Progress Thread My 79 Coupe Is Alive.

According to Flowmaster's tech specs, they recommend minimum 12" of pipe after the muffler. I may be a bit short, but close.

This afternoon I figured I'd have a go at the inner fenders to see how they might fit up to the modified fender. On a hunch I grabbed a pair of inner liners from a 94 Mustang thinking that they just might work with a bit of trimming. The 94 wheel opening is much larger than the what the Fox fenders have but the lower part of the fender is wider too. The lower part of the plastic was the part I had to trim the most. Basically I just held the plastic up in the fender opening and marked the outline of the fender. It took a couple of times to get the plastic trimmed down in all the right places to fit. Once I had them cut down they fit almost as if they were made for the car. I love it when a hunch pays off.

Haven't had much car time over the past month and a half with Christmas and a vacation as well as some house projects filling the days. This week I was able to get a couple days to work on the Mustang again. I'm slowly emptying the attic of the larger parts, this week the rear bumper cover and Xenon rear skirt were my target. I had pulled a bumper support at PicknPull a while back and had done some work drilling holes in it to reduce weight since nobody was willing to donate an aluminum one to my project. I used a couple of sizes of hole saws to do the work and ended up taking off nearly ten pounds or a third of the weight of the bumper. finally gave it a coat of paint and also cleaned up the bumper mounts and painted them too. The rear cover had gotten a bit distorted over the years as I had not stored it particularly carefully. I had been working at laying it out to let the warping settle out. It seems to have worked, the cover has only a minimum amount of distortion in it now.

I took the metal support pieces out of the cover and cleaned them up then gave them a shot of paint. The cover had a couple old bumper stickers applied to it, so i set to work getting those off. The one that was the most work was a Denver Broncos one, the girl who had the car before had used it to go to university somewhere in the US, possibly Denver. I don't know if this is somehow meaningful given the upcoming Superbowl Game with Denver. If the team is half as tenacious as that sticker, they should do well.

With the cover cleaned up I put it onto the car, then got to fitting up the xenon rear skirt. I am happy with how it looks on the car, it hides my rear hung mufflers nicely. I just need to get some better screws as the only ones I had on hand are hex head sheet metal screws. I'll have to find a source for good quality automotive trim screws as I need them for various other items as well. I also have the Xenon side skirts, I bought a complete kit used a while back, but I'm not really liking them as much. They are a bit beat up and don't seem to fit very well so I'm going look into something different for them.

Getting the bumper and valance in place was the thing that needed to happen so I could finish hanging the mufflers and exhaust system. Since the pipes exit through openings in the valance, I wanted to have it in place properly to line up the pipes. I spent today building exhaust hangers and getting the mufflers fitted correctly. The right one was actually good as I had it, the left one I had to trim the inlet pipe down as well as do a minor trim on the over axle pipe. It too is now fitting correctly, I just need to finish welding up the hangers for it and then getting the four hangers fastened to the car.





I'm also toying with building some sort of a spoiler for the rear. I like the three piece spoilers from the pace cars, but of course they are not going to fit on a coupe even if I did find one for a decent price. I'd hate to hack one up trying to fit it to the car, so the best bet seems to be to build something. I had a piece of foam insulation, so I cut a shape from it to see how it might look. Of course I would have it extend full width, but I do like the basic shape. Stay tuned on that.

The Cobra bumper is nice too, but not on my 79 as it would mean having mismatched body molding profiles on the car. I'm using a Pace car front end on it and want to keep the lines consistent all the way around the car which means keeping the original rear bumper cover.

Got a call this morning and my Spectre air cleaner was finally in. I'd ordered it back in early November, but it was on back-order. Thanks to Darran (82GTforME) I scored the two air tubes that fit under the fender to draw the cold air up in trade for my fender liners. The air cleaner has flanges that mounted to the skirts in the engine compartment and flex tubes to connect to the air cleaner. It's kind of like an aftermarket version of the HO dual snorkel air cleaner. I did have to add an extension ring to the base to raise it up high enough off the MSD EFI throttle body. That was a fairly simple job to cut a strip of tin form it into a ring and weld it up. The right tube just barely tucks under the MM strut brace, but it looks pretty good I think. The EFI cam with a nice decal that I applied to the lid. I'm not usually one to put decals on anything other than my toolbox, but I liked the way this one looked. Kind of like those sixties muscle cars. Also grabbed a nice Ford logo wing nut to hold it on.

With that little item looked after, I got back to my original plan for the day, finishing off the mufflers. I got the left muffler finished off and welded up first off.



With that done, I got at fastening up the hangers onto the car and getting the final adjustments done to all the pieces.



Everything for the hangers I made except for the rubbers. I also made up a couple of tips to finish it all off out the back. I have been looking around for some nice chrome or stainless ones, but haven't found anything that would work yet, so i just cut a couple pieces of exhaust tubing, cleaned them up and gave them a coat of header paint. I'll bake the paint on tomorrow so I can get them on. I will still be on the lookout for something else, but these should do fine if I don't find any.

Thanks, the air cleaner is made by Spectre which is a division of K&N. It has a K&N type element in it. They make this style with different options on the angle of the inlets. I had to do some figuring and measuring to decide which one to get. It was special order so non-returnable if I got it wrong. I really wanted a cold air inlet style air cleaner rather than the typical open aftermarket style.