After four years, over 100,000 miles, and such abuses as road coursing, drag racing, canyon carving, land speed runs, drag racing, long-distance road trips and the unholy mess that is the road system of Ohio and Michigan, Project Angry Grandpa was hurting. And it was bad enough that even my wife noticed, after my trip down to Alabama for the Ratty Muscle Cars deal. Things were beyond broken, and a quick and dirty check-out ruled that I was looking at nearly a full front-end rebuild. Crap. So I made a proper decision: I’ll drive the Fox Mustang while I wait to get all of the parts together! Sure, most of the interior is out and the floor is tearing itself apart, but a couple of days’ worth of road work (and the punchlines for bringing a Ford to LS Fest) would be fine. Except it wasn’t…while running errands a couple of days ago, the questionable location in the floor of the Great Pumpkin Mustang finally let go, dropping the seat down to the tracks. In the interest of keeping that car alive, it’s parked. So now I was up to three dead cars in the driveway…that will not do.

Ultimately, since the Imperial’s upcoming engine is still a ways off (the crankshaft is out being turned) and the Mustang is now probably going to need a new floor pan, I had no choice but to drop money on the 300C, and yesterday morning, I was not looking forward to the project: sway bar end links, tie rod ends, both hub bearings, and a full caliper rebuild on one side, plus a deeper check-out for more damage. I rolled out the air compressor, unearthed the impact gun, and on a temperate yet sunny day, got down to business. It was money well spent…the hub bearings had an eighth-inch of side-to-side play in them alone.

I may not work at the speeds Erik at BFNY Performance works at, but four hours later, everything was done, Angry Grandpa was on the ground, and short of a proper alignment, was back in action. Not even such fun as having the wrong caliper delivered and finding that the hub nut is some monster that no ordinary tool kit would ever have stopped me…in fact, I managed to score a socket-and-ratchet kit for 1″ to 2″ sockets! The caliper rebuild was flawless. The tie rods and end links were stupidly simple. I didn’t even have to fight the brake pads (usually the fun I have with disc brakes) and there was no hour-long bashing session to free up ball joints. I didn’t even bleed. In fact, everything went together so well that I actually am a little concerned. I won’t look a gift horse in the mouth, however, and the test drive simply revealed a home-done alignment that needs only a minor correction to be spot-0n.

There’s my story, now what about yours? What went better than expected? A full engine swap where it fired on the first hit of the key? Electrical work that didn’t take two years with everything functioning? Let’s hear it!