Arrival of Big Bird

At one point ( I was probably 18) I decided I wanted to swap out the tired old 302 in my '69 Mustang.   I started combing the local paper for engines and came across an old Thunderbird that had a 429 in it.  For some reason,  I thought the 429 would be perfect for my car.   The car was local and the asking price was around $600. I exclaimed to my brother, forget an engine, I'm getting a whole car.   

The T-bird was a 1969 model which I was unfamiliar with. I was thinking it would look like the early 60's square birds...which I liked. Unfortunately, when I went to look at the car I found this monster:  



It turns out that with the arrival of the Mustang in 1964 Ford decided it had to change the direction of the T-bird. To differentiate the T-bird product,  it went upscale with many luxury appointments. It also went 'up scale' as Ford abandoned the unit body construction and reverted to a massive body of frame design.  To call the car big is an understatement.....it was gargantuan.  And it was a two door to boot. One cool thing is that the four door version of these beasts utilized suicide doors.

One of the first things I learned about this car (and quickly came to appreciate) was how hard 'luxury' was back in the 60's. The T-bird was loaded with little simple features that we take for granted today. One example was intermittent wipers. When sitting in the T-bird I realized that the wiper switch in my Mustang only had three settings (off, slow and fast).  Today, we'd hardly consider intermittent wipers worthy of a check box on a new car's option sheet....but back in 1969 this was cutting edge technology.  The scary thing is how Ford executed things like the intermittent wipers, tilt away steering wheel, remote trunk release, sequential tail lights, recessed headlights, etc. They were mostly complex electro-mechanical devices (not solid state) and often depended on what appeared to be countless vacuum reservoirs located throughout the car connected by seemingly miles of vacuum tubing.    

As I became a fan of the quirkiness of the T-bird, the vision of pilfering the engine, transmission, rear end and possibly brakes for my Mustang faded.   I just couldn't bring myself to part out this obscure luxury liner.  This was further complicated by my father's reaction to the beast.  I didn't exactly tell him I was buying it. I just bought it, drove it home, parked it the driveway and split for a couple hours (to avoid the initial reaction).  When I arrived home I thought for sure I was going to get read the riot act.  In fact, when I first saw him I swear I was able to read his lips and it had something to do with killing me.   But as I approached him, ready to face the music for parking a two ton monster in his yard (unannounced), he went into raving about what a nice car it was.  Later at one point, when my brother and I were working on it, we told him our plan to remove the drive train and scrap the car....he just looked at us and said "Fix it."  For years after that, my brother and I would use the "Fix it" quote on each other as a mantra whenever working on projects. 

I never had the time or resources to finish that project (I was focused on the Mustang) but I never had the heart to scrap or part that car out. Instead, my brother eventually finagled a deal to trade it for a Porsche 924....a story I'll tell at a later date. 

  

Cougar Life

Stuck to the side of my toolbox are a couple old newspaper clippings advertising a few Mercury Cougars. The old yellow clippings were retrieved from the inside of a closet door. The closet happened to be in what was once my bedroom in my childhood home.  I was probably 13 or 14 years old when I clipped these from the 'Bargain News' and hung them in my room.  It was only a few years ago when helping my parents move from our old house that I found them and took them to put on display in my garage.

The Mercury Cougar was always one of my favorite muscle cars.  The electric razor inspired grill with hide away headlight was just plain cool.  The sequential taillights were even cooler.  If you asked me at that age what car I wanted when I grew up I would have said a Mercury Cougar with a 428 in it. My brother's truck had me in love with the Ford FE power plants.  In fact, in 8th grade, our English teacher made us right a letter to ourselves as seniors in high school.  The cool thing was that the school took the letters and gave them to us 4 years later. What was one of the first things I asked the older version of myself? What did I drive!!!  I even asked specifically if I had a Cougar with a 428 in it.  At the time I read the letter I was driving my 69 Mustang with a 302 in it....I think the prepubescent version of myself would have been satisfied with that answer.  So the point is I always wanted a Mercury Cougar.

As I mentioned in my post about my first car, the day came when I was ready to invest time and money to get the Mustang exactly where I wanted it.  This was going to involve updating the Mustang's chassis, suspension, brakes, and transmission.  While researching online (it was now the internet era) I came across a 1967 Mercury Cougar for sale.  It was an original S code car....meaning it came with a big block 390. While not the 428 I dreamed of, it was part of the FE family which I was always fond of.  It came with a 4 speed top-loader and had a complete Total Control Products front suspension on it.  It even had Wilwood disc brakes on all four corners. These were all the goodies I wanted for my Mustang and I couldn't even buy these parts for what the guy was selling the whole car for.  So my plans changed and my brother and I drove to Cleveland, Ohio pulling an empty U-haul trailer behind his V-10 powered  F-350.  We drove straight there, picked up the car, stopped for dinner with some relatives in the area and drove right back with this gem...

 

I still have the Cougar and you will be seeing many more posts featuring me doing dumb things with it as soon as the Spring arrives!!!

Atomic Batteries to Power....

The orginal Batmobile from 60's TV series staring Adam West is the best TV  hero car of all time! My brother and I always mused that when we became older and struck it rich, our first conquest would be to purchase one of the orginal Batmobuiles (like Mark Wahlberg's character in Rockstar).

Well, it turns out that Batmobile #1 owned by legendary car customizer George Barris will cross the auction block on January 19, 2013!  The car will be auctioned by Barrett-Jackson in Scottsdale.  I'm not a fan of what Barrett-Jackson did to our hobby.  I remember watching the earliest televised auctions on Speedvision and being disgusted by the inflated prices.  Barrett-Jackson made our beloved works of art nothing more than investments for guys with big egos and bigger wallets.  As a result, every local idiot with a pre-1973 anything for sale automatically upped their prices 10 fold.....but I'll blast that phenomenon at a later date....back to the Batmobile.

The orginal George Barris creation was derived from the 1955 Lincoln Futura concept car.   Upon its success molds were made fromt he orginal and threre fibreglass replicas were made for promotional use.  By the way, the orginal car was powered by a big block Ford 390!  Here is a great link to more specs. In the meantime, I have a little more than a month to win the lottery or inherit a fortune.

First Victim

When I was about 9 or 10 my brother bought a gnarly 1970 Ford F100. Big lifted pickups (as well as mullets) were in vogue at his vocational high school, so much so that his high school yearbook had class notable categories such as "Best Car" and "Best Truck." The truck was a beast. It was a F100 shortbed that was lifted and sitting on 38 inch tires. It had a 460 big block, 4 speed tranny and smoke stack exhaust. My father hated that thing! This was officially my (and my brothers) first step into gearheadedness.

My brother did everything to that truck! He pulled the body off and sanded and painted the frame due to the recommendation of a crazy neighbor. He changed the wheel/tire combination a bunch of times. He upgraded the axles. He even managed to swap the engine 3 or 4 times....the kicker is it never left our driveway!

I learned allot from this truck such as:

Lesson 1 - It sucks to be a car guy in Connecticut without a garage.

SoCal may be the heart of the car culture. But I'll always consider those guys soft and spoiled until they experience working on your car outdoors in subfreezing temps. Nothing builds character like laying on your back under a car in the cold and having frigid fuel run down your arms into your sleeves as you reach up and work on fuel lines.

Lesson 2 - Cheap tools don't fair well against 30 year old bolts.

Even though my father was not a car guy, we were lucky in that he was a general contractor and had a wide variety of tools in the garage. The problem was they were all crap. Add to the equation my brother's only approach for dealing with stuck or fused parts was to just push or pull harder made for interesting lessons in physics. Bending a cheap screw driver when using it as a pry bar is no big deal. But I never knew wrenches could bend and sockets could strech like they were made out of play-dough. We (especially my brother) destroyed everything. As I became older and purchased my own tools I learned to appreciate higher quality tools (or at least tools with warranties). Runs to Sears to exchange our battered Craftsman hand tools became a annual tradition.

Lesson 3 - Cutting torches and welders are cool.

As we got further into the project my bother acquired more specialized tools. We eventual obtained an arc welder that would provide hours of fun, but that absolute highlight was an oxy acetylene cutting torch outfit. Who knew you could slice through steel as you instantly liquified it?

　

Lesson 4 - Poor planning and lack of funds can doom a project.

My brother was 16. As a result, he also only had the income and intelligence of a 16 year old. These two factors ultimately led to the truck never reaching the street. Resources and planning will continually creep up in shaping my future projects.