The Luxstang history

[luxstang]

I finally got almost everything together to live up the history of my car.

Keep in mind that in Europe that is a much harder thing to do than in the U.S. because we have what they call Data Privacy Act, so no information regarding ownership of cars is available to the public.

That way it is very hard to track down previous owners. In my case it was even harder due to two vents in the car's life:

1. it got a new license plate somewhere along the way and

2. It got repainted a different color and changed owners multiple times.

I bought the car in 2001 and the old man who sold it to me showed me a few pics from when they "...took the children to the French Riviera in the car".

I noticed that the car had a different license tag in the pics and I asked about why that was so.

Here I need to explain something first. In our country cars are given tags and they usually stay on the car all its life unless the owner decides to keep the tags for his next car, like vanity plates.

Once a car was given a plate, it is impossible to change it without selling the car.

So it was weird that this car should have two different tags under the same owner.

he told me that in fact the Lux "DMV" sorted out all the plates starting with a "J" for use on trailers only, so when the guy took his car for inspection they told him he would get a new title and new plates.

Fast forward to a few years later.

I was booked for a wedding and while I was waiting for the couple in front of the town hall a guy walked up to me and told me was the bride's uncle and that he used to have the same car.

He started to point out the differences.

When he had his car:

It was brown metallic

It had a white top

It had a console

It was painted red after he sold it

It had Magnums 500s

It had the bumper guards

It had the rocker panel moldings

And it used to have the tag "J7089"

Although my car looked like it does today all the things he listed fit mine to the last detail. The console was not in the car that day because I had just painted it and did not have the time to put it back in before the wedding.

I could not remember the exact license tag on the seller's pics but I remembered the letter "J".

Now you need to remember that is a very, very small country and that there probably not more than 20 of these cars here in the 70s so the odds we were talking about my car were very high!!

Then the couple came out and in the following mess I lost track of the guy.

Again fast forward a few years:

After a car show the wife and me went to dinner with some friends from the Mustang Club whom we had known for years and we got talking about cars (duh!) and I mentioned that my car used to be brown originally and had had a white top.

The guy looks at me and says: Then I've known your car in the seventies. It belonged to E.H. and we often took it for a spin when we were young, having fun with the top down and chasing girls.

he gave me the guy's phone number and when I called him it turned out he was the guy from the wedding.

He told me everything he knew about the car's history and gave me the exact license plate number it had when he owned it. I was later able to have a nonofficial confirmation that the car with the "J7089" tag was actually mine. (Nonofficial because information on prior owners falls under the Data Security act. I knew someone who knew someone who knew whom to ask.... you get the picture)

So, here's the history:

The car was ordered new here in Luxembourg and was first registered i February 1972, one day shy of Valentine's Day.

It was a gift from a night club owner to his girlfriend.

(Yes, it's a genuine Pimpmobile!)

She thought the car was too big for her so he drove it himself for 5 years until he traded it in for a new car.

Enter E.H., the wedding guy. He had just gotten his license and bought the car as his first car.

He kept it for about 2 years until he sold it to a young guy who was just getting to be a big player in the Luxembourgian night club scene (and who later became THE king of the red light district, owning almost every nightclub and cabarets in town).

Yes, the second pimp!! If you're going to live with clichées you might as well make it big.

That guy never registered the car in his name and one day he gets caught on the Lux border and his car gets impounded.

My buddy E.H. gets a letter that "his car" was found without proper registration and he actually had to pay a fine at the time but he could produce the sales bill, so the fine was only for not sending the title back in.

When he got to the station where the car had been impounded he saw that it had gotten a horrible red paint job. That was in the very early 80s.

After that the car kinda vanished from sight. All the people who knew the car before did not know it was red and nobody knew where it was.

E.H. thought it was probably totaled.

What I dont' know is if there is another owner in between the third owner (pimp #2) and the guy I bought it from.

If there was one, he would have had it for no more than one or two years.

Then I bought the car in 2001, joined the mustang club and no one knew which car it was. During the last two days, I have talked to two people who actually remember the car from back then, as well as its owner. I have known these people for 14 years now and no one knew that they knew my car back then and that it was that very car.

It's never been registered outside this country but it's somehow vanished from memory from the early 80s until 2001 when I bought it.

When I got it, it had 1973 taillight bezels with no blackouts, so it was probably hit in the back somewhere down the line.

Here are some pictures from the second owner's private stash, showing the car in 1971, sporting its original 5H paint, white top and some very funny small lights under the bumper in front of the turn signals.

I just got these pics myself and it's actually the first time that I have seen my car in its original color!!

note the broken grill near the right head light. That grille must have been swapped later because when I got it it had a standard grille but it was neither broken nor fixed in that spot.

Also in 1979 it had already lost its chrome wheel lip moldings.

Ok, here are some pics for you to enjoy, straight from 1979:



Here we did a little "Befrore-After" shot. the guy still lives in the same place, so I put my car in driveway and took the same pic about 40 years later.



Unfortunately the sun caught in my cell phone lens and I noticed it when it was too late.

 

[Thin Lizzy]

Wow, amazing history, thanks for sharing. Great to see those old pictures too, she wouldn't get it!

Have you found any traces of the original metallic brown on the car (like under the dashboard)?

 

[luxstang]

Yes. There is still some brown on the inside of the quarters behind the plastic panels where the top goes in.

When they did that botched up red paint job, they simply over sprayed the jacking instructions on the inside of the trunk lid and under it was a perfect patch of the original color. Unfortunately I have no pictures of that ecstasy at the time I didn't think it was worth documenting.

Of course that got lost during the restoration and the yellow paint job.

 

[Don65Stang]

Very cool Mike! Thanks for sharing.

 

[Boss1Ray]

Very cool. Excellent job researching.

-And those pics are priceless!

Thanks for sharing Mike!

Ray

 

[JimNiki]

Mike, that's why you're the man!

Bloody good detective work!

 

[Flatback72]

A great good news story to read before I trot off to work in this morning! I've managed to clean up the last pic a bit doing some two-minute alterations to the contrast.

 

[jpaz]

Luxstang, that is simply an amazing story & car!

 

[71mach1lady]

very cool, so at least three pimps?

 

[LCB1]

Great story Mike, now you got me curious about the history of my car.

Larry

 

[T-Tom]

Love the story! ::beer::

 

[OLE PONY]

Great researching. I've always been interested in hearing the history about old cars.

 

[luxstang]

A great good news story to read before I trot off to work in this morning! I've managed to clean up the last pic a bit doing some two-minute alterations to the contrast.

Thanks Brett.

I'll just snap another one when I return the pictures after scanning them.

I'll also let the guy drive his ex car for helping me with the research.

 

[Mac]

Mike,

Great story, fantastic job of tracking your cars history!

Mac

 

[luxstang]

You guys give me more credit than I deserve. I got lucky and all the pieces somehow came to me once my friend identified the car from memory and gave me the second owner's telephone number.

 

[luxstang]

Ok, a little update.

I thought why end the story there?

Here are some pics taken the first week I had the car. I was actually pretty lucky because the car was a roller and worked fine and even passed inspection with no objection and no need for touching up, so I could immediately drive it.

I will pinpoint a few things though that give you an idea of how bad it really was.

Look at these tail light bezels. No black paint, so they are from a 1973. On the 1979 pics it still had the correct blacked out ones from 1972. What had happened here? Probably been rear ended at one time because I found last year that the valance is metal flake blue under the paint. This car was never blue though.



Also note the obvious use of bondo.. lots of it. You will find that there are no crisp body lines anywhere on that car if you look at these pics.

Check out this view from the side. What is missing?..... Anyone... Bueller?,..... Bueller?...... The gap between the front fender and the lower valance is missing. All one big patch of bondo!



Also note the Magnums that had been treated to a major rub down with abrasive paper before the PO sprayed them with DIY store rattle can wheel paint.

This next pic was taken a few weeks later after I bought some cheap Cragars with RWL tires to get rid of the 205/70/15 white wall tires.

Look at how crooked the driver side fender extension is. It´s tilted down at the top and inward at the bottom. That is because the car had taken a major hit in the front and the front frame rail was bent inward, which we found out much later.

That fact would cause major problems a few years later when I tried to install my front spoiler which was simply too long, or better: The car was not wide enough!

The holes in the bumper for the typical Euro style additional high beams that were a fad in the eighties are also a nice touch.

Here again you can see the nice big patch of bondo in between the fender and the valance which makes for a pretty wobbly line.



Here´s another gem. Can you say dull paint and chrome?

Also note the gaps.... Horrible!

BTW, here I had already plugged the holes in the bumper and removed the bumper guards which left a nice "tan line" where the guards were.

On a positive note: Does anyone else think that this pic looks very much like a 1970 Shelby from this perspective?



Then a year later we pulled the engine for the first time.

Pro: check out the original carb on the original intake manifold. It also had the original exhaust manifolds hooked up to a single pipe exhaust. BTW it also had the charcoal canister and all the emission control stuff still hooked up.

Con: Look at all that crappy red overspray!!! It was everywhere.



Nice and grimy!



From now on it slowly got better. As the engine was out, I took some time, a wire brush and some paint and got busy. At the end of the day it looked way better. By the way, those paint runs behind the shock tower were there from the factory. I decided to leave them there and simply clean them up and paint them over:



I´ll stop it here before it becomes a complete rebuild thread but I thought it belonged to the history of the car before it became the car that we all know today.

 

[whitesoc]

Very cool Mike....all I know about my car is that it had a DSO for Colorado and when I bought it , was in Virginia.