429 Grande Article very rare car

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That looks to be a factory-painted hood. It should be well documented before being repainted.

 
That looks to be a factory-painted hood. It should be well documented before being repainted.
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With all your ram air hood paint research - I was hoping you would chime in on this one! There are way too many version of how to do a correct hood blackout (or in argent) treatment.

Do you have a template?

Thanks Kit.

Ray

 
The templates from Pheonix Graphics and Graphics Express are correctly shaped. ( my car was used by one of them to make thier template)

The shape of the front corners is where most get it glaringly wrong. The design comes almost back to parallel with the side edge of the hood before turning along the front edge. That is almost never duplicated correctly.

It looks like an OEM-painted hood to me.

Also note how close the design is to the molding on the leading edge of the hood. Thanks to Jeff Ford and Mustang Monthly's wildly incorrect article about how an OEM hood was painted, there are many, many restored cars out there with unintentionally incorrectly painted hoods. They claimed the design was placed farther back on the hood, screwing up all the curved dimensions around the scoop character lines.

This one here one this 71 Grande looks correct.

Side note: I always took umbrage at Ford's useage of the word "Grande" for this Mustang model. The word "Grande" does not have the same meaning as "Grand", or even "Gran", as I think they may have intended.

"Grande" actually means "big" or "extra large"...and this Mustang is no bigger than any other Mustang sold during the same year.

However, with the monsterous 429 CJ lurking under the hood...maybe the only appropriate name actually is........

.........Grande!

 
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Are you sure it is factory? Looks like the rest of the car had been repainted. (Different vinyl top, no badges).
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Good points Will. Thanks!

The vinyl top just appears to be missing (removed) and the top probably cleaned and repainted. A white vinyl top on a green car... hmmm interesting.

I am really hoping more try and replicate the correct design - and we help provide good reference. Ray

 
Sorry fellows, I tend to believe this one is a (very good) repaint. Ford didn't put full paint under the vinyl roofs if they didn't have to; even the finish that did wind up under the roof was thinner than the rest on the car.

EDIT: Now I'm sure it's a repaint. Font on the hood is Arial - straight out of Windows:

$(KGrHqIOKo0E32)oY9r!BOH19E5mWg~~_4.JPG


Ad: http://www.ebay.com/itm/RARE-1971-429-COBRA-JET-RAM-AIR-GRANDE-ONE-OF-TWO-/390883149777?pt=US_Cars_Trucks&forcerrptr=true&hash=item5b027387d1&item=390883149777&nma=true&si=ijWgoK7EFyTcKs7OK3ZNxncCCvg%253D&orig_cvip=true&rt=nc&_trksid=p2047675.l2557

I believe some of the seam lines were finished in plastic filler as well instead of lead, though this may apply only to later vehicles.

-Kurt

 
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I didn't see that photo...good catch. That is definitely not correct font for hood decals.

 
Curious but what is the correct font for ram air decals? (and other related ones ?)
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Though you can't always rely on the names given to similar computer fonts to be correct (as some may be digitized versions of the original under a new name, and others are ripoffs of the originals), the Ram Air font is a bold variant of Eurostile - originally designed in 1962:

http://www.myfonts.com/WhatTheFont/results?ch[0]=3&ch[1]=5&ch[2]=1&ch[3]=R&ch[4]=A&ch[5]=M&ch[6]=A&ch[7]=I&ch[8]=R&wtfserver=wtf_e_41&id=00213362535186d5000a40200000712c&glyphcount=9&imageid=0&x=78&y=33

Eurostile Ext Black, Eurostile MN Extended Bold, and Microgramma D Bold Extended are all very suitable given the right kerning. Microgramma D Bold Extended has a slightly different shape to the "A," which would have to be confirmed against an original decal.

You can read about the development and variants of Eurostyle on the old Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eurostile

This appears to be an excellent digital reproduction using one of the proper Eurostile fonts:

FOD096.jpg


This is a poor attempt at a digital reproduction using a similar - but incorrect - font:

13934543012701504369091.jpeg


And, of course, the Arial font on this Grande is incorrect as well (and is a poor show of effort and pride on the part of whoever did the stencil).

-Kurt

 
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That close-up of the "429 RAM AIR" doesn't even look like a black decal. It looks like a template was placed before painting the argent and then removed, leaving green letters behind.

What a way to leave a turd as the finishing touch on an obvuiously nicely-repainted car at some point in its life.

 
I see all the comments about the improper black outs on hoods and agree. I see cars on eBay that they want big bucks for with the shiny paint on the hood. When I asked why they said it was too difficult to keep the flat paint clean.

I have a 73 Mach with the original black paint on the hood. I will take some pictures some day for reference for all. I would need to take the hood off to get good picture of how they did the rear of the hood on the bottom. You for sure know they were only trying to make production when you see how they taped it off.

Another area on the 73 models that bugs me is around the front side marker light. Ford sprayed around the light and the light with the flat black paint before putting the side stripe on. Most cars I see show paint color there also.

I quit MCA due to them telling me I would have to change things on my car that were not original to do any better. I won a 3 rd. in unrestored at the Nationals one year without cleaning the underside of the car. I never went back they have tunnel vision on how cars are built. They said I had incorrect screws in places and they came from Ford that way. We made parts or 12 or 15 different Ford vehicles at one time. You have parts that get rework and they sit in a warehouse until you get several racks and then rework and ship. The date codes can be 6 months old by then. We welded up fractures in panels and ground them down and that was an acceptable repair for Ford. If you run out of a fastener that is in the spec. engineering will approve a sub. to keep the line going. Parts can actually be pulled from service in some cases to fill the requirements on the line if there are issues in the part supply. One time for a model change build for Ranger trucks I ordered the panels from Ford service stripped them altered them and sold them back to Ford for several times what they cost. It saved us having to pull a set of dies from the yard and make 20 parts to fill the prototype order.

Enough venting. The hood black out or argent paint is applied incorrect more than correct for sure. Cars in the 60's and 70's were put together with hands not robots in fact one left a lit cigarette under a console I pulled out once. There it was melted into the carpet.

Enjoy reading all the Mustang stories.

David

 
I see all the comments about the improper black outs on hoods and agree. I see cars on eBay that they want big bucks for with the shiny paint on the hood. When I asked why they said it was too difficult to keep the flat paint clean.

I have a 73 Mach with the original black paint on the hood. I will take some pictures some day for reference for all. I would need to take the hood off to get good picture of how they did the rear of the hood on the bottom. You for sure know they were only trying to make production when you see how they taped it off.

Another area on the 73 models that bugs me is around the front side marker light. Ford sprayed around the light and the light with the flat black paint before putting the side stripe on. Most cars I see show paint color there also.

I quit MCA due to them telling me I would have to change things on my car that were not original to do any better. I won a 3 rd. in unrestored at the Nationals one year without cleaning the underside of the car. I never went back they have tunnel vision on how cars are built. They said I had incorrect screws in places and they came from Ford that way. We made parts or 12 or 15 different Ford vehicles at one time. You have parts that get rework and they sit in a warehouse until you get several racks and then rework and ship. The date codes can be 6 months old by then. We welded up fractures in panels and ground them down and that was an acceptable repair for Ford. If you run out of a fastener that is in the spec. engineering will approve a sub. to keep the line going. Parts can actually be pulled from service in some cases to fill the requirements on the line if there are issues in the part supply. One time for a model change build for Ranger trucks I ordered the panels from Ford service stripped them altered them and sold them back to Ford for several times what they cost. It saved us having to pull a set of dies from the yard and make 20 parts to fill the prototype order.

Enough venting. The hood black out or argent paint is applied incorrect more than correct for sure. Cars in the 60's and 70's were put together with hands not robots in fact one left a lit cigarette under a console I pulled out once. There it was melted into the carpet.

Enjoy reading all the Mustang stories.

David
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I have to agree with you on the MCA there were times I had to correct the judges on my car which I ordered new.. from telling me I had the wrong hood or wrong shifter which both are original ... As a Ford tool & die retiree we would do what ever it took to keep the lines going (they did not stop the lines to change the date stamp) so we could get parts out to the assembly plants we would even run extra parts to put in warehouse for when there was a major press rebuild or model year change over. The plant I worked at was and is a major stamping plant and stamped out thousands of parts each day.

 
Enough venting. The hood black out or argent paint is applied incorrect more than correct for sure.
Click to expand...
True - though the stencils used to make the tu-tone on the hood of this car are far too different to be a production line oddity, and the font used for "429 Ram Air" didn't exist until 1982.

Would love to see the manner in which your hood is taped at the back. I love being able to spot factory sloppiness from restoration sloppiness ;)

-Kurt

 
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On cars that recieved the black tutone hood paint, the trailing edge of the underside of the hood was also painted black from the rear edge, about 5 or 6 inches deep. The sides were masked straight, but the leading edge ( horizontal to the back edge of the hood) was unmasked, creating a sloppy overspray effect.

Mine had this from the factory, and I have seen it on every factory-painted tutone black ram-air hood I have ever seen.

I have seen several factory argent ( silver) painted tutone hoods, and NONE of them had the same treatment.

I have never heard an "official" explanation for why this was done, but I have a guess:

The rear underside of the ramair hood is quite visible from inside the car. If the hood has black tutone, there is a very eye-catching difference in the paint between the top and bottom side while driving/ sitting in the car. To draw attention away from that area, the black was extended on the bottomside a few inches to try and make this not as noticeable.

On an argent-painted hood, the effect would be reversed, since the argent is lighter-toned than the body color. Painting the underside on an argent hood would actually draw your eye towards that, so...on argent hoods the underside was left unpainted.

This is all, of course just a wild-ass guess on my part.

It would be interesting to find out the "official" reason.

 
The blacked out hood on my car is original. The car was painted twice, but each time they did not re-paint the hood blacked out area. You can see the original factory pastel blue paint under the fading black. I will be taking very careful measurements and making a re-useable stencil for the re-paint of the hood during its restoration. Cheers

 

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