1968 Mustang Fiberglass Work - Mustang Metal Mods

Our completed door handle mod (minus the plastic handle of course). You can see the handle installed in our lead image of this story. One thing we ended up doing was swapping handles side to side, meaning the left is on the right, and vice-versa. This was due to the different release rod operation, but if you want to get fancy with a compound mechanism or a cable and pulley setup, you could leave the handles on their proper side. It didn't matter to us since the driver side key lock hole will be filled regardless.

You saw us test fitting the CDC Flashback fascia last month, but we didn't get into any of the metal work necessary to support it. What we did for our installation was to use an Eleanor fascia mounting bracket from Mustangs Plus and Danny cut it to fit the fascia and made custom mounting ears. The height of the ears is set by bolts right now during the mock up phase, but it will be fully welded before painting.

The sides of the CDC Flashback fascia require attachment to the bottoms of the front fenders (which we trimmed to fit the fascia last month). We borrowed this attaching idea from the Fox Mustang front fascia, which is a stud plate riveted to the fascia's edge, which will pass through two mounting holes in the fender edge and be secured by nylon locking nuts.

With our custom metal fab out of the way and just a few small fiberglass areas to work out, Danny had completed enough of our custom touches to start laying on the Evercoat to give our Mustang its final shape. After allowing the filler just enough time to firm up, Danny knocked down the major high points with a "cheese grater" file.

A second coat of filler and another round with the file got the majority of our panels where Danny wanted them to start sanding with a 36-grit pneumatic sander. Coming up in our final bodywork installment we'll finish up our initial sanding with 80-grit paper and then apply a coat of heavy filler primer, then more sanding, epoxy primer, basecoat, and clearcoat. Stay tuned.

Elsewhere, around the headlight openings are more mounting studs, just like the stock '67-'68 headlight buckets. All in all there will be at least a dozen attachment points to secure the fascia.