The Care and Feeding of Ponies: Grill for R model nose

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.

Saturday, October 11, 2014

Grill for R model nose

A friend of mine that restores old Shelbys and Mustangs for a living sent me some pictures of something that he has been doing for a grill on the fiberglass R model noses. I thought that it looked very nice, and seems so obvious that I have trouble thinking that nobody ever came up with that before, but, I've never seen it before.

All that he did was put a normal 65 grill on the car in the usual manner, and then take another 65 grill and cut the ends off to fit inside the lower area. The lower piece is upside down, and he also bent the lower lip of the cut piece around the other way so that the screw holes line up. Here are some pictures of it out on the floor so that you can see it better. I thought that this looked kind of cool, and since a lot of people have this nose their car, this is an inexpensive way to finish that which kind of looks like something a manufacturer might have done.