73MustangGrande
Active member
- Joined
- Jul 3, 2015
- Messages
- 35
- Reaction score
- 0
- Location
- Bradenton, FL
- My Car
- 1973 Mustang Grande, 351C, FMX, coming out of 20 year sleep.
This car is a 1973 Mustang Grande. Been sitting in my father's garage for somewhere between 15 and 20 years. I talked him into letting me get rid of it because I knew he was never going to do anything with it. Instead of scrapping it like I told him, I towed it to a friend's house and the work began. I gave my father $400 to complete the story This car was supposed to be a birthday surprise for my father, but he heard through a different friend of mine that the work on my Mustang was coming along quite well. He confronted me and was very happy about what I'm doing. It turns out that he always wanted to build it up to be my first car, but it never happened. He tried to give me the money back, but I won't take it. I can say that in the end, I bought the car for $400. So day one was change out the points and it fired right up, but sounded terrible. To make sure it would hold water, I filled the radiator, and it promptly started leaking from the freeze plugs. So, out came the engine. The freeze plugs got replaced as did the timing set because it was worn out, and the engine went back in. Cleaned up the carburetor fired it up again, but not on all 8. Pulling plug wires one at a time told me it was running on four. Low compression was the cause, thankfully it was just from sitting for so many years, but number one had flat 0. Fixed the stuck exhaust valve and the bent pushrod and as it's been running the compression has gone from high 90's/low 100's, to about 180 in every hole. Fixing the blown head gasket helped as well. A different carburetor and now this thing will idle. But it idles very rough. Being I don't have a tach, I don't know what the engine is running at, so I can't really set the carb, it may not even be jetted right for it. Timing is set at about 12, and it seems to run the best there. As for the body, the roof is shot and so is the floor. I cut all the rust out of the floor and welded in patch panels, and the floor is now done and covered in dynamat. Went to Home Depot to get some cheap carpet for now, and once it's molded in properly, it may become permanent. The blue and yellow dash is now black and looks much better. The roof is covered in Bondo because although my welding is good enough for the floor, I do not trust myself to weld anything that's going to be seen. I'm still trying to decide on a color, but I also need to get new tires so I can drive this more than 20 mph around the block. For the color, I'm thinking like a really dark purple and put the Boss stripe on it and black racing stripes on the hood. Right now, I'm on my desktop which does not have much of any pictures on it, but there will be more to come.