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TheAutoBuilder.com

Ford

New Love for the Step Child

Ford fans will always have a soft spot in their blue-oval hearts for the Windsor, the Cleveland and the big 460 FE engines—and deservedly so. If you’ve ever crawled a junkyard for one of these engines, you’ve likely passed over more than a few 351M and 400 engines to find what you are looking for. Poor factory numbers and bad word-of-mouth have made these cousins to the mighty Cleveland about as wanted as poison ivy at a nudist colony, but there is power to be found in those engines—and cheap, too.

HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR

Looking at the Stallion shows the influence of Unique Performance on Foose’s design. Actually, once you really sit down and look at the car, it appears to be a collage of design features from classic Mustangs, all herded together on the same car. The new front fascia replaces the stock headlight buckets with a large round light and smaller driving light, and this arrangement looks very similar to that found on the Unique G.T.500E. Horizontal billet bars replace the stock honeycomb mesh in the upper grille, shaped very much like the original ’65 grille, down to the offset Foose badge in place of the stock Mustang emblem. The lower grille contains another pair of round lights and more billet bars.

SLICK SLEEPER

Mustangs are usually not candidates for sleepers, because everyone knows Mustangs have plenty of power from the factory for their lightweight bodies. This example, owned by Mike Skiles, looks like an original ’69 Mustang, but as soon as the engine is fired, that logic is thrown out the window.

LONG TIME COMING

It’s no guarantee that both halves of a married couple will love the automotive hobby. More than one marriage has ended following the ultimatum, “It’s the car or me,” though the same statement has also put an end to a large number of perfectly good hot rod projects. So it’s always nice when a car can bring a couple even closer, as is the case with Dennis and Dixie Gray and their ’63 Fairlane.

WHAT A CONCEPT

After recently purchasing a ’62 Thunderbird, it became obvious very quickly that the car needed a new engine. Our plan was to turn the car into a daily driver, and so, as long as we needed a new engine, we figured we’d add air conditioning to the car while we were at it. And if you really know your Ford history, you also know that the ’62 was the last model T-bird to come with a generator rather than an alternator—one more reason to consider an upgrade.

SHOW & GO

York, Pennsylvania’s Jesse Houseman is a genuine Ford man. In addition to owning an ’89 convertible 5.0, an ’04 F-150 and, previously, an ’89 LX 5.0, he built the stunning ’88 LX you see here. He did almost all of the work himself, starting with a four-cylinder donor car in poor shape and transforming it into a show car with racecar performance—or is it the other way around?

CONCEPTUALLY ’40

It was a sketch published in another street rod title, and while it brought many interesting comments, to our knowledge no one acted on the sketch to convert it to a real roadster. Enter Sam Magarino of Sussex, New Jersey. Now, Magarino likes hot rods, and lately he has enjoyed building some pretty outrageous hot rods with the help of Barry Lobeck and his crew at Lobeck’s. This would be a project of great magnitude, and that was the name aptly applied to this car for the show season.

GOING PRO

Producing horsepower requires two major ingredients, namely, air and fuel. Of course, the two must be supplied in the correct proportions and at the proper time; but improving power is a simple matter of adding airflow. Naturally, additional fuel will be required once the airflow is improved, but the first item on the horsepower priority list should always be more airflow.

PUMP THE POWER: PART 2

Auto manufacturers are constantly working to develop trucks that safely tow and haul more weight. However, the byproduct of high load capabilities is a rough unloaded ride. On a recent visit to J&D Performance, we found the crew beginning work on an Air Ride system for the owner of a 1999 F-350 two-wheel-drive dually. The owner of the truck was happy with its ability to tow and haul, thanks to Part-1’s addition of a full Banks Power Pack, but extremely unhappy with the truck’s ride when unloaded.

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