I recently became a Mustang owner, despite being mainly a Chevy guy for the first 40 years of my life. That’s not to say I’m only a Chevy guy, as I’ve owned, repaired, rebuilt, tuned up, beefed up and bag driven vehicles of all makes and models. So I still wouldn’t say I’m a Ford guy now, but I sure have taken a liking to this Mustang!
It all started when my neighbour and best buddy bought himself an 86 Notch. As I was hunting the classifieds for fox body parts for him, I came across an ad for a 1983 Hatchback for sale or for trade. Just for the heck of it I offered to trade one of my race quads straight across for the car. The guy jumped all over it and off I went to have a look.
This was no show car, that’s for sure! And although the quad was worth more than he was asking for the car, I had only paid $800 for the quad so all I needed to see was potential in the car. After inspecting the underside for major rust issues and finding everything in surprisingly very good order, I did a quick vin search which turned up a squeaky clean title. This is when I saw that the car was actually a 1980. When I asked about the year, he proceeded to tell me that the car was originally a 1980 Cobra, but he had been attempting to fix it up using 83 Mustang and 83 Capri parts cars. Not knowing much about these cars, we made the deal and I hauled the car home.
After doing some research on the 1980 Cobra, I felt a lot better about the deal I had made... until I tried gettting it to run. Distributor out 180 degrees, engine oil pan, transmission pan and pretty much all other gaskets were made of pure red silicone, fried duraspark ignition box, dozens of loose bolts, hacked up wiring, missing and broken interior parts and many, many other obstacles to overcome!
On the third day I finally got it to run, but everything leaked... a lot. After a week or so of scraping red/blue/black goop and replacing with proper gaskets, lots of re-wiring, new ignition components and timing, I had it running well with no leaks. Having it running and driving was nice, but it was way too ugly to be seen in.
The previous owners figured it would be a good idea to paint the entire exterior of the car with high solids rubberized undercoating spray paint. Let me tell you, this is not even a remotely good idea and if you ever try painting a vehicle with this stuff, better hope you never run into the guy you sell the car to... as he will not like you very much at all! A couple spray bottles of goo/adhesive remover (even really good paint stripper doesn’t work very well for some reason)let it soak for an hour, then spent an entire day using a plastic scraper which yielded a couple gallons of what can only be described as a black tar-like substance that never dries.
After seeing what the car looked like underneath and searching the salvage yards for parts to swap out the hideous Capri rear bumper cover and strange looking sunken taillights, I figured I’d do some light body work and at least make the car one solid color. A nice little added bonus I discovered while piecing together and cleaning up the interior, was when I removed the seat covers to find Recaro seats. Had no idea what they were until I hit up a google search, but they sure did look like they’d be a cool looking seat once they’re recovered. Really dig that mesh headrest!
It came quite a long way in the first few weeks, as I’m a pretty motivated (and impatient) individual when I want to get something done. Here she is so far...
A good part of the info I came to find about this car was derived from the decoding of the drivers side door tag/sticker. These codes aren’t easy to decode with so many different sources on the subject. Every source seems to either have a different definition for a code, or simply doesn’t list the code I’m looking to decipher. Being a Cobra seems to make the matter even worse! Lol
If you could Please help translate the following:
Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can provide. Glad to be a member of your forum!
DAN
It all started when my neighbour and best buddy bought himself an 86 Notch. As I was hunting the classifieds for fox body parts for him, I came across an ad for a 1983 Hatchback for sale or for trade. Just for the heck of it I offered to trade one of my race quads straight across for the car. The guy jumped all over it and off I went to have a look.
This was no show car, that’s for sure! And although the quad was worth more than he was asking for the car, I had only paid $800 for the quad so all I needed to see was potential in the car. After inspecting the underside for major rust issues and finding everything in surprisingly very good order, I did a quick vin search which turned up a squeaky clean title. This is when I saw that the car was actually a 1980. When I asked about the year, he proceeded to tell me that the car was originally a 1980 Cobra, but he had been attempting to fix it up using 83 Mustang and 83 Capri parts cars. Not knowing much about these cars, we made the deal and I hauled the car home.
After doing some research on the 1980 Cobra, I felt a lot better about the deal I had made... until I tried gettting it to run. Distributor out 180 degrees, engine oil pan, transmission pan and pretty much all other gaskets were made of pure red silicone, fried duraspark ignition box, dozens of loose bolts, hacked up wiring, missing and broken interior parts and many, many other obstacles to overcome!
On the third day I finally got it to run, but everything leaked... a lot. After a week or so of scraping red/blue/black goop and replacing with proper gaskets, lots of re-wiring, new ignition components and timing, I had it running well with no leaks. Having it running and driving was nice, but it was way too ugly to be seen in.
The previous owners figured it would be a good idea to paint the entire exterior of the car with high solids rubberized undercoating spray paint. Let me tell you, this is not even a remotely good idea and if you ever try painting a vehicle with this stuff, better hope you never run into the guy you sell the car to... as he will not like you very much at all! A couple spray bottles of goo/adhesive remover (even really good paint stripper doesn’t work very well for some reason)let it soak for an hour, then spent an entire day using a plastic scraper which yielded a couple gallons of what can only be described as a black tar-like substance that never dries.
After seeing what the car looked like underneath and searching the salvage yards for parts to swap out the hideous Capri rear bumper cover and strange looking sunken taillights, I figured I’d do some light body work and at least make the car one solid color. A nice little added bonus I discovered while piecing together and cleaning up the interior, was when I removed the seat covers to find Recaro seats. Had no idea what they were until I hit up a google search, but they sure did look like they’d be a cool looking seat once they’re recovered. Really dig that mesh headrest!
It came quite a long way in the first few weeks, as I’m a pretty motivated (and impatient) individual when I want to get something done. Here she is so far...
A good part of the info I came to find about this car was derived from the decoding of the drivers side door tag/sticker. These codes aren’t easy to decode with so many different sources on the subject. Every source seems to either have a different definition for a code, or simply doesn’t list the code I’m looking to decipher. Being a Cobra seems to make the matter even worse! Lol
If you could Please help translate the following:
Thanks in advance for any help or advice you can provide. Glad to be a member of your forum!
DAN