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.