The Galaxie Sees Rescue

Okay, another title with double meaning.

True, the car was "rescued" from the clutches of the Folsom Police Department. Where had the car ended up? At my mom and dad's place in the town of... Rescue.

You think I'm making this up, don't you?

I refer to my dad's place as his "shop", but it's not a business. It's a 6-car-sized garage/barn with more tools than Sears. He and my mom (married 52 years, I might add!) have a nice little 2-story home in the country overlooking this huge garage/barn. It's a great place.

Anywho, my dad and I started to take stock of what needs to be done and can be done to the car while it's up here. And one of the first things we agree upon is that the car won't be going home with me tonight. For one thing, I still don't have a front bumper or license plate to put on the car to avoid getting another fix-it ticket. (Contrary to popular belief, just because you were already tagged for a fix-it item the resultant ticket is not a free pass good until the listed date the repairs are due to be made. You can get tagged for the same thing over and over again, if law enforcement so decides. Consider yourself warned.)

The next decision we agree upon is that the car isn't going home with me until the sticky mass of black spaghetti that was once the wiring of this grand old Gal is completely removed and fresh wiring sits in its place. It just so happened that my dad had a brand new 12-circuit rewire kit he had bought for his '32 sedan hanging around, and he wanted a 21-circuit kit, anyway. So I bought his 12-circuit kit off of him. But first, we would take care of the alignment. (Not that difficult on these old cars.) I also tightened up the steering to reduce play in the wheel.

Since I had to leave the car at my dad's place, I got my wife to drive up and get me after work. For the next 4 weekends I drove my Sport Trac up the hill to work on the Galaxie. The many trips in which I didn't have to depend upon driving the Galaxie gave me some flexibility in what I could do to it.

By the following weekend, my dad had found some old 60s-era Stewart Warner gauges to set into the instrument cluster. (Note: Just like in any race car, the Galaxie does not have a speedometer in the gauge cluster. I base my speed on the tach reading. I did that for 8 years with my old Ranchero... only the 'chero didn't even have a tach!)

We cut a panel out of aluminum for the 5 gauges (in order, left to right: fuel, voltmeter, tachometer, oil pressure, water temp). On the reverse side of the aluminum sheet we cut the gauge panel from, it read: Parking for Driving Exam Only. (I do not know where the sign came from... honest!) Then I sprayed the panel with Rustoleum "Hammered" finish paint for a hand-formed look. That same weekend I started doing the rewire by stripping out anything that looked like old factory wiring (and, while it definitely looked old, it hardly looked like wiring thanks to the fire), even the fuse block. Everything.

We also measured out the area on the transmission hump that we would have to cut away to eventually install the Gennie floor shifter. More on that conversion later.

The starter solenoid was moved under the dash, and a Cole-Hersey Racing battery cut-off placed into the top of the dash. Flip switches were added along the lower edge of the dash, just to the right of the steering column.

The new wiring harness was installed with the fuse box tucked under the dash. Wiring was simpler than most since I wasn't wiring in any door / dome / courtesy lights, heater / air conditioner unit, cigarette lighter, or (gasp!) RADIO. (Yes, fellow cardomain.com'ers, MY music is simply the sound of true American V-8 exhaust, just as God intended!)

The car does have wipers and a horn wired in (to make it street legal, of course), and I did add a third LED brake light over the custom molded-in gas filler. Even the taillight bulbs are LED based, making for a MUCH brighter (read: safer) brake light system. The molded-in third brake light actually serves 3 purposes: it is safer, I think it looks cool, and it helps to fill in the gap from the missing original trunk lock bezel.

After I was done with the rewire, the only original wiring remaining was the 2" of wire in the taillight and parking light sockets needed to connect to the new wiring harness. Even the headlights got replacement sockets, and they now sport bright white HID-style housings. Man, they make a difference over the old yellowish sealed-beam lights they replaced!

A Shift In Direction

One of the changes that simply needed to be made to the Galaxie was to convert the sloppy column shift to a floor shift. The expense (not to mention the sheer rarity) of making the conversion with factory pieces from the era would have a serious effect on how we were going to accomplish the feat. Doing so required a suitable aftermarket kit.

Yeah, I know, I know... why didn't we just go with a full 4-speed changeover while we were going to all of this trouble?

It has much to do with that word used in the opening paragraph: "expense". Try pricing a used T-10, or (ouch!) a top-loader tranny. And we're not even talking the added cost of the remaining components needed to complete the conversion! I did mention cost being part of the project considerations, right?

Anywho, my dad was going to put a Gennie shifter in one of his '32 Ford projects that had a C-4 auto. He already had the floor shifter kit, but the cane wasn't as tall as he wanted. A new 24" cane was about half the cost of a new conversion kit, so we split the cost of the new kit and I got the existing kit for my Galaxie's C-4.

The reason for going with the Gennie shifter is that the same kind of kit manufactured by Lokar (still a fine kit, and usually priced less than comparable Gennie kits) has a specific type of Park-position lockout, which prevents the use of a generic shifter ball. See, I just happened to have an old white Hurst 4-speed shifter ball hanging around that would look real nice on the Gennie shifter while confusing the casual looker. (Only about 5% of the people that have looked in the interior of the car have questioned where the clutch pedal is.)

So, we drained and removed the transmission pan to turn over the shifter body from its column-operated position. I went ahead and changed out the tranny filter while I was down there, too. Then we finished cutting out the floor area above the tranny where the Gennie's support bracing had to mount. We were a bit disappointed to find out just how far forward the shifter would go; damn near under the dash! But after we put it in place, we heated the cane with a torch and gave it a major angle. My dad welded a 2" extension on the top of the cane, and we had a shifter that fit. Some adjustments, and it was time to put the floor piece back in place.

We had to weld an additional 1" of sheet metal around the edge of the cut out piece to give us a mounting ring. Lots of sheet metal screws later, the floor was whole again. Then we mounted a 4-speed leather boot out of an old Falcon Sprint for the finishing touch.

My dad had an old Moon-style accelerator pedal just hanging from a wall in his garage, gathering dust. After talking him out of it and an old cabinet hinge later, I had a custom gas pedal, and the original factory one to sell on eBay.

Earlier, I mentioned that I had some rust-through in the trunk above the gas tank. This as pretty common since that area sees a lot of moisture collecting after driving in wet weather, moisture that really has nowhere to go. So, I built up the floor with fiberglass sheeting, bonded with a product called POR-15. They have gas tank treatment, epoxy putty (to repair old, cracked steering wheels), just some really great stuff! If you're restoring any car that has rust issues, this stuff is liquid gold! Trust me on this and save yourself a lot of trouble. You'll thank me for it later.

As an added level of protection for the trunk, I also sprayed the floor of that with truck bed coating. The stuff also acts (minimally) as a sound deadener as well.

The "aluminum" interior panels are actually fiberglass paneling, like they use in restaurant restrooms. At only $35 for a 4' X 8' sheet, it makes perfect fiscal sense for this kind of project. Painted with the Rustoleum "Hammered" aluminum-colored paint and pop-riveted solidly in place, not many doubt it to be the real deal.

The seat is a bucket out of a '66 Mustang with a fresh factory-replica set of covers, and bolstered with 3/4" plywood that I covered with black vinyl and topped with some additional roll cage padding. I even mounted a cup holder to the leading edge of the bolster, made out of a 3" PVC plumbing coupler. It'll hold a 44-ounce drink with no problem.

I am held in place by a purple 5-point M&R safety harness. Who needs air bags?

On the transmission hump I installed a 2 1/2 lb. fire extinguisher. I felt it especially critical in a car nicknamed "Fireball".

In the next page, I'm going to take a break from the car's restoration to share a little of what makes ME tick, and why I would even bother with a project like this.