Hey, welcome to my garage. I'm Dave, I'm 34, I live in Flint and I work second shift, which is how I ended up with a lot of daylight hours and a car with no floor in it.

The car is a 1967 Mustang hardtop coupe, 289 cubic inch V8 with a two-barrel carb, C4 three-speed automatic, originally Wimbledon White with a red interior according to the door tag, though when I got it the color was mostly primer and rust. It is not a fastback, it is not a GT, it does not have a big-block, and nobody is going to put it in a museum. It's a plain coupe, the kind they built a few hundred thousand of, and that's fine with me. I wanted one since I was nine.

I bought it in April 1997 for $1,800 from a guy out past Davison who'd had it sitting in a pole barn since 1988. It ran, sort of, if you poured gas down the carb. The floor pans were gone, the trunk drop-offs were gone, both rear quarters were bubbled, and there was a mouse nest in the heater box the size of a softball. My wife said "that's a lot of money for a mouse house." She was right about that at the time.

The plan was always frame-off, or as close as you get with a unibody: strip it to a bare shell, fix all the metal, rebuild everything mechanical, paint it, and put it back together right. Not a trailer-queen show car. A solid, honest, correct driver that I can take to the cruise on Saturday night and drive to work on Monday.

1997: Teardown

• April '97. Car comes home on a borrowed trailer. Pushed it into the garage, opened a beer, looked at it for an hour. Ordered the shop manual and a parts catalog that same night.
• May-June '97. Interior out. Seats, carpet (what was left of it), door panels, dash pad, headliner. Found $1.35 in change and a 1979 pull-tab. Every screw and bolt into a labeled zipper bag. More on that under Lessons.
• July '97. Engine and trans out with a rented cherry picker. Took two of us and most of a Saturday. Engine on a stand, trans on the floor under a tarp.
• Aug-Oct '97. Front and rear suspension off, brakes off, all the glass out, wiring harness out and tagged. Now it's a shell on jack stands. Sandblasted the underside with a rented blaster at my buddy's place. Do not do this in your own garage. Do not do this without a hood and a good respirator. Sand comes out of your ears for a week.
• Nov-Dec '97. Too cold. Stripped and cleaned small parts in the basement, sorted the bolt bags, read the manual again.

1998: Floor pans and the engine

• March-May '98. Cut out the old floor pans and the trunk drop-offs. Welded in full replacement floor pans, both sides, plus new torque box repair panels. Borrowed a 110-volt MIG welder and learned to use it on scrap first. My welds got a lot better between the left side and the right side. The left side is under the carpet. Nobody will know.
• June '98. Rear frame rail patch, driver's side. Seam-sealed and primed everything I could reach underneath.
• July-Sept '98. Engine rebuild. Took the block and heads to a machine shop for hot-tank, magnaflux, a .030 overbore and a valve job. Put it back together myself on the stand over about eight weekends: new pistons and rings, bearings, timing chain, oil pump, cam (a mild street grind, nothing crazy), gaskets, freeze plugs. Painted it Ford Blue. It looks like a new engine because it basically is one.
• Oct '98. C4 to a transmission shop for a rebuild and a shift kit. I could have done it myself and I chose not to, and I'd make that choice again.
• Nov '98. Fired the engine on the stand with a jury-rigged fuel can and a battery. It ran. My neighbor came over to see what the noise was and stayed for two hours.

1999: Body work and primer

• Jan-Feb '99. Cut off both rear quarter panels (the lower parts) and welded in patch panels. Same for the lower door skins. Replaced the passenger front fender outright with a good used one from a swap meet.
• March-May '99. Grinding, filler, block sanding, more filler, more block sanding. This is where the time goes. Anybody who tells you body work is fun has never done it. My arms are bigger than they've ever been.
• June '99. Epoxy primer over the whole shell, inside and out. First time in two years it was all one color. Big day.
• July-Aug '99. High-build primer, guide coat, block sanding. Repeat. Repeat. Found a low spot on the roof I'd missed. Repeat.
• Sept '99. Final block sanding in 400 grit is about 80% done. Doors, hood, trunk lid and fenders are all primed and hanging from the rafters. Rebuilt the front suspension while I wait on the weather: new upper and lower control arms, springs, shocks, ball joints, tie rod ends, and a new front disc brake conversion because I'd like to stop.

The goal: PAINT BY SPRING 2000. Wimbledon White, same as the door tag. A body shop out on the north side is going to shoot it; I know my limits and a paint gun is one of them. If the paint goes on in April, I figure reassembly through the summer, and I'd like to drive it to a cruise night before the snow flies next fall. That's the plan. I've had plans before.

People always ask. My wife especially asks. So here it is, through September 1999, rounded off and not counting beer, pizza, or the tools I "needed." It's more than I told her at first and less than she thinks.

Still to come: paint (that's the big one, probably $2,500 to $3,000 at the shop), interior kit (seat covers, carpet, headliner, door panels, dash pad, maybe $900), chrome and trim, tires and wheels, a new wiring harness, and a hundred things I haven't thought of yet. So call it a $12,000 car when it's done, for a $1,800 car. And you know what? You can't buy a finished one for that, and you sure can't buy one you did yourself.

The nice thing about a '67 Mustang is that they made a ton of them and people still love them, so just about every piece is reproduced and the catalogs are as thick as a phone book. The bad thing is that means a lot of your money goes to the catalogs. How I've done it:

• Swap meets. The big ones in the spring and fall are worth the drive. This is where I got the fender, a good used dash bezel, a set of original hubcaps, a 1967-only grille, and a pile of small trim for a lot less than new. Bring cash, bring a flashlight, get there when the gates open, and know what the good stuff looks like before you go so you don't buy a '68 part for a '67. (They're not all the same. The side marker lights are the giveaway.)
• Mail-order catalogs. For anything rubber, anything that has to fit exactly (floor pans, patch panels), and anything mechanical, I order from the big Mustang parts houses. Call and talk to a person; they'll tell you which floor pan fits and which one you'll be fighting all weekend. Order the whole weatherstrip kit at once, it's cheaper than piecemeal.
• The local parts store. Bearings, seals, brake hardware, plugs, filters, belts. A 289 is a 289; they have most of it on the shelf or by the next morning.
• The classifieds and the club newsletter. There's a Mustang club in the area and half of them have a garage full of parts they'll never use. Ask.
• The junkyard. Not much left in the yards for a car this old, but I've found a couple of things, and it's a nice way to spend a Sunday.

1. LABEL EVERY BOLT BAG. I'm putting this first because it's the one that matters. Every bolt, screw, clip, washer and bracket goes into a zipper bag with a piece of masking tape on it that says what it came off of and where. "Left door hinge, upper, 4 bolts." Not "door stuff." Two years later, "door stuff" means nothing, and the Mustang uses about nine different bolts that all look the same until you try to put the wrong one in. I have a coffee can of unlabeled hardware from the first month before I figured this out. I call it the Can of Shame.
2. Take pictures before you take it apart. I didn't have a camera then. I have drawings on the back of pizza boxes. Pictures would have been better.
3. Buy the shop manual first. Before the car, if you can.
4. Do the metal work before you buy a single shiny part. Chrome is fun to buy. Floor pans are not. You will want to buy the chrome. Don't. The floor comes first, and if you never finish the floor, you've got a box of chrome and a rusty car.
5. Practice welding on scrap. Then practice more. Then weld the car.
6. Anything with "rebuild" in it takes twice as long as you think. Anything with "body work" in it takes four times as long.
7. Know what to farm out. I did the engine assembly and I'm proud of it. I sent the transmission out and I'll send the paint out. No shame in it.
8. Keep a log. Dates, what you did, what you spent. That's most of this page. It keeps you honest and it keeps you going when the car looks worse than the day you bought it, which it will, for about a year.
9. Tell your wife the real number. Eventually.

Coming as soon as I borrow my brother-in-law's digital camera. He got one this summer and he's a little protective of it, which I understand, seeing what my garage did to his good jacket. I've got two rolls of regular film from the teardown and the engine build that I keep meaning to get developed and scanned, so that's the other option. Either way, the "before" pictures will hurt, and the "after" pictures aren't possible until spring.

This section, like the car, is under construction.

Other garages on GeoCities.us: The Corvette Diaries (they're further along than me and I'm not bitter), Gearhead Garage for when you'd rather pay somebody, Saturday Night at Thunder Valley for dirt track racing, and The Minivan Chronicles, which is what my wife drives while the Mustang takes up her half of the garage.