1. Intro

This is the 1966 Mustang (the Barudi "bomb" as my co-workers dubbed it) we purchased for $1000 before our first child, our son, was born, sometime in 1984 or 1985. Our niece was living with us at the time (you can see her standing near our 1984 Buick in the picture on the right) and my wife (the other woman in the picture) wanted me to fix it up and we were going to give it to her when she turned 16.
After we first got this Mustang, I began stripping the old paint off after it had been sitting out in the hot summer sun in Southern California. There were a few spots on the trunk that were bubbling, so I took a putty knife to it, and it peeled off like dead skin. There were quite a few layers of paint on the 'peel'. The top layer was a midnight blue that had faded to a chalky dark blue as seen in the photos above. There was a copper-brown under the blue, and a torquise blue under that. Underneath all of these layers was the original Springtime Yellow. After peeling off the majority of paint, I attacked the layers of Bondo underneath the yellow, especially in the rear quarter panel. The front had a lot of Bondo indicating that at some point in time, the car was in an accident of some sort. The hood was bent near the front, and the head-light frames and covers were broken in some places. The front bumber was bent, but the grille was still in pretty good shape. The doors looked fine except for some dings, but the front fenders were pretty banged up. I basically stripped all the chrome off the car and put it into storage. After analyzing the front fenders, I decided to buy new reproduction front fenders, along with the emblems for the side. I made the mistake of throwing the fenders away before I could make a template for the emblems. After sanding it down to bare metal, I primered it with rust-preventative red primer.
Then came the first child, Christopher, in Sept 1987.
Then came the second child, Katelyn, in June 1990
Since then, we've moved once in California, and then moved to Illinois, and then again to another town in Illinois.
Every time, taking the eye-sore with us.

Christopher turned 16 in 2003 and drove a 1990 Pontiac Grand Am for a while.
Chris and I worked on the car in the summer of 2003, just before he turned 16 and now it is finally finished.
 Here's a little history of how that went...........
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