After a thorough servicing, our 1964 Ford Falcon is running like a champ. All of the original wiring was still in place which made life extremely easy for us. The motor only has a handful of connections to get it running. Once running, we got a timing light on it and started fine tuning the carburetor. After making sure our $100 transmission still had all its gears, we took her for a spin around the block! As expected, the car drove like utter garbage because of the lack of suspension bushings, poor alignment and mismatched tires; all of this can be fixed relatively easily though.
Oddly enough, this car came with 3.50 gearing from the factory, making first gear extremely short yet fun. It’s not hard peeling out on tires that are 20 years old and have a contact patch as wide as your cell phone, but it’s definitely hilarious.
Next on the agenda is to make our Falcon a little less… Ugly? We began stripping off all the surface rust and as much of the flaking paint with an angle grinder and blue clean up disc. After we got down to bare metal, we sprayed some white primer and came back and blocked the car with some 220 grit sand paper. We moved up to 320 grit to begin smoothing things out. Sticking to the budget theme, we’ve been using off the shelf aerosol primer. With proper prep, we didn’t have any adhesion problems.
The Falcon’s original paint had seen better days, so most of it was stripped off and primed.
As for color, we chose Krylon satin blue. Yes, out of an aerosol can! The Falcon’s trim is perfect for making a two-tone color scheme. Believe it or not, we have a total of $1500 in this car including the purchase price of the car. Our goal was to bring back a car that was destined to be scrapped and build a budget friendly cruiser. We think we accomplished that quite well!
