was so excited, we hadn’t seen a grin like that for while. But, we will be featuring the rebuild of this project on our blog too. We must say this is a fantastic looking paint job and all the cloak and daggers games was well worth it to see the look on his face. Yogi guides her home.

fullpaint1

Chris’s i6 Project

Chris’s Project 66 coupe i6 gets under way now with the engine and gearbox out of the car. The front has been stripped down so we can have a good look at the engine bay. The plan is to get this onto the rotisserie to have a full check of the underside and the rear quarters which are causing us a little worry at the moment,  nothing that can’t be sorted of course, but we just want to see what is required to put it right for parts ordering etc. if we need to that is.

We also decided to take the back axle out as well while we were at it, the hands on work will so begin.

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Who’s Payin’?

It’s that time of year where it’s cold damp and dark, but it’s getting closer to Christmas and a welcome break of over indulgence and is welcome! Herbie’s American Diner is a regular venue now for friends of Mustang Maniac, this occasion was no different last Sunday, we decided to have our Christmas lunch at Herbie’s as we enjoy the food so much. The Turkey came in the form of a burger with all the trimmings such as stuffing and cranberry sauce. There were even a few that had the traditional burger which was doubled-up just to make sure they looked like Santa himself. It was a great afternoon and a good turn out with the usual culprits and a couple of new faces with us too. A few photos were taken obviously:

They say a picture speaks a thousand words; this one seemed to suggest that somebody should pay!

herbiesxmas

But, when it was announced it was only a joke….. the boot was on the other foot.

Beth (Yogette) gave her approval of the afternoons antics too.

 The next day:

After such joyous events things can be a little heavy going the next day. Terry was working on a 289cid which was making some strange noises deep in the block. He decided it was going to be an old school diagnosis with his stethoscope which narrowed the noise to a particular cylinder. Terry even offered a full body medical with that long probe too. His kind offer was declined of course, needless to say the kettle was put on for hot cuppa.

doctor

Later that week:

Our new Falcon convertible arrived so we decided to take it and her sister truck for a spin. Petrol heads with wind in their hair on the way to a big fry up, what more can you ask for on a cold winters day, apart from a hot cup of tea that is? We decided to go in convoy of course, but there was a debate over who was going to drive.

Hang on – I thought you said Yogi was in the back!

Back to Christmas again, the new launch of the gift vouchers has gone down very well indeed. We have had a number of purchases from the  partners of Mustang owners who didn’t know what to get them. But, now they don’t have to  worry.

Hot of the press, our exclusive tax discs have appeared in January Edition of American Classic. At the time we post this the copy wasn’t in our hands but we will post a picture of the mag next week for you.

WebShop link for Gift Vouchers, click here.

WebShop link for Classic Car Tax Discs, click here.

 

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Gift Vouchers Now Online

As promised our WebShop has now been updated with full Gift Voucher functionality. That means you can now purchase the Gift Vouchers online via the WebShop, buy them directly from us at our offices or order them over the phone if you prefer. Once you have the Gift Voucher(s), you can use them against purchases made from our Webshop by entering that voucher’s unique code and the price will now be altered accordingly for you. What better way to shop online within the comfort of their own home, pay for the products with the vouchers and wait for the delivery to arrive? Get that perfect Christmas present solution for the person who has everything – except some of our Gift Vouchers of course!

Our Gift Vouchers sent via post are FREE P&P!

Gift Voucher pair

Webshop £10 Gift Voucher link click here

WebShop £20 Gift Voucher link click here

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Gift Vouchers

Exciting news & hot of the press – literally!

Mustang Maniac now have the ideal solution for buying that special person something from our stores. It can be a nightmare working out what will or won’t fit or would they like this or that. Now you can purchase our Gift Vouchers in either £10 or £20 denominations from us in person at our office or over the phone. We will also be making these gift vouchers available online purchases as soon as we can (see note below). The vouchers will be valid for 12 months from the date of purchase, that means the lucky recipient will have plenty of time make their mind for what they want to choose from our vast array of always in stock products, we will of course be on hand to help out if required. These vouchers will be available all year round for any special occasion that you can think off.

£20 voucher

£20 voucher

The WebShop planned updates:

As these vouchers are brand new and just arrived in our offices during the evening of 2 December 2014, we will be making some big updates to our WebShop in order that you can buy and use the gift vouchers online. These changes will allow the voucher codes to be validated by our WebShop and can be used as full or part payment for your online purchases. Please bear with us while we make these changes as soon as we can. We will obviously let you know when that full functionality is available via a blog post and all our social media updates.

For further information give Adam or Beth a call

Voucher pair

 

 WebShop link for £10 Gift Vouchers coming very soon

 WebShop link for £20 Gift Vouchers coming very soon

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Mr. F. & Mr. D.

Here at Mustang Maniac we get strange requests for all sorts of things, most of which we can cope with some we won’t entertain for some obvious reasons. However we will let you into a couple of conversations of genuinely true stories, but we will only tell it once because the outcome is the same as you will see why:

We received a phone call from a customer who “Just wanted a “D””, he later went on to explain what he actually wanted was a single letter “D” for the lip of his hood. Of course we have the “F.O.R.D.” Scott Drake set that has all four letters in a pack for £20. But, his guy wanted us to open a packet up and sell him just the “D” for a couple of pounds. What would we do with an incomplete set of letters, why not just replace all the lettering on the hood? So we agreed we would just send a “D”, but it would still be £20. Needless to say he said he could “buy a whole pack for that!” Exactly our point, unfortunately he wasn’t happy and we heard no more, which unfortunately wasn’t our aim to upset customers at all. The other true story was the same, the only difference this time was a request for the letter “F” with exactly the same style conversation taken place a few days later. We honestly thought it was a prank call.

By a random coincidence a couple of weeks ago we had a car in for a winter service and the hood lettering of the “O” & the “R” was missing from a recently applied new set of letters, so we were asked to replace the missing letters which we did of course from a pack. So as you can guess – we now unusually have a spare “F” & “D”. Most of the time if we change one letter will change the whole lot as standard so they all look the same and not some tarnished and some sparkly new ones.

F D letters

Mr F & Mr D

Then we had a thought, as a one-off or in this case a two-off, we just wanted to say to Mr F and Mr D – we now have your letters individually – so please give us a call and I’m sure we can sort you out a very favourable prices if you are still interested. We always try to help out our customers where we can.

Cars:

We get many rare cars in here in our workshops, famous cars and celeb owners of cars, but for confidential reasons we don’t divulge them all. But, we have a car here that was famous in its own right back in the ’70’s, she even appeared on a few covers and in a few centre pages on various hot rod and custom car magazines. The car was delivered to us to be looked at for a potential restoration. Now this car in her heyday was a real head turner, now you would probably look the other way. She does look a little worse for rust and rot should we say to be kind, but underneath the structure is sound and chassis legs are fine. Of course we have from some cars of our own stock that are rotten underneath, but the their metal work is fine. So we could make up a car from the pair quite easily or just add new panels, but the finances and time involved have yet to be agreed. For now this tired old legend awaits her fate! Will her Dixie horns ever sound again, we just don’t know, but surely the heritage of the car could just well be worth it.

Last week we mentioned in our blog that the a ’67 body shell was purchased “with a donor car from our stock.” This was incorrect and apologies to our customer who pointed out the error, thank you. The donor car is in fact the customers car and what we meant to say was “it’s now with stored with our stock”. Our excuse was that it was a busy day when the post was written up. However, we are genuinely very excited about this project build, and we will bring you pictures of the car all panelled up before she gets her coats of paint. The shell at this point really does look menacing all in a satin black we must say! We will also be running our regular update features of this project car from a shell and donor to an awesome show car. There will be a dedicated page for this project in our project cars very soon, so watch this space.

Classic Car Tax Discs:

What we have failed to mention was the fact that these tax discs also have the standard wording on the back from that classic motoring era. A customer has pointed it out to us that we didn’t mention it on the description, we just thought it was obvious that all, so here is a pic of the wording on the back – all be it the Mustang Maniac stamped version.

taxdiscback

Our WebShop has sold a number of the tax discs for non mustang owners too now. So make that stocking filler something a little different and nostalgic.

Generic Tax Discs click here.

Mustang Maniac Tax Discs Click here

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Getting T10 Into Gear

The problem we have during this time of year is trying to keep the customers cars dry and out of the rain. We shuffle things around in the workshops and work on what we need to. Some of these cars are not very water tight should we say as they are only ever out in the sun, the last thing we want is to have a mobile foot spa for our customers when they come to collect them.

We have just back a 1964 – ’65 Borg Warner T10 gearbox after a full rebuild. This T10 gearbox was later replaced by the now more familiar “Top Loader” which was used on most Fords from 1964 – ’73. These now very desirable gearboxes are becoming more difficult to be rebuilt correctly, however this gearbox now feels silky smooth and as good as the day it was made. Give us a call to get a quote and get it done properly.

 

A little while ago we mentioned the new ’66 Coupe i6 that is coming in for a full restoration. At the time the pictures had not been uploaded, but now they are all present and correct. So here is a selection of the car as she arrived. We have had a quick look at her and some work definitely needs to be done as you can see. We need to work out the owners budget on her and just how far this restoration needs to go. Some previous work has been undertaken prior to her arrival with us, like all these things we will need to establish the competency of that work before we start anything else. As we have said before, it can be done as we have proved many times here on this blog.

We have had a ’67 full body shell up for sale for a little while stored in our dry shed as we call it. A customer has seen it and bought it along with a donor vehicle from our stock. Obvious the body work on the donor car does not matter as long as the chassis is fine. So we are now making up the shell ready for paint. We will haves some photos soon of the shell with all the body panels fitter up.  But here is a picture of the basic shell before we start any work on it. Next week we will have some pictures of the shell with full panels and gapped correctly ready for paint.

Our Classic Car Tax Discs:

We have had a sales run on our tax discs and now we have split them up into sections so they can be found much more easily on the WebShop.

  • Generic Tax Discs click here.
  • Mustang Maniac Tax Discs click here.

It was pointed out that we were charging for the Postage and Packaging. This was an error when the system updated with the pictures and we have now correct it. The Postage and Packaging is FREE! now there is no reason not to get one. These Tax Discs would make a great stocking filler Christmas gift for any Classic Car owner. Due to the high interest we are now looking into producing more years 1969 – 1973 soon.

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