Of the things I've learned while working on both '89 notchbacks that I've owned:
1. 20-year-old plastic does not like to be held down by a bolt that's anything more than finger-tight ... and sometimes not even that much;
2. The black, gooey adhesive from old electrical tape is harder to get off your fingers than the brake dust that works down into the grooves of your fingerprints;
3. Any modification or repair performed upon a Fox is not considered worthwhile unless the process involves at least one occurrance of injury that results in bloodshed or some other wound that will take at least a week to heal;
4. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, and Ford design engineers were the crew that laid the asphalt;
5. Somewhere, a fat, greasy Ford executive is rolling around naked in a pile of dollar bills and laughing insanely for making decisions that led to things like the PCV valve being on the back of a 302 intake manifold, and the wimpy-arsed ashtray door spring that saved them a buck or two per Fox Mustang in production costs;
6. There is a psychological profile survey given to applicants for positions as Ford engineers that includes the question, "Do you strongly agree or disagree with the following statement: I find it very amusing to anonymously play pranks upon large groups of people" (to which the appropriate response is "strongly agree");
7. An exhaust project or tranny fluid change is not complete until you are literally up to your armpits in grease and grime;
8. Rear gear fluid bears a striking resemblance in smell to horse poo ... which makes sense, since they both can come from the rear end of a Mustang;
9. I single-handedly kept UPR, Summit Racing, and Jeg's in business through 2006 with my expendatures (and now I'm making someone at Visa very, very rich, too);
10. Josef Mengele (Google the name) long ago suggested the concept of placing the single most important accessory of an engine (the water pump) in the most obnoxiously cumbersome and hard-to-reach place of all by stacking EVERY SINGLE OTHER ACCESSORY OF THE MOTOR ON TOP OF IT as a means of mind control - subjects would be rendered completely insane and reduced to a miserable, blubbering mess while trying to remove bolts that break off in the block or timing cover and so forth, and those inviduals could then be mentally reprogrammed for use as Nazi stormtroopers ... although this program was never fully implemented until long after WWII when a sadistic Ford engineer stumbled upon this design suggestion in the late 1960's when the Windsor engine block was being created.
So, umm ... in spite of all that, I still love my Notch.
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