Ok, so I am finally getting around to this post. I am the third owner, bought this car in 1990 as a father son project while in high school. It has just under 65,000 on the odometer and it was a really solid car when I bought it. It needed paint, but it had no rust in the body anywhere. It was repainted that winter, but I never put the decals back on as I could not afford them.
It was a daily driver for the next 16 months and then went back to dad for storage while I was in college.
Post college, I relocated from Nebraska to California (met my wife in college and said she was not going to spend one more damn winter in Nebraska, so I sacrificed and moved to SoCal!) and left the TA behind. Dad always kept it garage, except for that one day it decided to hail on it
, but he tried to keep it running and it was always registered and insured.
He died in 2004 and there was the car, still sitting in storage. It had not run in several years and sat there a couple of more until I brought it out to California in about 2006. Once again it sat in my garage collecting dust until I finally bit the bullet to try and get it running. The first goal was to try and get it running, but I found that the t-stat housing and the water pump were leaking pretty bad at one point as well as the power steering pump. The battery tray and rad support had rusted through (shocking I know) so I decided to pull those and replace, which meant one afternoon the front clip was disassembled with all nuts/bolts tagged and bagged.
After looking at the motor further, I was not willing to try and start it as it smelled pretty sludge filled and the decision was made to remove the motor for inspection. It had never been removed/rebuilt but did have a fresh rebuilt turbo when I bought it. What a good decision that was as the inside was completely sludged up from a lack of maintenance by the previous two owners.
That was Fall 2009. The motor was taken in to the machine shop in/around December 2009 and bored .020 over with new Silvolite pistons. The crank was turned .010, heads cleaned, valve job and then life interupted for a year, including moving. (Had to hire a tow truck to haul the TA 12 blocks to new house because it was a bare sub-frame with no suspension on the front.)
About two weeks ago a buddy started on the FE 360 out of an inherited Ford F100 and challenged me to get off my arse and build my motor. So we hauled them to a friends shop for final assembly. After two weeks (one night each week) we finished our motors. I will be hauling it home to rest while the subframe/control arms/rad support/bumper reinforcement and brackets are powdercoated next month. I will be installing all new brake/fuel lines, new master cylinder and booster to begin final assembly.
Since this is not a frame off resto, but a homegrown hands on build on a limited budget, the majority of the work is being done by me and my friend. I will strip the firewall and repaint as well as the immediate area of the subframe while that is out. Once the motor is back in, I will begin working back taking out the rear end and detailing that area too. I developed one rust spot behind the RR wheel spoiler, but it is only about
2 1/2". I cleaned that up temporarily to prevent further creep of the crud. It will be a while before it is finished, but it will be nice when it's done. The interior is in really great shape and only needs a headliner. I had that recovered in fabric in 1990 as the foam had let go on the original. I will update as the progress is made. See my following posts for what I have documented in photos so far.
