A '65 Mustang comes and goes

When I had to sell my '67 Fairlane GT, I traded it for a '65 Mustang that looked like the one below.

It had GT style Rally wheels instead of those in the picture.

The main attraction for me was the engine. I never really knew much about it but I told everyone, and I suspected, it was a "K" code 289, wth solid lifters. Stock it was rated at 271 hp. This one had some mods.

Starting at the top was the 3x2 intake with its oval cast aluminum air cleaner. 

Next was the Mallory dual point distributor with the weird cap, and no vacuum advance.

The last modification I was aware of was the headers. I don't remember exactly what brand they were but I think they were Tri-Ys.

That's it. Other than those changes it was a pretty mundane Mustang. I had a 3-speed manual transmission, drum brakes, and no power steering.

I had the Mustang from late '68 until the winter of '70/'71. I'm a little fuzzy on the exact timeline. I know I had it before I got drafted. My dad came to see me a couple of days before I got on the bus. We went to Johnstown, N.Y., to visit my sister. My dad drove the Mustang back to Connecticut.

I next drove the Mustang in March of '69 when I was sent home to recuperate from double pneumonia. 

I took it to Connecticut Dragway once that spring. I, and the car were totally unprepared. I opened up the headers and the engine misfired terribly. To top it off, the driver's side motor mount snapped!

While back in Connecticut I worked for a friend's brother at his shop in Vernon. I repaired the Mustang there and made the decision to swap the 3-speed for the top loader 4-speed (that transmission was in 3 different cars). 

Once in the car I found that the 3rd & 4th shifter arm hit the floor. I simply reversed it, and ended up with a wacko shift pattern (why I didn't just beat the snot out of the floor to give it room is beyond me).

This would be the normal shift pattern -

The shift pattern ended up with 3rd and 4th swapped. Not exactly conducive to quick upshifts.

The last modification was the 9" rear end. It was already in the car. And it had what could have been a big problem.

Ford 9" rears through the years used two different fill holes. The most common was in the "pumpkin."

The other was in the rear of the housing.

Now take a guess which my Mustang had. You guessed it, neither. There was no fill hole! I owned that darn car for almost 3 years and never, ever was even able to check the diff gear oil level!

At some point I changed the exhaust. I wanted something with more noise. And boy did I get it. In place of the mufflers, I installed two resonators from a '61 or '64 full size Ford with a 390. The resonators were pretty short and they were straight through. Here's a picture of the exhaust for a '63 Ford. The mufflers are the long, round things. They fit behind the rear wheels and are almost 3' long. You can see how small the oval resonators are.

Those noisy resonators caused me some trouble in Canada. I got stopped by the OPP (Ontario Provincial Police) late one night. I was accused of having no mufflers; I argued that I did. The officer said regardless the exhaust was too loud. Fix it ticket! Some real mufflers cured the noise.

The Mustang never was what it should have been. The bones, that solid lifter 289, were good. But there were problems, oh lordie there were problems.

I'll start with the Mallory dual point distributor. Maybe, just maybe, it would have worked fine with a single 4-barrel. But the big oval air cleaner for the 3X2 setup caused a big problem, a problem that meant a new distributor cap whenever it snowed, or rained hard.

Let me explain. Snow would blow under the hood and pack the front or the air cleaner. It would then melt and drip onto the distributor cap, where it would follow the casting marks to the coil terminal. It would then arc across to one of the plug terminals, etching the cap, making it garbage. Back then those caps were about three times the cost of a stock cap.

Eventually I exchanged the Mallory for a stock Ford distributor with vacuum advance. Not only did I never have to replace the cap after every snow storm, but the darn car ran better!

I should have replaced the 3X2 carb set up for a single 4-barrel while I was at it but that's hindsight. Yes the issue with snow (and sometimes rain) was no longer a problem with the stock distributor. The 3X2 just never worked well. There was always an issue with the end carbs sticking shut. It was almost like there was a governor; I'd press on the gas pedal and all was fine until it felt like my foot was on the floor. Then I'd stomp on the pedal and the end carbs would open. Once open they wouldn't fully shut! 

I worked on the carbs many times, checked the linkage (no binding), and it seemed like the throttle plates were jamming. I never did get it to work correctly.

When I first went to Canada I sent the Mustang back with my friend Tony and my brother. Months later I asked my sister to bring it back. I was then living in Ottawa, and taking classes at Carleton University. 

The Mustang was never really cutout to be a winter car, especially not in snow-bound Ottawa. Toward the end of that winter I was driving and hit a chunk of frozen snow with one of the headers. It broke open at one of the welds. I jerry-rigged it so it didn't make too much noise.

I was pretty much a penniless student, working part-time, with no hope of having enough money to fix the Mustang. So back to Connecticut it went. It was sold, probably for way less than the what sum of the parts were worth.

Do I wish I had kept it? Mostly no. Back in snow country a car like the Mustang is best used as a good weather car. If I had kept it, it most likely would have ended up a salt-eaten junk. I do wonder sometimes who bought it, and what they did with it.

There's always more to the story of course. These are the parts I feel like sharing.