Welcome to my Mustang build.
This whole thing did not start off as a car project. It started as an engine project. The Ford 427 Single Overhead Camshaft engine to be exact.
That obsession started decades ago when I read about John Vermeersch’s 1960 Starliner and its cammer engine. I’d never heard of a Single Overhead Cam V8 engine from Ford, this was 1983 so the Modular engine was still 7 years away. I found that the engine was nearly impossible to find. This was way before the internet so finding one in someone’s garage tucked under a work bench was not possible unless you knew someone who knew someone, etc.
Jump ahead to 2010 and a casual search through ebay finds a set of heads and a block for a 1966 427 SOHC engine up for auction and I am so there. I don’t have a car for the engine but then again, I don’t have a complete engine.
The search started for a car to put this engine in. My first thought was a 65’ Impala I have. It’s paid for, has a huge engine bay and it’s paid for. Did I mention it’s paid for? I tell my Ford buddy about my plans and he threatens great bodily injury to my person if I do anything as heinous as that. He’s a big guy so I decide that a Chevy/Ford hybrid isn’t the way to go, I started looking for something else. I was thinking about making a Thunderbolt clone. The 64’ Fairlane race car from Ford. I found a couple of nice examples for sale but couldn’t see cutting them up to drop this huge engine into. I dinked around with different ideas; a Ford Pinto, Mustang II, Granada, Fairmont like what Glidden campaigned in 80’. I live in California and because of the way the emissions are set up, the Fairmont wouldn’t have made it to registration. I almost forgot, I really thought hard about a 64’ Falcon Sprint but at 680 pounds in just the engine alone, that’s a lot of weight in the front end of such a small car and I’m not moving the engine back and drive from the rear seat. The search continues.
I read a magazine article about a 1969 Mustang. A Boss 429 Mustang named Pop’s Toy. The story goes that Pop’s bought a 1969 Boss 429 Mustang, new, and was disappointed with the performance of the engine so he pulled the Boss engine and put in a crate 427 SOHC. The pictures made it look like a drop in, no hacking out the shock towers or any other major mods. Hmmm, I’m liking this but it is a Mustang. It’s like a Camaro, everyone has one.
In October of 2012 I am working in New Jersey when I see a craigslist ad for California for a 1969 Mustang painted up like a Boss 302 and it looks amazing. I want that car but it’s in central Cali and I’m not. How can I get this car? The problem is soon solved for me when the car is sold but the hook is set, I want a 69’ Fastback Mustang.
Once again it’s ebay that proves to be the answer. Two or three weeks after missing out on the Boss 302 replicar, I am going over the typical searches. Bring-a-trailer has a couple of cars but there’s a reason the site is called Bring-a-trailer, Ebay had a couple of cars and one of them was sold almost as soon as I saw the auction. The second car looked ok, Plenty of pictures showing all sides of the car, interior and engine bay, maybe the trunk. It had promise, I wasn’t looking for a pristine car. One small problem. The car is in Ohio, I’m in Clifton New Jersey and the car needs to get to Los Angeles. What the Hell, I’ve already lost out on a couple of decent cars, who knows when another workable car will come along. I placed my bid and went about my business knowing full well that I would be outbid way before the auction concludes. I had set a maximum bid and every time I was outbid, I got an email rubbing it in. Short story long, I won. I hadn’t expected to win and not to be ungrateful but now I had to deal with the issue I had mentioned, How was I going to get the car and once I got it, how was I getting it home?
Luckily I won the car very near to the end of my stay in NJ. I would be heading home for a couple of weeks and then returning to the East Coast for a couple of days. I had a plan forming. I would go to New York for work and then get a ride out to Ohio when I was finished to check out the car and arrange for transportation to ship the car and then I’d fly home to meet it and all would be right in my little gear head world. Didn’t even come close to that plan.
After considering different options I decided to drive the car home. I was trying to get a childhood friend, who relocated to New York, to run out to Ohio to get the car and stash it somewhere in Brooklyn where he lives. I’d pick it up and drive it home after my job in New York was finished. Bryan didn’t have a place to store a car for a week or more but he did volunteer to drive the car back to LA with me. Bryan has always been my right hand man when it came to doing things a little out of the ordinary and this drive qualifies so with him on board, It was like a mission from God. I had to drive it home.
I finished the job and early the next morning I met Bryan at Grand Central Station to catch a train to Toledo Ohio. I found out that there are no direct flights out of New York or New Jersey into Toledo. The train didn’t take a whole lot longer than a round-a-bout flight, it was cheaper and I’d never been on a train before so I got an added bonus to my cross country adventure. The train boarded at 3:30 PM. We found our seats and settled in for the ride.
We arrived in Toledo early the next morning and caught a cab to the shop where I had the seller take the car to get it serviced. The garage owner showed up and I finally got to see this car I had waited and agonized over for so long. The body wasn’t embarrassingly wrinkled. Far less cancer than one would expect having lived most of its life that close to Lake Erie. The engine fired up and ran fine once I discovered the manual choke handle under the dash. I paid the seller who arrived at the shop not long after it opened and then paid the bill for the shop work, loaded up the car and pointed the car West. The mechanic gave us an odd look when I told him we were driving the car to California and said we were nuts. I took that as a blessing. What fun is a road trip if you know you’re gonna make it without the possibility of the car breaking down. Where’s the adventure in that?
I wanted to take Route 66 home and did the best we could. The majority of the trip was spent on I40 but where possible we went in search of 66.
The car behaved surprisingly well. Early on, the right wiper blade nearly fell off when I tested the wipers. I fixed that with some mint flavored, waxed dental tape. I think it’s still there 10 years later. When the sun was going down, we discovered another hazard on the car and that was the old pitted and scratched windshield. During the day it was fine but once the light from the setting sun and the the headlights from oncoming traffic hit the glass, the windshield became a big sheet of glare. I lost all visibility. I don’t know how Bryan was able to make his way under those conditions but I sure as hell couldn’t. After that first day, I decided that we weren’t going very far once the sun set. The steering was another challenge, That took some work to keep the car going in a straight line. Bryan described it as sawing back and forth aggressively. I don’t remember it being that dramatic but it did take some time to get used to. My favorite hiccup of the car was the third gear of the transmission. The shifter wouldn’t stay in gear. It would pop out as soon as you let the shifter handle go. We found a bungee cord and rigged it in such a way that it could be removed from around the shifter and just as quickly wrapped back around the T handle when we hit cruising speed. Yes, someone put a Hurst T-handle shifter on a three speed.
It took 4 days to get to Flagstaff Arizona. I wish I’d had more time to stop and be a tourist but I had to be back at work. Bryan checked the oil after roughly 2000 miles and found that the engine was down about a quart of oil. If you know anything about these older engines and considering the age of the car, being down a quart was better than acceptable. This little 302 really had me impressed. I didn’t expect it to be as torquey as it was. I was beginning to question my plan to swap the engine.
By late afternoon of day 5 we were rolling into LA. I dropped Bryan off at his mom’s house so he could pick up an old Suzuki SUV that was going to waste in the driveway. Bryan loaded up the Suzuki and was heading back to Brooklyn within 12 hours of being dropped off. He later told me he made it home in 60 hours. I think he was showing off. As for me, I went home and left the Mustang in the driveway until the next morning. I had access to a workshop so that’s where I parked the car for the next few days until I could get it to the DMV to make it an official California car. After that the Mustang went back to the shop for several weeks before I was able to get the time to see exactly what I had bought.
The following blog posts are. of majority, from memory. I’ve been working on this car since 2013 and as of this writing, it is now 2022 and the project continues.
Since the bulk of the posts here are me trying my best to document the various steps and projects to date, you’ll find that the posts do not follow a real chronological order. I bounce around a lot.
Follow the links on this introduction page, they should help cut down on a little bit of the confusion.
Thank you for being here and I hope you find some useful info and maybe a little entertainment.
Albert.