Waiting Around

This week has been a frustrating week with not being able to concentrate on any one thing for a period of time. For those that don’t know Adam also runs a recovery company, and sometimes to help out Adam has been on the road doing some recovery when needs must. Most of the time our Mustangs are picked up and delivered back to customers in our covered lorries or recovered on the flat backs if that is what’s required. We have provided this extra service for a long time now and works well, it can save miles on the cars, pick up dead cars or transport them for safety reasons. This week our own Mustang Maniac truck was called to a mission of mercy to recover a car that had got stuck following a SatNav. Although we like our SatNavs, if you follow them to the letter they can lead you to some random places and this was no exception.

All hands to the pumps can obviously have benefits and down sides, the up side is we can help those that need our services, the downside is that we are not always in the office to take technical phone calls. So in that respect we apologise if you have tried to get us without success, but sometimes we take our overalls off and put on our suits of shining armour on to save the day.

We will go a little more off piste now as it were, but a similar incident where the sister company LAR were called out to a second Sat Nav failure this week. This time it was a sewage lorry that got stuck in some “mud” should we say, the lorry tried to turn around but got bogged down so we had to pull it out, not a nice job but somebody had to do it. We also had one of our newer recovery vehicles at Trucks Fest this weekend, if you are there pop by and say hello.

Anyway, back to Mustangs now; we often have cars in that require finishing off due to difficulty of the task, problems or time constraints which we fully understand of course. The owner of this stripped down shell had been working on her for a while now and wanted it to be painted by us. The car has been previously prepped and primed which now sits waiting for the next stage in the paint process. We did have to replace a front panel and she should be ready to go to the paint shop as soon as there is a free slot.

A newish 289 engine needed some serious diagnostics as it was making all sorts of noises and rattles. The whole car was transported here for us to investigate. This was a pretty simple one diagnose – no oil pressure, when we say no oil pressure – there was none, it didn’t even register, so we quickly shut her down. We took the engine out and removed the sump of and could see there was the optional race oil guard fitted which was nothing to do with the issue we have now. We investigated the crank and the more delicate parts for damage where we could see that it had all worn away and was now  small block scrap unit. We are not sure the full reasons why yet, but our first suspect could be a faulty oil filter, it’s rare but it can happen.

We strongly recommend to pay the extra few pounds to get a good quality oil filter, you may save a small amount short-term, but cost an awful more lot long-term!

Acapulco ’66 Coupe

The work on the mechanics has moved inside , Quite s specialised job of fitting a head liner in place. This has been fitted now and the fold marks will soon fall out when the head liner bows pull it a little tighter over time. Now you are getting a little taster of the inside colour scheme.

At Mustang Maniac we have parts to hand most of the time which are just collected from stock and noted on the system for invoice. Some of those parts can be stored in other areas that are locked away and can take a few minutes to locate. To try and work efficiently we aim to have the parts we need for the next day sourced from stock the evening before, that way we can just get on with the work when we get to the workshops in the morning. When we said to hang on a minute while we get the parts, we didn’t think we took that long at the end of a very busy day ! :-)