Front Seat Upholstery Installation

Before taking the car to Tampere I stripped the interior almost completely. The Mustang pretty much contained only the driver seat. This meant I could try changing the upholstery on the passenger seat. It had clearly been changed at some point, most likely in the 90s during the last restoration, but the color had faded badly. CJ Pony Parts had a nice video of the operation in YouTube so I followed its instructions.

There were no tears or holes in my seats, but they just looked ugly with the discolouring. I considered buying some vinyl dye but after asking around, I found out that it would have cost almost as much as the new covers and most likely getting the right color would have been difficult. So, I ended up ordering new front seat upholstery.

After disassembling the seat, I decided to begin with the back rest. I removed the back cover and cut the dozens of hog rings that held the vinyl on the frame. I was careful not to damage the old upholstery if I happened to need it later. I also found a Distinctive Industries tag in it so as I had suspected, they had been replaced earlier.

I was glad to find that the foam and seat frame were in really good condition. All I had to do was install the new cover.

I also reused the old listing wire. I pulled it out of the channel in the old cover and pushed it in the new. Then I followed the install order mentioned in the video. I hog ringed the top of the listing wire to the frame and then pulled the cover over the foam.

Then I added more (many, many more) hog rings to the listing wire and the back of the frame. Finally I removed the metal pins from the old seat back and installed the new on.

Couple of small wrinkles were left to the top right corner of the seat back that I could not get out. Let's see how those settle after some use but I wasn't too disappointed for my first try at upholstery project. It kind of felt that the new covers were a bit larger that the old. Most likely the foam has compressed a bit during use. Perhaps adding a thin layer of new foam would help?

Then I had to do the same thing with the seat bottom.

I unbolted the tracks and cut out the old hog rings. After carefully removing the cover I was rewarded with a really good condition foam again. I followed the same routine as before and installed the new upholstery.

Then all that remained was assembling the seat.

All in all, installing the new upholstery was not that difficult and it made a huge difference with the look of the seat. Now I just have to do the same thing for the driver seat when I get the car back.

New Tires

I got fed up with the non-matching tires on my car and decided to do something about it. I found a good article about early Mustang tire sizes from Mustang Monthly magazine and read through it. I wanted something classical looking but, as I actually wanted to drive my car, they had to be radial tires.

I could not find many options available in Finland so in the end I decided to buy a set of 205/75-14 sized Nankang N-605 TourSport white walls from Dukopart OY in Lahti. They are Taiwanese tires and at least according to some friends that have them and what I read from online forums should be pretty good. They weren't insanely expensive either as most special tires are so I was convinced.

I have not installed them yet as the car is in Tampere but I'll do that when I get the car back.

Rear Wheel Arch Repair 1

While I was rebuilding the brake caliper, my friend started working with the passenger side rear wheel arch. The lip was pretty badly corroded so it had to be replaced.

There was a lot of body filler spread all over the quarter panel. Some smaller patch panel had been welded at the rear corner of the arch and the repair had been hidden with the filler. It'll be interesting to see how much of the stuff is on the car when the time comes to paint it.

After getting all the body filler off from the area of the repair, my friend cut the patch panel and marked its size to the car.

The quarter panel hole was cut a bit smaller than the patch panel. My friend stamped the flange of the patch so it would slide under the original steel. The inner wheel arch also needed a small patch to its lip. Luckily nothing more major problems were found. Annoyingly my patch panel did not reach all the way down at the rear of the arch. There was a little corrosion there too so it might need another patch.

The new panel was quite close to the original and didn't seem to need a lot of tweaking to make if fit with the inner arch and the shape of the car. Hopefully the quarter panel would not warp when welding the patch.

Brake Caliper Rebuild

It was time to continue the rust fixing so I drove the Mustang back to Tampere. I joined my friend in the garage for an evening and while he began working with the rear wheel arch, I decided to rebuild the driver side brake caliper. The passenger side caliper had been dragging so I rebuilt it during winter. After that the driver side started dragging. I should have done both at the same time...

When rebuilding the passenger side, I learned that pulling the pistons out could be pretty difficult. This time I used the brake pedal to push them out before removing the caliper. I pulled the brake pads and applied some pressure while my friend made sure all pistons came out evenly. Next I could remove the caliper and sand blast it clean. Then it was finally time to disassemble it.

Unfortunately the cross over line snapped in half while I was taking it out. It had corroded pretty badly and the end fitting would not even turn any more. At this point I was extremely happy that I had bought new lines a few weeks ago. A disaster avoided!

I removed the old seals and cleaned everything as well as I could and it was time to put the caliper back together.

I had new Raybestos seals and four new pistons. After pushing the seals in their grooves, I lubricated the pistons and pushed them in. The new cross over line needed some bending but otherwise assembly went smoothly. I bolted the caliper back to the car and then applied some silver paint on it.

I had also bought new braided brake hoses but couldn't start using them yet. It seemed that the brake line fitting on the car was also pretty corroded and would most likely also break the line if I tried turning it. I'll have to replace the lines later before installing the new hoses.

Adding Relays For Headlights

I did a final checkup for the engine by removing all plugs and peeking under the valve covers. Everything seemed OK except that plugs for cylinders 3, 4, 5 and 6 were a bit greyer than the rest. Weird because they are exactly at the opposite corners of the engine. I need to get the carb tuned by a professional.

With the engine side handled, I decided to do some electrical work. Some previous owner has replaced the original sealed beam light bulbs with later H4 type headlight. This meant a lot brighter lights but with a much higher current requirement. Unfortunately the original wiring and switches were not made to handle that current and it was only a matter of time before something would burn out.

I went through the same problems with my Corvette and solved the issue by redesigning and building a new harness. I didn't want to do that this time as the original harness was in pretty good condition and I wanted to retain the original look. Or at least be able to return everything to original easily. Then I found this article which covered Reenmachines conversion harness. The idea in it was really simple. The new harness took the relay activation signals from the original headlight connectors and added new, larger wires from the relays to the headlights. Zero modifications for the original harness was needed so I wanted one.

Only problem with the kit was the price: 225 dollars for a few wires! Luckily the harness was so simple that building one would not be a big task. First I drew a diagram of it.

The light red and light green wires control the relays and are pushed in the original passenger side headlight connector. I used 18 gauge wires as not a lot of current go through them. The main wires are 14 gauge and there is a 20 A fuse in the main power feed. I decided to hide the relays under the battery tray and measured the wire lengths accordingly. So after a trip to the car parts store and a few hours of building, this is what I got.

I used some nylon wrap to protect the wires and to make them seem a bit cleaner. The lone black wire that comes out of the harness at the junction is screwed to the original headlight ground bolt on the radiator support. It is missing the connector as I had to cut the wire to correct length in the car.

I decided to use a glass fuse as its box was the simplest and every other fuse in the car are of that type. The yellow wire is still missing the connector in the picture as I needed to measure its correct length.

This picture shows the passenger side harness. Unfortunately I could not find a male H4 connector so I had to use individual terminals. The new headlight ground wire just makes a short loop inside the wrapping and connects directly to the old harness.

I also noticed that the H4 terminals are a bit wider that the normal 6,3mm versions. I could not find those either so I had to solder the already wired terminals from the connector to my own wires. Annoying as this meant that the wire colors change. Why couldn't they just include the separate terminals that I could crimp to my wires?

On the driver side I just had the H4 connector and one terminal to the ground of the original wiring harness.

Installation

I began the installation by removing the headlight housings. Then I turned the lights on and measured the voltage in the original connectors. The car was not running but I saw an 1,5 volt drop compared to the battery. That causes a huge difference in brightness and the difference would probably be even more with the engine running.

Next I had to remove the battery so I could install the harness. The relays were placed out of sight under the battery tray and from there the wires come up to the top of the radiator support and split towards the headlights. After connecting everything up I measured the voltage again. This time the difference was under 0,1 volts. Excellent result!

While at it I also replaced the bulbs with better ones and screwed the housings back. I turned the lights on and the difference was huge! I was really happy as building my own harness had cost only about 30€ in parts.

Original wiring

New harness with relays