What I've been up to. Fixin' a 5.0

My roommate and I bought the car (89 GT 5speed) to fix up and resell and its been a task and a half. I've enjoyed it though and its been a hell of a learning experience. We arent done yet, but we're really close. Still have to wet-sand and buff out the bodykit peices and finish buffing the car itself, pull and rebuild the transmission (bad 2nd gear synchro), clean the engine bay up and we should be ready to turn the car out.

Sadly, we lost alot of the "during" pics of the body work and prep, so it goes from the "before" straight to paint masking, heh, but you can get an idea of what all we had to do.

The Before shots. Dont have a good shot of the rear bumper but it had a hole in it and a crack or two.




Masking the stripes/car.




Shots of the stripes sprayed. Thats Donnie by the bumper, he's helped Bryan and I AALLOOTT. Great guy, very very meticulous, very good.


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Spraying. I'm the guy in the white suit.



A couple shots of it after the spray, not wet-sanded or buffed, but it gives you an idea how it'll turn out. The guy in the blue shirt is Gary our instructor, the other guy is Bryan, my roommate.

Most of these pics were taken during a two day, 27 hour-of-work marathon to get the car in paint and ready for wet-sand/buffing by Thursday. I spent Thursday painting the kit, and Bryan spent it.. well, doing nothing. In 8 hours he buffed half the hood and one fender. Go Bryan.



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This is my first start-to-finish other than a half-assed little S10 that was ****onashingle. I'm really happy with how it turned out. We had some problems with dirt in the paint on the first color coat and we had to bake it off and sand then re-spray color.. Thats why we ran so late on the second day. 12 hour then 15 hour spans, lol. I was a little worried until I saw how well it buffed out.. Its gonna look really good IMO.

Two 8 inch stripes with a 5 inch gap done in Dark Pewter Metallic (PPG). 5 coats. 5 coats Dark Red (Omni.. Yeah, I know, its all we could budget in). 1 tack coat, 2 wet coats Omni clear (again.. all we could budget). Same on all the body kit peices.

I'll add some more pics if anyone cares to see them of the finished and assembled project, hopefully by this coming Thursday.

Still loving school and learning alot. I have about 10,000 miles to go before I'm "good" but I think I'm getting there slowly.. Learning from my mistakes and trying to do a good job. Been in school since this last January.

Thanks for the comments folks. Theres a few little issues in the paint. We should have used fine line tape for the stripes but other than that, its looking good.

The trim peices are faded and ugly, but we bought some trim paint to bring back the lustre. Also, its hard to tell from those photos but both front fenders are in really rough shape, not just finish-wise but dented and beat to hell. Bryan worked on those long with Donnie and had Gary (the instructor) assist a little bit on the body line transitions.

We also had to yank the old motor out. #8 cylinder was toast. Ring was in peices, which I found in the oil sump and pan, lol. Thankfully though we had an extra 5.0 shortblock kinda hanging around our garage. Was the motor we put in my roommates 67 'Stang, which we decided to totally tear down and restore from the ground up.. So the motor was just collecting dust (Stay tuned for details on that project in about 17 years, lol). I figure we'll just rebuild the old 5.0 out of it, stick the '67 intake, carb, headers etc on it and sell it down the road some.

I'm itching to get back into the shop on monday and get the kit buffed and shiny and mounted and get it done done done.

All in all I think, not counting a buffer we went ahead and bought and a few other little odds and ends, we have about 2600$ into the car and thats including buying the car for 1250$. Granted, we had alot of random materials from other projects floating around, but we could have done it for about 2850$ if we had to buy all the sandpaper, masking tape and paper and the like.

Heres a couple of the latest Mustang pics.

Anyway, its washed, buffed and partially assembled. Its real close to done. Body kit still isnt on, but the lights are back in. Trim has to be repainted and detail stuff taken care of, but you can get a good idea what it'll look like from these pics.

We started school in January. The Mustang is the first car we ever really did. No previous experience to speak of. We did a little S10 (cab only.. had a wooden bed, heh) that was *really* torn up but the guy had us on such a tight budget and we had too many poeple working on it.. I was disgusted by it in the end. Basicly it was a project assigned to all the new students and the lions share of our group just wasnt willing to take their time and do a good job.

I try to pretend the S10 never happened, but I still wake up screaming