The first & Last Car I will Own
— FIRST PERSONAL BUILD —
I bought this 1967 mercury cougar as a barn find in 2012 while I was in high school. It was wrecked in the 90's and had sat up ever since the wreck. From 2012 to 2014 my dad and I went through the whole car and restored everything to make the car reliable enough to be my daily driver. In 2014, two weeks before college started, we finished the project and began driving it. In 2016, a friend and I long hauled hot rod power tour. In 2021, I drove it to North Carolina to get married and my wife and I did a 2500+ mile road trip for our honeymoon. I have logged well over 50,000 miles since the restoration and have 1000s of hours of work into this car. I probably log more miles driving to the track and racing every year than most guys put on their hot rods total.
Engine
The engine has had several iterations over the years, each one taught me more about engine building. Now it is a 347 CI small block ford with CNC ported AFR heads and a mild street cam. It makes 370HP at the tires with conservative timing and fueling, and of course I did all the machine work and assembly myself. I will be changing the valvetrain up soon to a solid roller setup for better dynamics.
I also have most of the parts to build a big cubic inch nascar engine that will get built in the future. C3 RYR heads, 4 inch crank, Jesel shaft rockers, ETC.
Body
The body had bad rust in the rear quarters and the doors and had been T-boned on the driver side, so the body work took roughly 6 months to fix. After doing all major body work, we sprayed high build primer on the car and block sanded it until the body was as straight as we could get it. We painted the car in our barn with a 2 part urethane that is a new ford color, black with faint red and green flakes.
More images coming soon.
Drivetrain
The car came originally with a c4 automatic transmission. Of course that had to go, so I bought a T5 transmission from a 88 fox body mustang and made it work in the car. This meant designing a clutch system, transmission mounts, and driveshaft that worked with the new setup. We used the stock c4 transmission mount and after a little cutting and welding we had that working. We built a new driveshaft from 3in exhaust tubing, and after driving it down the road with the new overdrive transmission we decided to change the rear end ratio. The latest revision of this is a TKO 600 transmission and a torsional limited slip in the rearend. It also has disk brakes and a panhard bar in the rear to help out the autocross times.
