1992 Mustang GT - 20+ year build project

Once the car arrived at Slicks' they began welding in the Scott Rod panels


correcting a bend in the core support


and smoothing the engine bay

next up they began the paint change from the original red/maroon color to a new Blue that I found from Mercedes.

I have spent months trying to find NOS inner fender liners, aka wheel well liners, and have failed to do so. I did manage to find one recently on Ebay, but I bowed out at the $250 level. Instead I decided to try and repair a small tear in one of mine and restore them as close to new as I could.

First thing first was to get a sense of just how nasty these things were, which damn were they nasty.






I then hit them with some Adam's all purpose cleaner and drill brush attachment, once they got good and scrubbed down I blasted them with the pressure washer. I have to say even at that point I was pretty impressed with the results, but I wonder how they would hold up long term.

I really wanted to see if I could get the liners looking as good as new or perhaps better than new. So I tried some of the Adams polishes trim cleaner, trim prep and trim restorer products. The results were stunning in the end and definitely worth the time I invested.



In this pic you can see the mounting tab on the top left that had a tear in it. I was able to repair this using a plastic welder, basically just a soldering iron with a special tip and some plastic welding "rod" aka sticks.

The next major milestones are as follows:
later this week - front suspension work begins. This includes the new MM K-member, Wilwood 6 piston brakes, new spindles, coilovers, etc.





I should mention that the rear-end was built years ago by Chris Neighbors and is already loosely in the car. Chris did a great job on the rear.






The rear was built using the original 8.8 factory differential. It was stripped down, shortened, and new 9" ends welded on, along with the tubes being welded to the center housing. The whole assembly then went out to be powder coated black. Chris installed a LPW ultimate 8.8" rear differential cover and bracing kit. The rear gears are Ford Motorsport 3.27 gears mated to a cobra 31 spline traction lock unit from Ford Motorsport as well. The axel shafts are 31 spline units from Moser. The final touch was the 4 piston Wilwood brakes mounted to 12" cross drilled/slotted rotors with a built-in brake shoe for the e-brake system.

I should have the new heads in later this week or early next week from TEA. This came about after discussing the project with Paul Lamar and ultimately connecting with Rick Smith.

I discussed the intent of my project at length with Rick Smith who created the TFS prototype intake he suggested I talk to TEA about a set of heads. Originally I was planning to use a set of CNC ported Canfield heads I bought many many years ago. They are brand new and only ever bolted on the engine, but i kind of want to reproduce the look of the original AD from the early 90s. Paul and I discussed as well and he agreed with Rick on the head choice and thought this would be a great way to complete the old school look of the AD.



Here are a couple of color pictures of the intake all cleaned up before it left to visit with John Marcella in Michigan. John agreed to take on the project and create a new custom lower to work with the original upper intake.





Once I get the new lower and original upper back from John I'm probably going to have them both powder coated back to the original blue as seen in the pics. The upper has a number of chips in the powder coating and I'd like to freshen it up a bit.

A quick update. I spoke to the paint and body guy this week and spoke to Chris at CCD about the overall planned work. We are all getting together this Friday to go over the car in detail. Right now I think I am going to send the car back out to finish the paint and body work. That will include replacing all of the exterior trim, repairing a couple of very small rust spots, new cervinis Cobra body kit, new front bumper (mine is damaged) and closing the antennae mounting hole in the fender. If everything goes to plan that work should be completed in about 2 months.

The timing actually works out a little better as that is about when I can expect to see the custom lower intake back from Marcella. During the time it is at paint I'm going to work on color changing the interior panels as well. I had already started on the dash and the center console, but I need to pull the rear quarter panel pieces.

Original dash before:



After color change:


While I had the dash torn apart I also completely disassembled all of the A/C duct work and cleaned it thoroughly. It was kind of shocking just how nasty that stuff gets with dirt\dust after nearly 30 years.

Not pictured is the center console. I will have to get a couple of pics of that this weekend. I had to repair a crack at the back end of the bottom of the console. After watching several youtube videos of people testing various products I determined to use good 'ol JB Weld to repair the console. I made my repair and let everything set up. Once it was good and dry and proceeded with the painting process. I followed the same steps on the console as I did on the dash. Quick wash down with an all purpose cleaner, followed by a basic soap/water wash. I then blew it all dry with the electric leaf blower and used an IPA solution to wipe everything down and remove any oils leftover. I then applied two coats of adhesion promoter, a quick dry coat (that setup for 5 minutes) followed by a wet coat.

After the cure time for the wet coat, 15 minutes I think it was, I did my first pass of black. In the end I think I made a total of 4 or 5 passes on each part to perform the color change. I was careful to use light coats so as to avoid causing runs. Everything came out really great in the end.

The only problems I had were with the vents, which I figured going in, and the glovebox latch. I think I'm going to be better off finding OEM black replacements for those items. Ideally I would locate some NOS parts, but I'm not holding my breath.

I'll post more updates this weekend.

Nothing better than coming home to a special delivery from Santa, aka TEA.

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Met with the paint and body guy today to go over the car and have a solid game plan. He is picking it up Tuesday to begin the work, start with swapping the subframe connectors and test fitting everything.

He's going to get my new bumper sorted, look at possibly integrating the cobra grill insert and blending it. Hes also going to get the makers garage carbon splitter all lined out before he paints. That way there will not be any drilling into freshly painted parts.

I went through my spreadsheet to organize and identify all the parts he will need. In doing so I figured out I needed to find a nos set of exterior door handles and nos rear hatch glass trim. Which thanks to a few contacts I've made over the years was done in short order. I also ordered all new clips for the glass and front windshield trim from lmr, that is repop based on ford tooling.

As progress is made on the paint and body work ill share some pics here.

I'm going to try and find time to work on perfecting my headlight restoration process as well. I have several nos sets, but I really want to find a solid way to restore them regardless of their state. This is just something I get a kick out of. Oh and I need to work on restoring the tail light housings at some point as well.

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Spent the weekend sorting through all of my collected paint and body parts and pulling them all together.

Interior was also pulled from the car today. So next weekends project will be cleaning and color changing the interior panels.


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Spent some time working on interior panels and color changing them. They came out great, but there are several scratches and even a few cracks. So I think today will just be a practice run and I'll have to find some other ones.

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Paint and body guy made some solid progress this past week. Car is largely stripped down and they are going to start making some minor repairs soon.

I finally managed to tracking down the NOS rear hatch glass window trim I ordered, after fedex lost it for a couple of days. Now I'm working on tracking my cervinis order. Hopefully the kit arrives soon or the project might stall for a couple of days.

Here are a couple of pics of the progress so far.

He also mentioned that he's going to remove the lead on the roof/hatch seam and replace with all metal product. Apparently that seam is a common spot to cause bubbling issues in the paint. Also going to do a small metal patch on the passenger fender to fill in the antenna hole.

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