Is this the original "playmate pink"?

I ordered 8oz of a Ford Fleet color known as WT9301 to test against my car and see if it’s actually the color of the early pink mustangs!  I’ll post the comparison photos as soon as I’m done, but based of of the sample on the top of the can, it’s looking rather promising!

I’ll be testing the sample this week to see if it’s right!

**update**

WT9301 turned out to be far too pale, unfortunately.  After further research we found the paint had actually been batched incorrectly.

Getting an antique convertible back into top shape is no easy task.  By far the worst part of it is stripping down the car and seeing first hand what years of damage and neglect have done to a once beautiful car.  It’s also difficult to bear in mind that before I started stripping down the car, it was actually a decent looking driver with crummy looking paint.

At any rate, I’ve managed to document the damage to the car that rust has caused, and I’ve outlined a plan of action in order to get the car back into shape:

Left Hand Rear Quarter Panel

Bottom of quarter panel is completely rusted out, White Paint indicates small rust hole

Inner Drop-Down Panel is rusted out as well

Slight Rust Out on Lower Side of Wheel Well (Passenger Side Rear Quarter Panel)

Tail Light Panel

Taillight Panel. No Rust, but lot's of little damage

Panel Between Vert Top and Trunk

This Panel is Just Ugly. Best to chop it out and replace completely.

Front Drivers Inner Fender

Another Shot of this Hole. It looks like it was Sealed Up with a Rust Encapsulator at one time, preventing it from getting any worse!

Engine Bay

The battery trays commonly rust out because the old batteries had a tendency to leak. It's a low visibility area, so the plan is to seal it and put some metal filler in.

Underneath The Car

The Convertibles had a unique panel below the door that was designed to add rigidity to the weak body structure. The panel on the drivers side is completely rusted out. Fortunately, the passenger side is solid.

Drivers Side Door

Leaky Seals caused water to pool in the bottom of the drivers door, rusing out the inner panel. Although the outer skin is fine, the inner panel will need to be repaired/replaced. A New Ford Tooling door will cost nearly $400, so I need to decide if it's more cost effective to replace the door or repair it.

All in all, not too bad!

 

 

1965 Mustang Hood Ornament, Likely a Dealer Option

I’ve seen this debate come up a few times over the years.  Every once in awhile someone pops up asking about a hood ornament they saw once on a mid-60′s Mustang, and they want to know if it was a factory original option or a cheap aftermarket item.  Well, it just so happens that my 1965 playmate pink mustang came with just such an option!

I haven’t found any evidence to indicate that the hood ornament is actually Ford made.  There is no FoMoCo stamp in the metal, but modern replicas of this exact ornament have a hollow bottom, whereas this example is completely solid.

My suspicion is that the ornament was actually a dealer aftermarket item.  It was common for the early mustangs to be optioned by the dealer that sold them with any number of items that were not actually made by FoMoCo.

Dave Hammar actually has a great site that details a ton of dealer aftermarket options for the early Ford Mustangs, but I have not found any information on his site regarding this particular option.

Is there anybody out there that has more knowledge on this unusual Mustang accessory?  I’d love to know more if anyone out there has evidence of the option from 1965, please send it my way!

I took the door glass out of the Mustang the other day.  The good news is that it came out.  The bad news is that my neighbors could have mistaken me for a sailor with the “choice phrases” I had for the car.  There were a couple of bolts that were so heavily rusted that no amount of WD-40 and an impact wrench could break free.  I ended up having to drill several bolts completely, and found the reason my rear glass windows don’t roll up and down:

That steel track on the bottom of the window SHOULD be straight.  There is a wheel that is supposed to sit in that track which guides the window up and down when it’s cranked.  However, if it’s not properly set, the wheel can jump out of that track due to hyper extention, and then cause all sorts of poblems, like the issue I now have.  The solution is to remove that track from the window frame and replace it.  No big deal, just a little bit of time and effort.

The main windows have their own unique set of issues:

On the upside, the FoMoCo stamps on the metal all look good!

A special Thank you to everyone out there that called or emailed me regarding the apparent listing of my vehicle by a dealer located in Pompano Beach, Florida.  For the record, this dealer took what he called a “stock photo” until he could get real pictures of the car up.  I’m not going to get into the issue of him using a copyrighted photo as I am not the copyright holder on that particular image, but I did take issue with images of my car being used in an advertisement for sale.

I contacted the seller, the sites the car was listed on, and the FL Attny. General’s office.  Thankfully, the photos of my car have been removed, and photos of a different car are now up.

My concern was that this may have been a situation where my was at risk of theft.  It seems now that this was really a case of a dealer not thinking anyone would notice the wrong car being posted online.  Either way, you can never be too careful in this day and age.

Link to conversation regarding listing on VMF

Notice the original paint vs. the mis-colored respray

Here’s an image of what the original “playmate pink” on a ford mustang looked like.  This photo was taken during the current dismantling and restoration of my 1965 convertible.

There’s always a lot of debate about the “proper” color for the earliest pink mustangs.  Because I was fortunate that my trunk interior had never been re-sprayed and I found a considerable amount of original paint under the dash, I was able to test a wide variety of color possibilities.

I tested every color imaginable, and even had a spectral analyzer take a crack at it.  In the end, the color known as WT9301 was a nearly perfect match, as you can see in the photo below.

A variety of 60's paint color chips, courtesy of mustangattitude.com

WT9301 Tested as a 2-stage paint against the original factory paint.

The Pink Mustang Waiting for it's new garage

Having a love for old cars carries with it an inherent problem:  Where do you keep them all?  For the odd junker or parts car, indoor storage may not be a necessity, but for an antique that’s in decent shape it’s a different story altogether.
Unfortunately, I purchased the Mustang without a garage space waiting at home.  I was simply out of space, and until I found more, I was forced to let the car sit in the driveway, tarped and rather neglected.  The immense rush of self-guilt that came from not having a proper garage space for the old car served as excellent motivation, and within a week of purchasing the car I started construction on a new single car garage.

I priced out pre-built garages, and compared with what it would cost me to hire a couple guys and buy all the materials myself.  As it turned out, the cost to have one delivered was with about $150 of what it would cost me to build it myself, but the delivered garage would have no windows and would be 60 square feet smaller than what I would build on my own.  In addition, the flooring of the delivered garage would be lumber, whereas if I built it myself the slab would be concrete.

We poured a concrete slab instead of wood flooring

The construction itself was incredibly quick.  It took about 6 hours to dig out the foundation and pour the concrete.  We built a slight ramp into the slab at the garage door, and decided to go with a 9′wx7′h garage door which ran $138 from Lowes.

The framing for the garage took about 8 hours, and then another 8 hours was spent finishing out the roof and walls.  For siding I decided to use a smart siding instead of T1-11.  It was my first experience with the material and I can’t say enough good things about it.  For starters, it was roughly $9 cheaper per sheet, it has a hard primed exterior surface, and it takes paint much better than t1-11 does.  If you’re looking to build a cheap shed or garage, check that stuff out!

The garage walls went up fast!

Putting up a garage like this was remarkably easy.  I didn’t purchase any construction plans, all the construction was done from memory, right down (or up) to the roof rafters.  I still need to build parts shelves in the garage and put up some finishing trim, but as far as storing the car is concerned, the mustang has a pretty new garage to rest in, safe and sound!

I have to give a big THANK YOU! to the guys over at the Brandywine MD fire house for helping me out with my mustang this afternoon!  I was worried sick that I might have caused serious damage to the car, but they really saved the day!

You see, I went out to a cruise-in at the fire house this afternoon, and as I was parking the car at the show, I drove over a manhole cover that collapsed beneath the weight of the car!!!  Apparently the welded steel tabs that hold the cover snapped, and the front end of the car sank into the hole!  I immediately froze, terrified I had snapped the A-arm or wrecked the suspension, and imagine my shock when I stepped out of the car and found this!:

Of all the places for it to happen, I was lucky it was at the fire department!  Aside from the hideous embarassment of it all, at least they had airbags on hand to lift the car and get it out without causing any damage!  Believe it or not, I didn’t have any damage to the body panel or paint, and only a slight nick to the lower chrome trim.  I did catch serious hell from the Chevy guys there, but I was just glad there was no serious damage!  It could have been a whole lot worse, and the guys at the fire house did decide to put cones up around the manhole cover after the little run in with my car!

Getting Ready for Paul McCartney!

You may or may not have been aware, but Sir Paul McCartney played at FedEx Field in Landover, MD Saturday Night.  I went to see the show, and while the music was great, pretty much everything else was a train wreck.  I drove the pink mustang out to the show because I was at the Mustang Mania V car show in Columbia, MD earlier in the day.  I got to the stadium 2.5 hours before the show, and it’s a good thing I did!

The show started about 1 1/2 hours late due to traffic being completely abysmal, supposedly people were stuck for as long as 2 hours trying to get in to the stadium!  It was fortunate that we had avoided getting there at the last minute, because I’m not sure the car would have been too happy with a 2 hour traffic jam to get into the show.

Once I was inside I found that the water stopped running in the bathrooms due to a blocked up pipe, supposedly they had it fixed 25 minutes before the start of the show, but the show started at 9pm, and I found the water had stopped at 7:25, so that’s at least an hour with no running water in the stadium.  Hardly the picture of sanitary conditions.

Food concessions were almost as bad.  After waiting for 20 minutes to get sodas, I found the credit machines had crashed (Cash only, folks!), the soda taps weren’t working, and they were waiting on the beer kegs to be changed out.  Essentially it was $5 bottles of water or nothing!  I spent $200 on tickets for the show, but the condition of the facilities certainly didn’t reflect it!

Paul McCartney Rocking FedEx Field!

The mass exodus at the end of the show was also a nightmare.  I assumed I would wait until the rush died down so that I wouldn’t get caught in a heavy back-up with a 1965 mustang.  I waited for nearly 1.5 hours and the traffic was still heavily congested!  I took my chances, and ended up getting out of the complex about 2 hours after the show ended.

90,000 people go to FedEx Field for Redskins Games, but 50,000 concert goers was apparently overwhelming.  Don’t forget that they charged a $10 parking fee per ticket, but you don’t get that money back if there’s  more than one ticket holder in your car!  Oh, there’s also more seats than parking spaces there, so they were essentially charging for a commodity that didn’t “technically” exist!

McCartney himself was awesome, 2.5 hours of great tunes from a legendary artist, but FedEx Field really short changed their patrons, IMHO.  How do you charge $10 for parking 50,000 times if there’s only 22,001 seats?  It should be illegal to charge money for a parking spot that

1. Isn’t used
2. Doesn’t actually exist!

I will say this much:  If McCartney comes back in town, I hope he goes to another venue.  I’d love to see him again, but there’s no way I’ll ever pay to see another concert at FedEx Field!

I’ve got the Carburetor finished, and it’s running great!  As it turns out, the inlet valves were almost completely gummed up, which would probably be why the car was stalling out so badly, and the gaskets were pretty much falling apart. (10 years of storage will do that!)

I got an electric choke to replace the original, but I haven’t actually installed it because the vacumn pump seems to be working perfectly after the rebuild (My original suspicion was that the original choke was shot).  I’m hanging onto the electric choke as a backup, and I’ve finished replacing the convertible top and interior, so I’ll post that good stuff in a bit!