Hello

There is a very large class of people that own 65/66 Mustangs that, as far as I can tell, anyway, have been, for the most part, ignored entirely. They don't really want that 100 pt. show car that is so nice and was soooo expensive that they're afraid to drive it, they also don't want to make their car capable of achieving warp factor three. They just want this car that they dearly love to be able to cruise around smoothly and reliably, without having it dump them out on the side of the road or have it start making weird noises or belching out big clouds of funky-smelling smoke. And I think, truth be told, that this is by far the largest class of Mustang owners. They take their car to some technician when what they actually need is a mechanic, and this, frequently, does not work out very well at all for the owner. They don't want to re-engineer the entire car, they just want someone to fix what broke. These are the people that I am trying help out with this blog. Some problems require a little bit of back and forth, as in, "Try this." "I tried that and it didn't change anything."
" Oh. well, you probably need to try that." " I tried that and it helped, but it still isn't quite right." "Now you need to try this...." If you go to http://www.allfordmustangs.com/ and then go to the classics forums, you will be able to do that with a pretty hefty gathering of some very knowledgeable people that also happen to be very friendly. None of that ridiculous one-upmanship, no flaming or abuse, none of that stuff. Just good, solid advice from people that know what they are talking about.

Thursday, December 19, 2013

Square sockets for drain plugs

I have noticed that people frequently ask if there is a tool that works to remove drain or plugs on the 65/66 Mustangs, like in the gas tank, rear axle housing, or manual transmissions. And, I just realized that I have never gotten around to mentioning that I have finally found them. I used to use a short 3/8 drive extension on the gas tanks. You put the extension on backwards, as if the tank was the wrench, and turn it with a 12 pt. 11mm socket, but, obviously, this only works on 3/8 plugs. SK makes square sockets, both male and female, which are called pipe plug sockets, and they work great. These are also made by Sears and a few others. The problem that I always ran into looking for these things was sales personnel that would look at me like I was the one that was obviously quite confused since they had never heard of the thing that I was describing, and I didn't know what they were called. Once I found myself a sufficiently old person that remembered back when those were fairly common and knew what they were called, I started checking around and found myself a set very quickly. These things are truly, as the aforementioned old guy said, "Handier than a two-pocket shirt." It would be an awfully good idea for a person to pick up a couple of these in the appropriate sizes for the plugs on their car. I picked up the complete sets, both male and female, for 'just in case', but, that is probably (certainly) overkill, since I don't work on these cars for a living any more.

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