Sunday, July 31, 2016

Day One to Reno for Hot August Nights 2016

Day 1 of my trip to Reno is in the books, and I'm relaxing in my hotel room here in Las Vegas.  One thing I've noticed about hotels - why are their Internet connections not much faster than dial-up?  Do you folks know how long it took to upload these photos for today?  Frustrating.  Oh well, I'll get over it.

So I hit the road around 8:30 this morning after finishing loading up "stuff".  I put the Mustang on the trailer the night before, so it was ready to go.  I have to remind myself that I'm not heading out to the wilderness somewhere, and if I forget anything, I can get it again wherever I'm going.  A lesson I have to relearn while packing for almost every trip.

Getting ready to go to Reno.  The car will come off the trailer once I get to Carson City

The only stop-n-go I ran into was on the north side of Tucson.  It appears a small sedan and an SUV tried to occupy the same lane at the same time.  The SUV was parked in the median pointing in the wrong direction, and there was scorched rubber crossing two lanes of traffic.  No EMS were on the scene, but a couple of AZ Highway Patrol were there trying to make heads or tails of the incident.

Tucson traffic due to accident

Made it out of Tucson, went through Phoenix
Downtown Phoenix seen from the east

and headed towards Wickenberg on Highway 74.  Saw a beaut along the way, or is that a butte?

Butte southeast of Wickenberg

I know Arizona has some pretty lax gun laws and truly believes in the 2d Amendment, but seriously? This will make the gun grabbers happy  :)

Vote for Shooter!

One thing about trailering a vehicle...I keep seeing it out of the corner of my eye, and for a split second I wonder why that SOB is riding so close to the rear bumper of my truck.  




Once I got north of Wickenberg, it was practically all up hill to I-40.  Made one stop for a break and took this picture of my Mustang with the Burro Creek bridge in the background.  This is headed north on Highway 93.

Joshua Trees while headed north on Highway 93

I made it to I-40 while practically sucking down over half a tank of gas between Wickenberg and Kingman.  Got the "Low Fuel" warning, and put 27 gallons of gas in a 26 gallon tank.  Must have been really low  :)  Good thing I'm carrying a spare 6 gallons of fuel in a container in the bed of the truck.

Headed north on Highway 93 out of Kingman, and made it to Nevada.  Grabbed a hotel room near Nellis AFB, and got some sleep.  It's another 8+ hours tomorrow until I get up to Carson City.  Until my next posting....


Friday, July 29, 2016

It's time to get ready for Reno Hot August Nights 2016.  I am going to trailer the Mustang up to Reno with a one night layover in Las Vegas, and then to Carson City the next day.  Once I get to Carson City, I will be accompanied by my father-in-law to take in some of the events of HAN.

Before heading out, I had to replace the windshield wipers and wanted to replace the front bumper.  As far as I know, these two items are original to the car.  Since I have owned the car, I have not replaced either of these two things.

Anyways, I bought a reproduction bumper from Mustangs Unlimited.  It's a Golden Legion brand and fit pretty well.  I had to "coax" one of the brackets to fit onto the bumper once I got it mounted, but it all came out pretty good.  Nothing that a pry bar and a Dremel tool can't take care of!  Before mounting the bumper, I cleaned the underside of it, sprayed it with a primer, and two coats of Rustoleum Sail Blue paint.  It is close to the Grabber Blue paint on the car, so it won't cause some color clash from reflection.  Picky, I know.
The original bumper

Driver's Side

Passenger Side

Old bumper on top, new bumper below

Prepping the new bumper

All painted and ready to install

New bumper ready to go


With the wipers, it was pretty much remove and replace.  I put a towel around the cowl area and used a claw hammer to remove the wiper arms.  Since I had done this recently when I had an issue with the wiper motor, the wiper arms came off easily.  I believe these are original because they still have the "TRICO" name on the underside of the wiper arms which face towards the cowl.

Old passenger side wiper

Old driver side wiper

Old and new wipers side by side

Next up - loading up the trailer and heading out to Las Vegas for the first night of travel.


Friday, July 22, 2016

In April 2016, we trailered the Mustang up to Flagstaff to make a run on Route 66.  The Mustang originally fought the idea of going by having a wiper motor start acting up the week before we left, and then suddenly the secondaries on the Holley started flooding the day we were supposed to leave.  It put our planned departure behind, but we finally got on the road.  Northern Arizona has the longest, continuous, driveable length of Route 66 remaining.  Along the way, we picked up my oldest daughter, Angela, in Tucson to join us in our adventure.  I did all the driving up to Flagstaff because my wife, Becky, doesn't have much experience driving with a trailer.  My two girls, Angela and Emmalee, rode in the backseat of the truck and made fun of me.

We got to our hotel in Flagstaff at 2:00am.  My original plan was to drive I-40 to the California border and pickup Route 66 there and drive it back to Flagstaff.  However, due to our late arrival and late wakeup, I instead elected to take the Crookton Road exit off of I-40 about 17 miles east of Seligman and start our Route 66 adventure there.

Route 66 after exiting I-40 at Crookton Road

We headed west towards Seligman and enjoyed the views along the way.  Since my Mustang has been converted to a two-seater, Angela rode along with my for this portion of the drive while Becky and Emmalee followed along in the truck.

More of Route 66 between Crookton Road exit and Seligman


Burma Shave!

After about 20 minutes of driving on Route 66, we entered the town of Seligman, Arizona.  Seligman is considered the birthplace of the Route 66 revival, and lives up to its reputation.
Looking west in Seligman

We stopped and got some ice cream at the Snow Cap Diner in Seligman.  They like to play jokes in here...if you ask for a straw, they offer you a bundle of straw.  If you ask for a spoon, they ask if you want a whole spoon (a spoon with a hole in it), or a half spoon (a spoon cut in half).  Just be prepared!
Snow Cap Diner, Seligman

Parked out front of Snow Cap Diner

My three favorite ladies, Emmalee, Angela, and Becky

Emmalee and Angela

Me with my two lovely daughters

After finishing our root beer floats, we headed west on Route 66 to continue our adventure.

Route 66 between Seligman and Kingman

Route 66 between Seligman and Kingman

Route 66 between Seligman and Kingman

We stopped at the Hackberry Store and looked around a bit.  Bought some souvenirs, took some pictures, and continued west.

Hackberry General Store

Parked out front of the Hackberry Store

Emmalee and Angela enjoying their time together

Before leaving Hackberry, I noticed an old soda machine that dispensed bottles.  The bottles were placed in horizontally at the left side of the machine.  One put his/her money in the machine, opened the door on the left, and removed a bottle of their drink of choice.  When I was a kid, we used to find these machines outside of gas stations.  At night, we would go there with a bottle opener, a cup, and two straws.  We would open the door, open the bottle in the machine without paying for it, and let the contents run into the cup.  We would take the two straws and put them together to make one long straw.  One person would hold the dispenser door open while the other one would put the double straw in the opened bottle in the machine and drink the remainder of the soda in the bottle.  We then would share the cup of soda that we got when we first opened the bottle.  Such criminals and delinquents we were!
Old Pepsi bottle dispenser

Getting ready to continue onward

After we finished in Hackberry, we continued heading west on Route 66 towards the city of Kingman.  We gassed up both vehicles in Kingman, got back on I-40 and went east to Williams.  We at dinner there and had some pie.  We parked the Mustang right outside the window of the restaurant and got a kick out of watching the people check out the car.  Some even took pictures.  We went back to Flagstaff to spend the night and left the next morning.

Westward on Route 66 from Hackberry

Freight train headed east on tracks south of Route 66 between Hackberry and Kingman

All ready to leave Flagstaff back to Southern Arizona

Overall, it was a good weekend for us.  My two daughters are 17 years apart in age, and it was fun watching them interact with each other.  We didn't get to travel as much of the Mother Road as we wanted to, but there's still time to try again.  We definitely have memories of our weekend together.





Sunday, July 17, 2016

This is my first attempt at creating a blog, and I will be using it to document  adventures with  my 1965 Mustang 2+2.  First, a brief history of me and my car.

I was born in 1960 in Presidio San Francisco at Letterman Army Hospital.  I grew up the son of a US Marine and a housewife from El Salvador.  My father was mostly stationed in California after I was born, and did three tours of duty in Vietnam.  When he was overseas, the rest of us grew up in Southern California, mostly in Orange County, so I consider that home.  I joined the Army in 1979, and was stationed in Fort Jackson, SC; Fort Lewis, WA; Fort Huachuca, AZ; Schwetzingen, Germany; San Bernardino, CA; Yongsan, Korea; and then back to Fort Huachuca, AZ where I retired from the Army.  After retirement, I started working for the Arizona Department of Corrections, and have been there for 22 years.  Not sure when I will retire from this job, but looking forward to that day  :).

I purchased my one and only Mustang in 1980.  I had been in the Army for almost a  year and was tired of bumming rides from my fellow soldiers and friends.  I started scanning the classified ads in the Tacoma News Tribune newspaper, and was looking for either a late '60's Chevy Nova or a Mustang.  One day I found an ad listing a 1965 Mustang available at a used car dealership in Puyallup, WA for $1000.  I took $1000 out of my bank account, put $800 in my wallet, and the remaining $200 in my front pocket.  I caught a ride out to Puyallup to take a look at the car.  It was a 1965 Mustang 2+2, flat brown in color, with the back end completely covered in various stickers.  I got in, and it smelled like a wet dog.  I took it out for a test drive and it drive fairly well.  I got back to the dealership and offered the salesman the $800 out of my wallet - I  never saw the money leave my hand, and all I heard was, "It's yours".  I drove it back to the barracks where a friend and I spent a couple of days scraping off stickers, cleaning the interior, putting the correct size tires on it (the tires it came with would rub against the fenders in a harder than normal turn), and some hubcaps from a local wrecking yard.  I went back to the dealership to pickup the license plates because the car was a trade-in from California, so the CA plates had been removed.  The salesman's eyes bugged out because it didn't look like the wet dog I drove off the lot a few days before.

The Mustang is a "C" code, automatic transmission.  Basically, a two-barrel 289 with a three speed C4 transmission.  When I bought it, it had a recently rebuilt engine with dual exhaust coming off the stock exhaust manifolds.  It did come with power steering, but no air conditioning.  One of the first things I did to it was pull the power steering system off and toss it in the dumpster...I don't like power steering.  I like to feel the road through the steering wheel, and the power steering pump and hoses sit right on top of the driver's side of the engine, in the way of everything.

Now the Mustang still has a 289, but it has been rebuilt several times.  Currently it has a 4 barrel Holley carburetor, a set of BlackJack or Cyclone headers (from 1980!), a Weiand Stealth intake manifold, Pertronix II distributor with a Flamethrower Coil, Ford Racing sparkplug wires, a CompetitionCam hydraulic camshaft with roller-tipped rockers, a Boss 302 windage tray, HiPo 289 connecting rods, SpeedPro forged aluminum pistons, and a pair of Twisted Wedge TW170 aluminum heads.  The drivetrain consists of a Toploader 4 speed manual transmission out of a 1965 "K" code Mustang, a Hurst Competition Plus shifter, stock driveshaft and an 8" rear end with Traction Lock 3.55 gears (Posi to you GM folks).  Brakes consist of Kelsey-Hayes 4 piston disc brakes that came out of a 1965 GT Mustang and stock drums in the rear.  The front and rear suspension have been upgraded with stiffer springs/shocks, a 1" Shelby/Arning drop on the front, and polyurethane bushings.  The paint is 1970 Ford Grabber Blue.

I drive this car as much as I possibly can.  It's not so fun in the summer here in Arizona without AC and a black interior, but I survive.