Fox T-Bird/Cougar Forums

so , my son hits a deer and surprise surprise!!!!  my how time flies.

sat so long gas started going bad.

here is the damage from dec 2016

with no open bay in my garage due to it being occupied with another cougar,, choices needed to be made.
fab up an exterior situation to fix the car.

I dug in deep to find out what was going on with areas along the bottom rear of both fenders and both rear quarters ,,,, its first 20 years of life in MI must have brought on much needed repairs.
I found 4 holes.

i cut out bad stuff & added metal webbing reinforced & rust neutralized and fiber glass dressed all the holes.  one thing leads to another as you all know.

painted with code 2h M/cabernet red.  Even experimented with automotive mixed paint you can get done in an air presure can from napa, now that stuff is really good at 13$ a can you cannot go wrong!    this is all single stage paint done with my new HVLP then repetative wet sanding stepping from 800 -1000 - 2000- 3000 - 5000 grit.  it took me 2 times of wet sanding to get this look. the basic rule to wet sanding is simple.... everyone has to do it,, rarely do you simply shoot paint and roll the car out the door.  so we wet sand!!!  the rule is on your final go of 5000 grit,, if your surface is not reflecting a somewhat of a shine,, your not done!  simply back down to 2000 grit and 3000 grit then 5000 grit till you start to see the surface look like its wanting to be shinny.  once you get there then move on to 3m 3stage system

rewinded back to surface prep and tenting and painting to arrive at the final product.

what used to be a 100 footer is now something like a 5 footer.  the paint aint perfect but this is my second time painting a car.

hope i did ok...

i kept some small degree of orange peel in the paint because
A= i was getting worn out with wet sanding
B= i think back during original painting processes the human/robot transition was taking place and lots of cars from this era had a little orange peel.

Used 3m 3 stage buffing system to get to the final look then wax happened yesterday.  this 3m stuff totally fixes dull headlamp lenses and is no joke.  its critical you use stage 3 for final work on surfaces!!!!

For those with a luggage rack on the trunk, you all know how much of a pita it is to wax back there.  Drill out and toss the old rivits.  insert plastic anchors inside the holes then use black phillups head screws. this way from now on when you wax you can easily remove the parts.

totally redid all the trim,,, did not keep the chrome line on the trim because i liked the full black out look,, i think ford should have made full black out on the trim for the 20ths bease the chrome skinny line never made sense to me with nothing else except the antenna was chrome on the exterior.



***********DISCLOSURE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
do not use blue painters tape,,, just dont do it!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Pics or it didn't happen ;)

pics in order as best as possible.............

more

more 2

more 3

more 4

more 5

found some more straggler pics..

couple more stragglers...........

Not bad Scott, looks really good!

Agreed. If you did all of that with a rattle can, I'm impressed.
You have much more patience that I.

Wow! Looks great!

Really good!  I love those Anny cars.

considering doing gold on the grille where the chrome is.  since i dont think i will ever luck out on the ultra rare gold/cabernet red combo grille, i can mock it up with the specific color gold ford used which is "sunburst gold",,, easily found at your box stores.

I think I might have a 20th grille in my parts stash, I'll check later today or tomorrow.

this one is close

http://www.ebay.com/itm/NOS-OEM-1987-1988-Ford-Mercury-Cougar-Grille-Red-/142152174746?epid=1522120205&hash=item2118ee0c9a:g:RiEAAOSw8w1X-A5K&vxp=mtr

So you rattle canned the whole car? If so legitimately not bad. I'm impressed.

no,,, what i mean is that some 20ths had gold where the chrome is,, and all were red on teh fins.

even the cougar in the middle was gold.

Eric can provide a pic of an example.. its been a few years but back on the old board somebody showed up with one on thier 20th car and that started the discussion.

not sure what that means,,, someone else also thought its rattle can work.

I experimented with rattle can options from napa.  they mix your color base/clear/hardener / reducer /flex agent into a can that is under air pressure,, then you spray it... it worked really nice in the temp areas i played around with..  I sanded all that off and did the car HVLP.

basically i did the whole job outside under a tarp

Pics of the booth? Well done one paint work!

For some reason I thought it was rattle can spray paint.

Either way looks good.

see page 1, post 4, you will see a tarp tent where i painted outside.  i changed the tarp out to a new one that came all the way down on the driver & pass side when i was finally ready to hit with a gun.  this short sided gray tarp was temp until i got another larger one that came down on both sides.

the disadvantage is i have this one cat that just loves his daddy.  He really enjoyed seeing my shadow passing along the tarp and chasing it  ** while he was on top of the tarp**.
at one point i was back at the trunk area of the cougar standing straight up and just gazing upon my work,,, then suddenly my hat gets vaporized up into the sky.  i get up on the bronco bumper and there the fugger sat,, flicking his tail , nothing but teeth and claws as he enjoys killing my hat.

the cat was the reason i had to change out my gray tarp because he was getting on the garage roof.  he would look down and see my shadow,, he would wait... and wait then he would pounce my shadow by jumping off the garage roof to the tarp.  He pretty much wore out the eyelets of the tarp doing this several times.

i am glad he showed me his new tricks early on while i was simply doing sanding and body work.  when it came time to paint the car for real.. i tossed him insde the house where he would cry and beg momma to let him go out so he could make his dad bleed... because thats just so much fun!

this pic is of rattle can mix from napa, i wet sanded and 3 stage 3m buffed it.

like mentioned,, i  removed all the air pressure can paint and shot with a gun.

the pic is washed  out with a color distortion, the big replacement blue tarp took over my subject area but did capture the rattle can work good enough.

here is another very good picture of the rattle can work,, you can see my 100 year old fan i used as exhaust.

in this particular picture i had not yet wet sanded....  you can make out the orange peel which was even enough and wet sanded down in one pass.

here is a pic of after i hit the whole car with a the HVLP gun.  we are way past the rattle can experiements.

I wet sanded the whole car and what i am trying to show is the fender.
the fender is ready to buff with 3m 3 stage.
the hood has been buffed with 3m 3 stage.

you can see that the fender is wanting to shine a little.  thats what i was saying earlier is that what i learned is dont stop wet sanding until your surface looks like its reflecting.'

since the rattle can paint is the very same paint that i used to shoot the car HVLP, i wanted to demo using spray cans.

What i learned..........

you have to move very slow with the rattle cans.
you need 24 cans minimum according to my calcs "if you wanted to do a whole coug/bird"
*DO NOT* buy a few here and few there.  I bought 4 cans and later got 3 more.  the second order i placed, well the color was not matching.... so order all at once.
at 13$ per can its amazing how it works out to be about the same cost as buying single stage paint and shooting with a gun.
the second purpose was to get some hands on working with the rattle can car paint.  I wanted to know that if in a pinch during a body part replacement i would NOT have to get into all the complications and step by step procedure of setting up a booth.  I could do some minor tenting for dust mitigation, set up a high cfm fan then scuff, prime, surface clean, spray can it , wet sand, surface clean and buff then wax.
another purpose was to encourage people who dont have a place to paint,, that it can be done if you plan an outside area well enough , dont worry too much about the look of the paint "knowing" our wetsanding will fix most anything.

the benefit of the rattle can is (from what i was told) you dont need to wait as long before wet sanding because they use hot reducer.

what i am going to rattle can on the car is the door jams and such.
i need to buy 4 cans.

so far excluding the costs of the rattle can experiement i have 625$ in materials for painting this.
this includes the 3m 3 stage which is expensive.

this style door panels is a real pain in the rear.  These door panels are full of so many weaknesses i am surprised that we still have all the parts to make them functional.
My arm rests have fallen off, pockets broken,, the list goes on.  So i get to work on new ideas to make them work again.

door pockets shown.
-drill hole on inside
-sneak in a wire under the leather like covering then twist it.
-i used electric fence wire because its tin coated and wont corrode anytime soon.

pics and you will get the idea

I seem to have located a punch card,,, perhaps in place of build sheets these were used instead????
I remember a thread here about this ,, softtouch i remember said he could just look at them and get some information about what it says.... that threads been many moons ago.

this is interesting....
this is some aux equipment that ties back to the factory option cd changer in my trunk.  I wondered what all that strange wiring was i found when i had my radio out last time to change the light bulb.. i saw it traveled down the pass side trans hump but had no idea what it was for till now.

i suppose the easiest way and least agreesive is to remove the carpet,, then presure wash it and let it dry in the sun.
works for me....... looks almost new again and this must have been the very first time it was ever cleaned.

this is something of a problem i brought upon myself.

a few years ago i was hauling 5 people in my 20th and a trunk load of luggage up to Minerva Oh for a funeral.

we develped a bad vibration in transit and during our stay my Bro-in law and I redid our driveshaft u-joints for the fix.

under the car is a metal safety brace to catch the drive shaft from hitting the ground .  during our repair i did not re-install the brace under the car.

this allowed water to wick into the interior and start some minor corrosion.

I hit it with a wire wheel the rust neutralized.

I added 3/8'' butyl tape bead to each stud floor penetration then secured the under the car hardware to seal it up.

so........ think about this one for a moment.
your on a road trip and your fuel pump goes out while up in Wash DC.
cars on the betway up there attract a lot of attention from the city.

got it towed to a shop to which they cared none the less about the integrity of my old beater 20th anny.

I imagine they undid the straps and simply let the fill tube just bust its way out of the fill neck surround ,,, its really fragile and i may replace this whole setup with a rubber adaptor of some sorts later on.  for now i repaired the cracks and added a piece of rubber inner tube to decrease the opening diameter but make it flexible for "if" the neck needs dropped out of the surround later.

I just now discovered the root cause for whats going on with dampness in/around the filler neck

think about it on your car... if this surround is cracked or broke, everything from weather , a car wash and the like allows water to shoot directly into your trunk!
I added butyl tape to the surround where it bolts to the body because the original gasket was thin like paper.

another shot of fuel neck surround

finally was able to integrate a storage cubby in the trunk that this car **never** came with.
its kinda just dropped in and a heavy tie wire up forward to brace it. 
it will work for me and what i have in mind for its use.

trunk pieces parts all presure washed and drip dried and re-installed.
trunk completed and redone

more trunk work

carpet back in,,, looks pretty good.
A little bit of staining but in areas that are completly understood.


Tip for you....... if you have not taken out your carpet ever....
to remove carpet.........
-follow carpet up behind the center dash up behind the ash tray.
-you will find a small group of wires penetrating a circle cut out in the carpet.
-the carpet needs to be cut here. 
-this cut is about 3'' till the circle is opened up.
-pull carpet out from under the center dash / transmission tunnel.

Major tip for easy re-install
-remove the sound deadening foam from the back of the carpet in the areas that made it difficult to remove.
-this would only be enough sound deadening to make the carpet height profile decreased allowing it to easily insert back under the center dash transmission tunnel area.

I did find a 20th grill in my stash. Then I reread your post and saw that you were looking for the gold-trimmed one, lol. Oh well. If you or anybody has a need for a 20th grille, shoot me an offer. It's got a couple chips in the red paint, nothing too horrible.

i would like a spare since the one i used was my spare.

I'll take it if noone else "needs" it

304 772 3411

think of something to trade for perhaps,  ..... but $ is ok to do as well.

here is a mod i wanted to do for a long time now.
How to keep pine needles and leaves from getting under that metal cover along the bottom of your windshield.

add sticky back foam to the back.  bolt it down and now its preventing things from dropping in behind this cover.

now to figure out how to achieve the same thing with the back window lower trim because stuff always gets in between that trim and the glass

interior all together....
making my first out in the public trip today after all my restoration

welp,, took the time today to make a couple front wheel brake dust sheilds that go between the wheel and the rotor.
also did this,, painted the chrome sections with sunburst gold.

like?

here is one of two mods i am doing to help seal up body gaps.

here in the trunk i placed sticky back foam so that when you close the trunk, the lid touches the foam rubber.  Water runs off the trunnk lid and then follows the foam down to the back of the car instead of running into the channel.

also, leaves and such cant get into this gutter anymore.

now on to another mod that has bugged me for years to help prevent rust on the bottom of the trunk lid where its exposed to the elements.

I dont believe this mod has ever been done , hope someone can make use of this info and perhaps post thier solution to sealing up this complicated area as well.

By design in the cougar, when you travel down the road a vortex is created and rain water gets sucked up under the trunk lid and especially in the area where the license plate is.

The profiles of the various parts back there allow you to reach up with a couple of fingers behind the trunk lid with it closed.

i want to seal the whole trunk lid off so that no water ever gets in there, atleast improve on the OEM design to reduce water penetration.

I started off with making sure that when the trunk is closed, the tops of the tail lamps offer a seal to the bottom of the trunk lid.  This was easy.....

see the white sections of foam backing added to the tops of the tail lamps.  in this particular foam , for the application i only had white,, its kinda putty white but still,, i wish it was black.

now to figure out how to use some parts and pieces i have lying around to take care of where the license plate is.

I started off with a short section of lexan which was already 90 deg angle and  only need some minor trim to fit & span across both tail lamps along the top.

this lexan part will simply be mounted using the license plate hold down screws.
problem,, the profile of the metal back here is not flat but my lexan part is,, what do i do now...........?  i need to shim it

I find some of my spare generator housing sound deadening foam thats about 2'' thick.
i cut two large chunks off to fit into the odd profile upper left and upper right of the license plate holder area.  this sound deadening foam is **VERY STICKY**, put it down once and your not taking it off without destroying it.  Its also very forgiving on flexing, it pretty much follows the profile of any odd shaped object pressed up to it.

Next i need to have a way to seal behind the license plate,, water can sneak up in behind there as well..,, doing this completes the sealing for this new part that will span from left to right.

now i want to drill my license plate hole locations in this new part and fit test it.
hit it with some matt black rattle can.

the lexan cover follows the same plane as the white foam i have in place now.  the white foam is 7/16'' thick.  the lexan cover is 1/8'' thick.

i lay a thinner 1/4'' thick black foam strip along the top of my new lexan part so the seal designs when they all come together are about on the same plane.

bolted it down and took some pics of the completed product.

with the trunk lid closed the inner skin of the trunk lid now touches this new mod and best of all the bottom edge is no longer exposed to the vortex of rain water anymore.

see how everything foam related gets all smooshed in and follows the profile of the new lexan part?

next up is to work on sealing the hood gaps so that when you close the hood, you dont let water down into the fender wells.

ford gave us the perfect application part if you eyeball the the foam part that surrounds the hood hinges.
I wish they continued the foam design and sent it all the way down the driver and passanger fender.  they had a reason for making it short i guess???

i will get this this new thing tomorrow eve i hope and wrap it up.

here i have the hood body gaps sealed up.
Lowes sells a really durable wide foam roll that is intended for the bottom of a garage door.  I cut it long ways to make two seals along each fender.
all this was simply put down with a hot glue gun.

now water runs off the hood and follows the seal down to the header panel instead of falling into the fender wells and engine bay