Fox Body Pony - Part 1

Today on Muscle car. Tommy picks up our newest project and shows how to smartly trailer your ride, the king of Grand National shows. Why it's number one and Rick goes through the ins and outs of spraying metallic paint.

Hey guys, welcome to muscle car. Today. We're out and about fixing to pick up our latest project.

I think you're gonna like it.

We get tons of requests for us to put one of these things together. So we figured we'd give you guys what you want. Not only are these cars affordable, but the parts of availability is through the roof on it.

We've eyeballed a few classifieds and a couple of websites. I believe we found us a good candidate.

That's right. A fox body mustang.

This thing fell straight out of the eighties

and the carpets dry.

It don't leak.

It's like it's lacking something under here. Get rid of this little

logo box and

put in something much bigger. 3.8 L.

That's a

small sex holder, right?

Lines on it. It ain't never been

rector

if it has, it would be.

Well, everybody that comes in there, what they're trying to do is put uh

a 50 in it is what they entail is. These cars are always abused if it's the 302,

you know, the 5.0 or something like that.

People out jerking gears in it, which that's our plans. But this, and at least we're starting with a, a good canvas to begin with. So, well, they say that there's a lot of these out there but there's very few that are t top it being a T top car, we're gonna have to brace it up good because we're gonna put some pretty decent power.

We're at it. These old cars already flex with the T top car, it's gonna flex that much more, but we're gonna

put it on a severe diet, lighten this thing up, put some good power under it.

Billy here seems to be a pretty honest guy with a pretty solid car

and he's only asking 1100 bucks

mind if I drive it,

don't mind at all. We'll take her for a spell or the key.

She's a bit smoky

but it seems to dry pretty darn well,

not too bad. Actually.

I think you're looking at our next project car

and I ain't risking trying to drive this thing back home.

I'm going to trailer

now. I'm no old fellow,

but in my time of hauling some cars around, I've seen some people do some silly stuff when it comes to tying the car down to the trailer. This is exactly what you don't wanna use.

If you notice this particular ratchet strap is melted, frayed

and almost broken.

So what that means is when you pull this car down

and you're driving down the road and you gotta get in the brakes or something happens, this is gonna snap, your car is gonna fall off. You could kill somebody or yourself or a dog

when you're hooking on the front, make sure you're using a nice solid structural piece like a frame hole or an

aon no tie rod ends or balances on the rear, use an axle strap,

just watch out for the brake line

and when you buy this down,

you gotta have material in here.

So if it's just loop, once it can actually back up

this way, when it pulls down as it's all wrapped up, it's got friction against it keeps it from unraveling.

I like to tie the rear in an X pattern because it evens out the geometric forces of the straps.

The dot Man won't be happy if you got all your straps blowing around every which way tie them down.

Now, with our mustang parts are pretty much available from the front bumper to the back. But if he was hauling in something a little more rare, be sure to bring along a roll of tape, this stuff will make sure that if you got a loose piece of trim, you can tape it down and it'll make its way back to the shop.

Me and old smokey headed back toward the shop. See you guys there

still ahead. We begin the tear down on our project pony plus more eighties muscle. When we take a look at a cherry Gnx

Mustang GT

for people who run

from 1979 to 93 the Fox Body platform was Ford's offering to the Mustang Lovers

over the years, they offered a wide range of options including the popular GT model

with 14 years on the market. This is one of the longest running car platforms of any American model

which means they're plentiful

and with a performance background upgrades are easy to find,

which is one reason we chose one of these cars for our next project. The plans for this car are simple. Number one affordability, not everybody's got some huge chunk of change laying around to throw at some project. Number two,

accessibility, a lot of the stuff we're gonna do to this car can be done in a driveway or in a garage if you have one, number three, drivability, not only is this thing gonna walk the dog, but it's gotta pass the emission sniff test when we're all set and done.

Uh Basically we want a fast low buck, do it yourself daily driver. But the first part of that statement is fast and this little girl is about two cylinders shy of what we need.

Just throw it

all this stuff right. Here is going in the scrapper because we're gonna swap it out for a Stroker motor. But we're gonna drop all the engine stuff out the bottom along with the suspension and the K member transmission all in one big hunk.

The technical term for most of the stuff that we're moving here,

uh, will be called lame

and unneeded.

So that means that we can pretty much hack it out of the way.

So we got a few little

ends that we're gonna undo or cut. Get out of the way. Drop all this, get the body up,

get him busy.

Normally you wouldn't use a pry bar to remove a spring. But with this, all the spring tension is pretty much been removed.

So just be sure to hold on to it.

That's all it is.

I'm gonna move these four bolts to hold the cradle in. Lift the body up with the lift

motor cradle. I'll be laying there on the jack stands.

Say bye bye to this poor sick little mustang embarrassment

with the engine all out of the way. I can start stripping off the firewall of all the stuff we're not gonna use. Then we're gonna clean it up. Throw in a splash of dup color to dress it up a bit.

We're using a shop back some soapy water and a little Jabba

brake cleaner to get the grime off the surface that we're gonna paint

and we're not building a show car. Here. We're building the daily driver.

So I'm gonna mask off the engine compartment, paint around a few things

and move on.

That's about all we can do until we get on the phone in order a few parts for this old girl. Our next step is slapping in a V8. Yeah, she's also gonna need new suspension wheels and tires and brakes and Tommy's got to rebuild the rear end for it. Then it's gonna get shot black and charcoal gray. And when we're all said and done, this thing is gonna look downright evil and that's why we chose the name Dark Horse for this project.

But there ain't much to do till I get those parts headed this way.

Going fast with class. That's how they roll with this blacked out buick. Plus how to avoid tiger striping. Metallic paint stick around

today's flashback. A 1987 Buick gnx

all across the country. Guys love racing, their Buicks and their motto going fast with class.

I like racing Grand Nationals because you can make so much power with a

V6

when it comes to mean modern muscle cars. The GN is in a class all its own

and the ultimate GN.

Oh, well, that title belongs to a limited edition 87 gnx.

The GNX is just a good looking classy ride. Buick only made 500

and 47 of these bad beauties and they came in one color black

this car right here. What's number 31 off the production line and it's owned by Buick lover Michael Norman driving a GNX is totally different than any other Grand National out there. It's got so much more torque from the bottom end up

just

really

gets

going.

The GNX was only available in 1987.

Y

was retiring the Grand National that year and wanted to send it off with a bang.

So they partnered with Ac mclaren to produce a more powerful version and dubbed it the GN

Lurking under that hood is the standard turbo V6 engine.

But it's been enhanced with the Garrett T three turbo charger which has a lighter turbine wheel made of ceramic.

The turbo could produce up to 15 pounds of boost giving this engine 276 horsepower.

It's an increase of 31 horse over the standard GM.

All this extra power meant it needed greater cooling capacity. So a new inter cooler with more fence per row was added.

The suspension also got beefed up with a rear pan, hard bar and ladder bar to handle all that extra torque.

Also added larger 16 by eight inch alloy wheels with a black mesh design.

Fender flares were enlarged to handle the wider tires and louvers were added to help remove heat from the engine bay.

The inside looks like a GN except for the sleek Stewart Warner analog gauges

and only GN

X had a special plaque and bossed with a production number fitted above the glove box door.

Another way to spot a true G NX is to check out the vehicle emission tag under the hood.

Instead of saying General Motors, it should say

it may surprise you. But the GNX was the fastest production car in 1987.

It even beat out the Corvette. It was a true Sleeper car back in the day. Thanks to its incredible performance power and limited edition status. The GNX is a highly sought after and very collectible car,

but that's not stopping Michael from having a little fun.

If I want to have a car, I'd rather

get out and drive it. If I can't drive it, I'd rather have a picture on the wall,

prepping and painting for a great metallic finish. Still ahead.

You're watching muscle car for a DVD copy of this episode. Just go to Power Block tv.com and order your copy for just 595 plus shipping and handling. Start your own muscle car collection delivered right to your door from the power block.

Hey, guys, it's time to zip up your paint suits and bolt on your listening ears because this week we're gonna show you the ins and outs of spring metallic paints and we'll show you a few of the do s and don't of applying that type of finish.

I've said it before and I'll say it again. A prep work makes the paint job and especially if you're dealing with a high metallic finish.

It's critical what grid you use for the final prep. Now, I've got some 320 grid here which is way too coarse for finish. Standing in just about anything, especially silver metallics. I'm gonna say on this side with 320

this side with 600. That way you can see what a big difference it makes.

I think that's good enough to make a point.

Now, I'm going to jump over to the 600 grid. It takes more swiping with the 600 but it's well worth it.

If you notice the hood that we're using here has been preened.

That's because we ran by OKQ and picked it up because they sell their dent and scratch hoods for cheap

and it's an easy way to grab some sheet metal to play around with

without having to work on the family car.

The silver base is gonna show the sandy scratches pretty dang. Well,

that's really easy to Tiger stripe with metallic paint, but we'll get to that in a minute

and you can already see the sand scratches starting to come through over here in the 320 grit side as opposed to the 600 grit side, which is nice and smooth and consistent. Now, this is the difference that can be made with just a change in grits. It can literally make or break a paint job.

I'm throwing down a nice coat of sealer to give us a clean canvas. This will wipe out all those scratches so I can show you our next trick.

I mixed up a little champagne color here. So it'll contrast nicely with the gray sealer that I just laid down

and it'll really show how easy it is to tiger stripe. This stuff.

Take a look at the spray pattern. I've said it like this to show you what happens when the paint is too concentrated on a narrow line.

When your spray pattern is inconsistent, it pushes the metallic deeper into the base coat than it does in other areas. That's why you have these dark lines and light lines.

Now I'm gonna go the opposite direction and turn my pressure up really high and widen the fan, which creates a split pattern.

As you can see. It did just as good a job of striping this hood as having the pattern too tight.

So this

guy

showing you guys the two extremes of the gun set up, there's a pattern that's way too narrow

and you got the pattern that's way too wide,

way too much pressure.

I

can see.

Now that one's gonna give you one stripe,

this one's gonna give you two stripes. The object is to find a happy medium in between those two with a nice consistent pattern.

Here we go.

The,

it

doesn't get any better than that.

That just shows that you can have the best gun, the best paint and the best booth in the world. But if it's not set up, right,

it's gonna look like it belongs in the zoo, man.

If you have any questions about anything you saw on the show today and check it out at Power Block tv.com. But for this week we're out of time. So until next time

we're out of here.