Decided to drive the mustang home to Statesville to my parents house
and do some work on it. Got a bit of a late start friday, then when
I got home, got the car loaded up, got in it, and it wouldn’t start.
Eventually figured the points had closed up, and once they were set
correctly it started up nicely.

Headed home, car did okay, though it ran a bit warm like its been
tending to do. On a 45 degree night, on the interstate, the
temperature gauge indicated about 65% of the way to hot. In
a few other highway spurts in warm weather, it had ran hotter
than that (though never over heating).

Got to Statesville a bit past midnight, so didn’t get any work
done.

Saturday started by trying to replace the turn signal lights
(the entire housing). Didn’t quite go to plan as they require
a retainer that was missing on the car and not part of the
light kit. Eventually ended up kind of gluing the left one
back (the one I removed and notice the lack of retainer).

Next up was to try to get a feel for just how badly rusted
the drivers cowl vent was. On early model mustangs, this is
a very common problem, that is also a pain to fix. Basically,
it’s a very poor design that drains poorly, gathers trash,
and isnt painted correctly, and eventually rusts out.

So, on mine, it was pretty bad. The drivers side vent is
bolted to that, and I basically pulled the bolts though
by hand. Not a great start.

But then things started going better. Checked the timing
and it was way off (about 20 degrees off). Since
that tends to make engines one hot, thats a good thing
to get fixed.

Changed plugs, new rotor and distributor cap. Changed the
oil, new fuel filter, new air filter, new radiator cap.
Didn’t get around to flushing out the cooling system.

Took the wheels off, checked the brakes. The drums all
looked good, and the pads look to be pretty new.

Greased up all the grease fittings I could find. Repacked
the wheel bearings.

The original gas tank has a hole in the top of it. The
top of the tap is also the bottom of the trunk on these,
so that tended to result in gasoline spilling into the
trunk if you feel the tank up.

So out with the old tank, in with a new one. Along with
a new sending unit, fuel line, and filler tube. Also sprayed a couple
of coats of undercoating on it while I was at it.

Found a couple rusted out spots in the trunk, stripped
them down, applied some rust transmogrofying stuff, and
applied some make shift patches for the time being.

“fixed” the dashboard lights that weren’t working. Looks
like the switch/dimmer for the dash lights thats built into
the light switch is bad. Since I didn’t have a replacement,
just wired them to be on whenever the ignition switch is on.

The last thing to get “fixed” was the cowl vent hole. Cleaned
it the best I could with a wire brush and some tin snips. Then
applied a stop gap kluge involving some sheet metal and some
expanding foam. Needless to say, the purists would not be
pleased. But the correct fix is complicated, time consuming,
and expensive, so that will have to do for the time being.
It seems to have stopped the relentless wind that was previously
blowing in while at speed. Much improved.

Car seemed to run cooler on the drive back, which is good.
And a quick calculation shows that it got ~20mpg on the
highway which isnt too bad.