Parts Preparation

Chassis Preparation

The first step in preparing the kit parts is to remove all the sheet metal parts from the frame. These are temporarily attached at the factory for shipping.

Here's the bare frame, with the body and all the sheet metal removed.

At the bottom of the photo, you can see a pile of tools, and my compressor with its big red tank. These are airplane-bulding tools we retrieved from my house on The Shop page.

Parts Painting

We're preparing most of the metal parts by cleaning and painting them with Eastwood paints, which come in several colors that look almost like unpainted iron, steel, and aluminum. It takes more time, but the parts will stay looking good a lot longer.

Some heavily corroded parts will also receive a coat or two of Gempler's Rust Converter, which stabilizes rust and leaves a black surface which can be painted over.

Our donor Mustang was from Arizona, and there is virtually no rust on the parts as they came from the car. However, the parts still need to be cleaned up, and some corrosion needed to be removed from the front spindles.

The rear suspension parts, including the differential, spindles, brakes, and halfshafts, came from a Thunderbird that was probably based in New England, where they use lots of salt on the roads (to make your car rust out so you can buy a new one).

In the photo is the differential as it came from the Thunderbird. It's dirty and rusty, although basically sound (we hope!) These parts required a lot more preparation, and made us glad we were lucky enought to get that Mustang from Arizona!

Here are some of the boxes of parts from Factory Five and Breeze.

Note the differential on the left. It has been cleaned up and has gotten its first coat of paint, Gempler's Rust Converter (only on the iron part). The Rust Converter goes on gray but turns black after you paint it on.

The differential has now been cleaned, wire brushed, painted with Gempler's Rust Converter, and then sprayed with Eastwood's Aluma-Blast.

Here it's being installed in the chassis. Note the rope and the jack underneath. It was a project to weave this big "pumpkin" in between the frame tubes into its new home!

Here's Nate at his cleaning bench, outside the garage. He'll spend many happy hours here in the early days of the project. At least, I would assume he's happy; he's smiling, right?

Behind him is the woodshed, which holds the firewood used to heat the house in the winter, and the Cobra body, sitting quietly on its body buck and grinning at Nate as he cleans the parts which will soon go inside it.

Here are the half-shafts after Nate has spent several hours on them. He dismantled them, removing the CV joints so they can be installed on the new shorter half-shafts that came with the kit.

Nate also spent several hours cleaning the CV joints, painting them with Rust Converter and then with Eastwood's Spray Grey so they would look like new parts. He also painted the shafts with Detail Grey so they would stay looking good.

You'll see more of this process on the IRS page.

The front spindles (on the Front Suspension page) got the same Rust Converter treatment as the differential and the CV joints.

Here are the front suspension parts after receiving a coat of Eastwood Chassis Black. They weren't corroded so all they needed was some cleanup and a coat of paint to look good.

There will probably be more parts preparation; watch this page for more (if anything new and interesting arises).