First Car - 71 Mach 1 rebuild

[4thesporty]

This was my 71 m code four speed car when I bought it. It was a basket case unlike yours. But I was able to make it mine so all is good. good luck with your rebuild.

You did a great job on your car. How long did it take you?

 

[Tnfastbk]

You did a great job on your car. How long did it take you?

Thank you. Probably 5-6 years. But when it was done it was paid for as well. Usually if I had money I had no time and if a had time I had no money. So basically I paid for it with overtime money from work shutdowns.
I'm not sure they are ever finished if you drive them a lot. Mine has been on the road now for maybe 13 or 14 years.

 

[4thesporty]

That's a good timeline, it's hard not to get impatient when every car show or youtube video you see has guys dropping loads of money all at one time on a project, their full time job is to work on said project, then they are able to condense down a few weeks of full time work into a 30 minute episode with a beautiful car at the end of it.....obviously not realistic for the vast majority of us grinding away.

 

[4thesporty]

Since I’m past the troubleshooting and “just get it running” phase today I decided to ditch all the rubber fuel line/hose clamps/plastic filter that was running across the top of my engine and it’s inherent fire risk.

I installed all metal line, added a place for a pressure gauge, metal filter, as well as a check valve before using metal braided line down to the fuel pump. All -6AN fittings.

 

[4thesporty]

Also cleaned up my JY charger steelies, primed, and fogged them black. I ordered some tires I’ll have installed this week and will run these mismatched wheels until I decide on a permanent set.

Rears are American muscle 18x10 and will have 275/35/18

Fronts are 18x7.5 steelies and will wear 225/40/18

I’ll hold on to those drag slicks currently on the rear wheels for another day.

 

[351mach1]

I'm about to do the 8.8 swap on mine this weekend. Did you fab up the leaf spring/shock bracket from scratch or did you modify the original one for the wider U-bolts? Pics and advice appreciated!

Keep up the great work!

 

[4thesporty]

I’ll snap some pictures before the weekend but I just drilled out my stock mounts for the larger u bolts.

The u bolts are a larger diameter so I enlarged one hole, then elongated the other to fit the u bolt tight.

I wanted to retain the shock mounts as I have staggered shocks.

 

[4thesporty]

Took advantage of the wife being out of town this weekend to bring the car inside the garage and get it up in the air.

I went to work cutting the frame ends off in order to install my tinman fabrication subframe connectors. I fought the passenger side with a death wheel for a while before I tried using my sawzall on it and that was the ticket to getting the majority of it done; then you just need your death wheel/grinder to do some finishing cuts that are too close to the floor pans for the sawzall.

I've got the connectors sitting in place now and will get to work on cleaning up the area, drilling some holes for plug welds, and welding and bolting them in tomorrow.

The extra piece you see on the rear is a bracket for his optional traction bars that I may or may not get in the future.

 

[4thesporty]

Wow, the pictures of the flaking undercoating look way worse than it does in person. I will be stripping most of that off in the near future and respraying something.

Also, the rusty exhaust is coming off real soon too. My headers are getting ceramic coated and I have a new Pypes exhaust system waiting to go on next.