The purpose of this website is just to have a place to share photos and to document and describe the restoration and modifications of my 1967 Ford Mustang coupe. Since the car almost got completely destroyed in fire accident in 2004 the whole effort to get the car back on the road has been called "The Phoenix Project"
The complete story begins at the Ford Metuchen factory in New Jersey where the car originally was made as a candyapple red, black interior coupe with a six cylinder engine and a three speed manual transmission. It was then exported and sold as a new car in Sweden. I know very little and have no intention to do any research about the car's life here in Sweden other than it's been in the Norrtälje area for quite some time before I bought it in 2000. At least four different owners are or have been members in the local Norrtälje club "Yankee Ranch". The car has even been mentioned as a price winner at the local Norrtälje American Car Show, which was hard to believe when I heard it just after I bought the car.
Somewhere along the line the six cylinder engine had been swapped for a 289 V8 and a C4 auto trans together with front disc brakes from a 1968 Ford Falcon and a N-case 9 inch rear end from a 1972 Ford Mustang. Also a lot of rust repairs and bodywork had been made to the car, unfortunately not of very high quality.
The last owner before me had taken the car back out on the street and through the inspection after it had been resting for a pretty long while, probably several years. There was a lot of work still left to do on the car, obviously depending on to what status you wanted to build it, but that just suited me fine when I bought the car as a running project in July 2000.
My initial plan was to work on the car during the long Swedish winters and enjoy it during the summers trying to avoid a larger project in the small garage I had back then.The goal was pretty much to just restore the car as it was with the upgrade parts that was already on it. This plan worked fine for the first two seasons, but then things got a little carried away when I started too many projects on the car in the fall of 2002.
In June 2004 I had the car pretty much back together to be able to drive it as we were about to move. But then disaster struck, I had a welding accident, the car's backseat took fire and I wasn't even in the garage when it happened. Almost the whole car and most of my garage equipment got destroyed from the fire and from what was done to put the fire out.