For the last few years I have been trying to sell my 74 Mustang Mach I, Johnny. My first car, which I hunted down and bought back 12 years after I sold it (Bought it in 87, sold it in 93, bought it back in 2005). My original goal was to fix it up and enjoy it, but I do not enjoy working on cars like I did 15 years ago (Dave argues I NEVER enjoyed it that much). So once I got it running, and it is an actual, drivable car, so hopefully safe from ending up abandoned in a junkyard, I have been trying to sell it. Every summer I try, people look at it, nobody wants to pull the trigger, and I’d fix up a few more things to make it better.

This year I again listed it for sale, and again got some interest but nobody wanted to deal with the engine problem, low compression on one cylinder. It needed a top-end rebuild. I could do it, I’d done it before, but I really didn’t want to. But since nobody else wanted to tackle it, I decided to make the commitment. I put my boat up for sale to make room in the garage, and someone snapped it up within a day (I guess I should have asked for more $$$). Now there was room in the garage, and I could tear the Mustang apart.

I was ready to pull the heads when someone on the Mustang II forum said they were looking for a nice fastback with a 302, and I thought about it for a bit, and wrote to them and told them I had a nice one, and they could have it and ship it home to CA for under budget. They were not afraid to do the work on it. A deal was struck.

He sent an inspector, and we used an online Escrow service, which was new for me. When it passed inspection he sent a transporter to pick it up. I had to say goodbye to the Mustang my Grandpa picked out for me. The interior I had put together, even the wheels I had hand painted.

So much nostalgia to that car, but now it is off on it’s next adventure to it’s excited next owner, and that’s ok too. We are only caretakers for the cars that go through our hands, we have to hope the next owner takes care of them too, or at least has a lot of fun with them.

I packed that car full of all the spare parts and bits I had kicking around, and when I got done I kept a spare pony emblem, and the housing for the original mirror which had been replaced. I put those together and made a memento to keep on my shelf. A little something to remember my unique yellow gold Mustang by.

I have this Mustang. It primarily functions as a kayak rack in my garage, but that’s not really fair, because it actually runs and everything. It’s just that when I bought it in 2005 I stripped everything out to look for any rust issues. It didn’t have any! But all the parts went into storage, and ever since then it has looked like this inside.

Beautiful!

In 2016 my friend Jim did the lion’s share of the work to put in the new drivetrain and get it running again. I cleaned out the gas tank, put in new sending unit, painted the engine bay, and rebuilt the brakes, and handed it over to him to finish. So when I got it back it ran, but it looked like this. Still pretty exciting progress after ..ahem.. ELEVEN YEARS. Damn this has been a long project!

Last summer, I started putting in the new carpet. I started by laying down insulation.

And I got to work on the carpet, but it was super hot, and really hard work, and nothing seemed to be cooperating, and one day I just walked away from it. Done.

Last week I saw a Facebook memory pop up that said I had been working on my carpet install a year ago that day! Dang! A year already?! Ok, I’ll get on it. So we pulled the kayak off of it and rolled it out into the driveway.

My tools were literally still laying where I left them when I got frustrated with it last summer.

Fine, lets put on some tunes and get to work. Car music for car chores.

I found the holes in the floor for the seat and marked those off, and figured out how much extra carpet there was. I trimmed the excess and put down the door sill trim pieces. Then I realized my real challenge was going to be remember how all this went together. Now it’s been 13 years since I took it apart!

No problem, Past Me has it covered.

Every screw and bolt, meticulously documented and individually bagged. And I’ve managed not to lose any of it.

But there’s so many parts, now my garage is full of interior parts I pulled down out of the rafters! My kayak is buried in them!

Like, what the hell is this?

Damn, Past Me is rockin’ this organization thing!

Passenger B Pillar. It even tells me which end goes up.

So I took my big interior panels, which I bought last year to replace my originals which were literally crumbling to dust, and cleaned them up…

And sprayed a fresh coat of paint on them. One of them was originally blue.

While that was drying I worked on the seatbelts. I think these are kind of generic seatbelts. They fit into the old location like they were meant to go there. It’s unusual something works out so nicely.

I wrestled the passenger seat into position and managed to get all four of the bolts through the holes in the carpet and the holes in the floorboard, and then laid down and reached under the car with one arm to tighten them completely by feel with the ratchet. This is the point in the project where I find myself laying on the ground, hot, exhausted, questioning every decision that has brought me to this point.

But finally it is in and fastened down, the carpet is trimmed, the kickpanels are in, and that is enough for one day.

Day 2 – I put the rear quarter panel inserts from my original panels into the newly painted panels, because they were in better shape. These are deluxe interior panels, with burlwood inserts. They look snazzy and match the dash and door panels. It takes a bit of work to get them fitted and route the seatbelts, and finish installing those.

Strangely enough, everything is fitting together nicely. I mean, I know it all belongs, but I’m still surprised.

I manage to install the upper trim pieces, since they are easily marked for me. Thanks, Past Me. You rock.

I run out of daylight, but got a lot done.

Day 3

With a little help from this:

And a lot of trial and error

I start getting the backseat installed. It is four pieces. The seat bottom, the seat back, a hinged metal panel the seat back fastens to, and a third piece that that panel locks into in the up position, and covers a gap when it is folded down. Plus these pieces have carpet attached to them, but the new carpet pieces do not have the reinforced attachment points the originals had. I make do by attaching them with contact cement. Then, after a bit of head scratching…

That’s how I got my stuff to college back in the day. Everything I needed fit in the massive back end of the mustang!

Two more pieces for the way back, just needed a little touching up to hide the scratches.

And (except for the missing parking brake) it actually looks like a legitimate car again.

Before the weekend is out I need to put more transmission fluid in it and test drive it, then Monday it is going to a shop to get it’s leak fixed. I’ll see if they can put the parking brake back in as well. And that’s most of the major stuff. Next I guess would be suspension rebuilds. And if we all survive that, and I win the lottery, maybe someday I’ll get it painted.

I feel pretty accomplished for three days of work in the evenings between after work and sundown. Thank goodness for long, hot summer nights. They feel like they were made for car projects! Maybe someday soon instead of working on this car, I can cruise down the road in my yellow/gold ponycar, wind blowing through my hair, Eric Carmen singing ‘Make Me Lose Control”. It will be 1988 all over again.

I don’t normally post on this blog about the Mustang so much, because it has it’s own blog, and this is where I post home and family stuff. But this is big news, and Johnny IS family – and Johnny is running again. I sent him over to my friend Jim’s house in October, right before getting laid off from my job 😦 Jim did an amazing job of putting Humpty Dumpty back together again for as little $$$ as he could manage. Maybe this should be called the Bionic Mustang, because he is better, stronger, faster than ever before!

Jim squeezed a 302 under the hood. This is considered nearly impossible in some circles, because 74 Mustangs have a smaller engine bay that was never intended to hold a V8, in fact when I discussed it online someone had the gall to tell me I was lying because it was impossible! Nope, not impossible.

Either way, Johnny is my Miracle Mustang, because Johnny was my first car in 1987, and I sold it in 1993 shortly after we got married. Then I kicked myself for doing so for years while I bought and restored other Mustangs, until I couldn’t stand it anymore, and knowing that the odds were that someone had junked it and cut it up by then, I went looking for it in 2005. Thanks to help from other Mustang lovers online, I found it. I handed over the cash and brought my old friend home, not running. Then I proceeded to have rough times that stopped me from really spending the money on it that I wanted to for years, until I met Jim (completely coincidentally – he came to look at a part I had for sale – not even a Mustang II part, but he saw my pony in the garage and said ‘hey, I have one of those, and a bunch of extra parts too’). He had the parts, and the know-how to make it happen. And he is just an all-around awesome guy!

So I pulled the old drivetrain out, rebuilt the brakes, resealed the gas tank and cleaned out the fuel lines, and sent it over to his house. He did all the magic.

It’s got a ways to go before other people will be too impressed by it, but to me..sigh, I’m more than a little in love with this silly yellow Mustang that my Grandpa found for me 29 years ago! Back then I paid $1000 which I had saved up from my afterschool job at the pet store. Today, I’ve got more than that in the engine.

Here’s my reward:

https://player.vimeo.com/video/173540723
Mustang II – New 302 Engine from Stephanie Roberts on Vimeo.

Seeing it roll out of the garage under it’s own power for the first time since..well, it wasn’t running when I brought it home in 2005, so..first time in a LONG time. And it sure as heck didn’t SOUND like that back in the day!

A couple days later he declared it finished enough to go home. Still lots of work to do:

but it’s running and driving.

We rearranged the garage to make room. Now I have TWO completely impractical cars! Lucky me!

I started playing around with polishing off the oxidation to make it look a little nicer. I plan to take it to some cruise-ins this summer, even if it is ugly.

And I can even drive it on errands, like here where I drove it to the gym. It’s a real car now, it runs and drives!

So, that’s my amazing project Mustang. Mustang #7 for me, and yet also Mustang #1. It’s something so many car enthusiasts wish they could have – their first car, the one they drove their friends around in at school, the one they took their first dates in, and I’m so incredibly lucky to have sold mine, and then found it again. Not one ‘like’ it, but my actual, honest to goodness, first car. Grandpa never would have guessed I’d still have my yellow pony all these years later!

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