I wasn't really looking for a "new to me car" when I found T's-Bird. My old daily driver (Suzuki Swift GTi) ,which I had owned since new in 1989, was having some rust "issues". I was sitting down after dinner one night flipping through the local paper when an ad caught my eye. It read something like this...

1993 Ford Thunderbird 70K loaded call for details XXX-XXXX.

Visions of a low mileage SuperCoupe danced through my head as I dialed the phone number in the ad as I had really liked the SC's since they first came out. In fact, I had a "man crush" on one that used to compete in car audio competitions back when I first started competing with my GTi.

 

A lady answered, and told me the following story regarding the car. She was actually selling the car for her mother, who was going into a retirement home and no longer needed it. It had only 70,000km original (45,000 miles) on the odometer and was in "good" shape...and the price was right! Sooooooo I jumped into Suzi (the GTi) and drove the 5 miles to where the car was located.

I walked around the corner to their backyard and there she was...all dirty and looking a little worse for wear. I don't think grandma ever waxed it...EVER!

I looked the car over from top to bottom and front to back. The body was solid with no rust anywhere. The car still wore the original paint over the entire car (except trunk lid) which is a big plus with me. Brand new Michelin tires, alloy wheels, ice cold a/c, automatic climate control, power steering, power brakes, power locks, power mirrors, power seats, tilt, cruise, remote gas and trunk release etc etc etc. It came with the not so highly rated 3.8L V6 and a 4 spd automatic. Oh, and a RED interior...I HATE RED INTERIORS!!!

I looked past the red interior and looked at the entire car. It had (in addition to very poorly maintained paint) some scratches and dings and a rather large dented panel on the passenger quarter behind the door. The car had been smoked in (another pet peeve of mine) but was still a very clean original 12 year old car.

I spent the first 2 weeks of ownership scrubbing, buffing and polishing every surface of the car. What a lot of work! I burned out my buffer (and put some heavy hours on my new one) and went through a TON of cleaners and polishes but it looked like a new car. I called out a fellow from DentsUnlimited to come and take a look at some of the dings for me. The fellow came right to my house and within an hour almost all the door dings and most of the large dent were gone! It's amazing watching these guys work and I highly recommend them!

I had to get rid of some of the red inside, and repair some broken lights (can you say driving by brail?) so after several trips to the wreckers and searching through a lot of cars I found most of the parts I wanted. New items added included a nice black console, a new dash bezel (the old one was damaged), a tailight, misc. interior pieces and some other odds and ends. A new front corner light was purchased from a member of SCCoWC which replaced the broken one. The back 3 windows were tinted limo black to also help darken down the interior.

The finish on the stock rims was flaking rather heavily so I located a mint set of 1990 SuperCoupe 16" rims from the SCCoWC forum. I had some 245/50/16 Hankook Ventus H405 tires installed which so far have proven to be a great tire.

Of course, as soon as you install some nice wide tires...the car looks too tall. This is where some Suspension Techniques performance lowering springs come into the picture.

One thing that amazed me once I started driving the car, was that there was no drink holders. What kind of car manufacturer wouldn't install this necessity of life? Hello, where am I going to put my large double double? A member of the SCCoWC informed me that the drink/coin trays from a late model Taurus can be slightly modified to fit. A search of the auto wrecking yard found me a nice clean one that in half an hour was installed in the T-Bird.

The stock AM/FM Cassette stereo HAD to go! (Does anybody even have tapes anymore?) In it's place I installed a new Alpine CD player so I could at least listen to my CD's. I will build a custom install ring to blend better with the dash later, after I remove it for the full system install. When I sold my GTi I removed the complete stereo system. This equipment is currently being installed into a custom enclosure for the trunk. It's slowly being worked on as unfortunately time only allows so much!