Great Progress

Brian came down Friday around noon and we had almost two full days of working on the Mustang.  We first concentrated on the back and installed the quarter panel extensions and the valance (piece under the bumper location).

A lot of effort was spent in the two days in getting body parts to fit as good as possible.  Gaps like the one you see here between the quarter panel and quarter panel extension were adjusted to be even and minimal......sometimes requiring shims.  We had been warned that reproduction parts often did not fit well due to the stamping or casting dies getting worn out over the years. 

Then the bumper, the trunk latch and lock, the taillight bezels and one of the taillight lenses (the other lens was cracked and broke when I was cleaning it).

The order in which things were put together is sequential in this blog, but was not always that way when we were working.  Sometimes I would be working on one end of the car while Brian was working on the other.  Also, we made a trip to a local parts supplier looking for some missing parts, and this turned out to be a goldmine of things we needed.  So we could continue on working in places that we had been stopped. 

Moving to the front, we installed the headlight buckets, front valance, stone deflector, and grill

You can see that the bumper guards are installed in this picture, but they had to be removed because it turned out the bumper had to go on before the guards.  This happened fairly often, as we had no instructions for assembly sequence and sometimes guessed wrong.  Same kind of thing happened with the rear bumper.  At first we installed the bumper brackets to the frame, and then found out we needed to first install the brackets to the bumper, and then the brackets to the frame.....just part of the fun. 

Then the bumper itself:

Then the interior grill parts including the Mustang in it's "corral", and the new rallypac fog lights:

The final steps for this weekend were installation of the remainder of the grill and one of the headlight bulb buckets and the headlight itself. 

Brian found the horns in the bin of parts that had not been cleaned and painted, so he got to use the bead blaster to clean them up. For some reason he really likes that bead blaster.

The car is starting to look real good: