My Dad and I decided to take a little bit of a different route with this restoration. One of the days during my Christmas break we sat down and made a complete inventory of every item and piece in the car. It wasn't any surprise the amount of parts we were missing or had been broken. This was a good chance to take the approach of getting everything for the car ordered at once. We basically restored all of the little parts left that were salvageable, then ordered the rest that were missing. This way when the actual shell of the car is complete, we won't have to waste our time restoring annoying little parts to get the car done.
So we started with the seats!
So we started with the seats! I sandblasted both bottom frames of the seats because they were fairly rusty and falling apart but the seat backs were actually in pretty good shape so I decided to keep them the way they were.
After a couple of fresh coats of black. Seat frame bottoms are ready for rebuild!
Seat backs in good shape, barely any rust!
The seat tracks needed to be completely refurbished. All parts sandblasted then painted, reassembled and greased.
Here's me having a little bit of fun with the new vinyl. Tough stuff to stretch! Nothing a little heat from a blow dryer can't help though.
Fully restored seat bottoms. Fresh.
The seat backs were a little bit more of a challenge to get the vinyl stretched over top of..but with a little bit of heat and sweat they eventually popped over and made a tight fit. Dad might have been a little frustrated here :P
The final product. They both turned out well and should look awesome once they are in the car. In this picture they are just missing the trim plastic pieces for the sides.
A little bit of fresh paint.
Gauge Cluster repainted as well. We opted not to repaint the white stripes closer to the glass screens. I kind of like this look better.
We had to take this one outside and sandblast the surface rust off of it. It turned out pretty well after a bucket of sand and a couple coats of paint. As good as new!
Completely restored the clutch pedal assembly. Although I wanted to just sandblast the assembly all together and just repaint it, in the end it was worth it taking the whole thing apart and restoring each piece because it turned out awesome!
This one was a fun one. The wiper motor could have easily just been blasted and painted as well, but I decided to take the extra time and take it apart to have those off set colours. In the end it once again turned out awesome and looks great...Even though you won't see it in the car :P
My Dad decided to take on the challenging project of restoring all of the wiring harnesses himself. What he did was setup up a few work benches, pulled out the good old 1970 mustang wiring manual and repaired/checked all parts of each harness. There was a surprising amount of imperfections where previous owners had tapped into the original harnesses for aftermarket items. Once all restored, re-wrapped in some new wire wrap.
A before and after of the emergency brake pedal.
Just the start of the parts room being filled with restored and brand new parts. Since all of the little stuff is done being restored, the focus can now be on the body of the car. Big projects ahead include both quarter panels, roof panel, tail panel, cowl panel.
