'Heart of Gold’ put me in the middle of the road. Traveling there soon became a bore, so I headed for the ditch.” – Neil Young, comments written for the liner notes of his 1977 compilation, Decade.
I FINALLY spent some time on the 1985 Mustang of late. I’ve assessed where I stand with parts, tools, etc. and have come to the conclusion that I have everything that I can reasonably identify to get started.
I then spent a day over the holiday cleaning the garage, sweeping, washing. All the good things that make a person feel better about the environment they are in. Looks good. Let’s get to work.
I’ve been looking for parts and pieces for this car for quite some time. I finally found the last bit which was the right rear quarter panel and that was tough to find here in Michigan. I had to travel to a place near Joliet, IL one weekend to grab the piece. Same color car! I would have loved to find a NOS part but that was not in the cards.
I also found a front nose piece in Ohio. Another weekend day used to get that.. Finding a nice part WITH the light bar again, took some time to get sorted and sourced. The light bar seems to be removed from most nose pieces
The next bit of work will be separating the body panel from frame bits but first cutting off the frame parts and the separating the panel from the remnants. That should be interesting since I’ll be doing from ‘inside’ the body panel.
Lastly, I also dug around and found the frame measurements for a 1985 Mustang Convertible. If you need the information I have a picture below and if you want the book it come from look for the 1985 Car Shop manual, Volume B2, page 47-04-19.
The second image appears to be the front end measures around the engine bay for a 1990 Mustang Hatch. I’ll keep looking for 1 985 Convertible values.
Quite a bit of progress on the Mustang yesterday.
The accident that the car was in bent the A-Arm, broke the strut inside and bent the sway bar link (all driver side). Used a death wheel to cut the link in half. Once that was done the rest was pretty easy.
I’ll need to take a look at the other strut when I remove it to make sure how the top of the strut is correctly assembled.
I also removed the sway bar to replace the bushings.
All in all it’s going well.
Not looking forward to putting the springs on but I do have the Maximum Motorsports spring tool and that should help.
Here’s a pic showing the front suspension of the Mustang. I’m in the process of changing the A-arm, the tie rods and the strut. Can you see what’s (horribly) wrong?
Pretty easy so far but then again, this car was stored inside and has 35k miles.
