Eric's 33 Build #583

[kraftee]

Last Tuesday, I left my summer house in Western NY State for the 6-hour drive to Wareham. Stayed overnight and arrived at FF Headquarters bright and early at 9:00AM. After a tour of the factory with Jason, we set to work loading the kit onto my little 12' open trailer. Everything was well packed and ready, so we hit the road at about 11 for the 1,250 mile drive home. Drove all day and all night and pulled into my driveway in Gainesville, Florida at about 7AM Thursday morning. By noon the trailer was in the shop and all the boxes were unloaded onto the floor.

Over the next few days, my buddies came over to help unload the car and remove the body, I removed the engine, transmission and rear end from my donor car, did a detailed inventory and condensed everything down to about 15 boxes. I also sent lots of stuff to the powdercoater's, cut the quad shock mounts off of the axle and organized my shop to begin the build in earnest.

A little about me: I am a middle aged, semi-retired guy with deep roots in the car business. My dad was with Mercedes for years, and owned a large dealership in Pompano Beach, Florida, where I cut my teeth in the auto biz right after college. He sold that store in 1988, which put my two brothers and I out of work. So, in 1990, we purchased a defunct Mercedes - Buick - Jeep/Eagle dealership in Gainesville. Ten years later we added Nissan, Olds and Volvo in Tallahassee. Along the way, we raced Mustangs and then Porsches in the IMSA professional road racing series. I was crew chief and built the cars, my two brothers and dad drove. In 2005, I decided to retire from the automobile business and sold the Gainesville store. Six months later, my brothers bought me out of the Tallahassee dealership. Since then, I have returned to metal sculpture, which is something that I have done since high school - however, now it is pretty much a full-time thing. I work mostly with copper and specialize in marine gamefish, turtles, lighthouses, etc. If you're interested, my website is www.copperlife.net and my facebook page is www.facebook.com/copperlife. My family has also always been into boating, so, after selling the stores, my wife and I were looking to purchase a Great Harbour cruising trawler from local boatbuilder Mirage Manufacturing. Our plan was to spend a lot more time down island in the Bahamas, but Ken Fickett, the owner of the company, convinced me it might be fun for me to join him and be his sales manager. So eight years later, I have sold lots of trawlers and have tens of thousands of miles aboard them at sea. I also have my 100-ton US Coast Guard license and a Class A Bahamian Captain's License and spend about 2-3 months every year captaining cruising charters in the Bahamas.

I have a great shop behind my house and have always had restoration/build projects going. In the '90s, I spent a lot of time restoring vintage motocross bikes (still another hobby - I have a full-on motocross track here on the property.) But over the past ten winters I have worked on mostly car and boat projects - first a Donzi 18, then a '55 Chris Craft mahogany runabout, and most lately, a '67 Buick Wildcat convertible. But now it's time for a new project.

I guess that leads us back to the Factory Five 33. So, here are the specifics of this build: My donor car is the last survivor of our old Mustang IMSA Firehawk series race cars. This particular car was a theft recovery built from the ground up as a "showroom stock" race car - which, translated, means we cheated our A55ES off on the build! After we retired it, we used it only sporadically for track days (we had mounted two race seats and harness sets in it - the kids LOVED riding in it on the race track.) One of my brothers also raced it a few times in the NASA CMC Mustang Series, but since about 2008, it has been parked in a field behind the family Nissan dealership. Anyway, the '89 5.0 EFI is pretty much stock - other than some more cheating: flow honed intake, exhaust porting, a whole bunch of head work, lightened and matched pistons and rods, Ford "Skunkworks" computer, etc. Still basically stock, I would guess it puts out maybe 30 or so more horsepower than stock. It needs a LOT of cleaning up as, while it languished in the field, a family of rats used the space under the plenum as a home - and ate pretty much every wire off the EFI harness! The transmission is an excellent Tremec 3550 with Steeda Tri-Ax shifter. We kept breaking the tailshaft housings on those damned T5s (even the so-called "world class" T5), so we gave up and went to the Tremec - never got caught, either. The rear is a Ford 8.8 with Auburn locker and 3.73 gears (still more cheating).

I ordered the 33 kit with hardtop, power windows, power steering, the EFI harness (of course), rear exit tail pipes, chrome tilt column, powdercoated frame, gas tank delete (already have my Boyd Tank), and racing harness delete (I HATE HATE HATE 5-point harnesses in street cars - going with a 3-point retractable setup.)

I have also ordered a hydraulic clutch setup from Mike Forte and power brakes and air conditioning from Whitby. I am going with 15" wheels and 50-series tires to help the ride quality and also to give it a little more of an old-school '70s look. I want my beautiful wife of 31 years to maybe actually LIKE riding in this thing. I have had plenty of "uncivilized" cars that she hated with a passion! No need to autocross or race this one - had my fill of that over the years. In fact, this build is going to be pretty pedestrian by the standards of this forum. Some of you guys do AMAZING custom work. I'm not going to reinvent the wheel here; gonna do some of the mods and upgrades I have read about here on the forum, but pretty much going with a standard Factory Five looking build. Standard interior (with NO friggin roll bar) and simple, two-tone pearl white over pearl yellow paint job.

So that's where I stand right now. I have pretty much retired from selling boats (although I am still captaining charters in the spring and summer), but I still have lots of copper work to do. I do about a dozen outdoor art festivals a year here in Florida and my website generates lots of work. So, much as I want to, I can't work full-time on the 33. Even so, this promises to be a pretty quick build. There were not many pieces backordered from FF (whew!) and Tom Wallace is right up the road about 10 miles. If I get stuck, I'll just give him a call!

Looking forward to spending lots more hours out in my shop!

ERIC

Mustang at VIR 7-30-06 13.jpgP5150076.JPGP9080027.JPG