So I haven’t been killing myself on this project the last couple of weeks since tedious jobs were required that are holding me up a bit.  The fenders, hood and door gaps need to be done before I can prime and paint these panels.  The gaps on these items are the important step that is suicide to do with painted panels.  This has been a slow process.  I have been wire wheeling and clear coating bolts and clips.  There are some attaching hardware like threaded inserts that were missing so we had to weld our own in the correct location to make the fenders fit appropriately.  The drivers door still requires all the rust work to be completed as does the driver’s quarter panel.  I will tackle these tasks next until I go after the roof of this car.  The two horns that I had for this car needed to be tested,  including a drop of oil in the tuning screw as well as painting and installing on the car.  The car wiring is not in place yet but at least it will be plug and play when the time comes.  I sanded the engine flex fan and painted it.  I had a helper for this task as seen in the  photo.  I clear coated the fan spacer as well as found the proper bolts to hold this fan to the water pump.  The majority of the body work is complete on the passenger side but I have to spray high build primer yet and block sand these panels.

So wheels and tires have been on the back burner because I had to convince myself to spend the money on them.  I had ordered a set of Magnum 500 wheels in 2022 for my Mustang and these came with center caps and wheel nuts.  The same rims I ordered for this Cougar cost me $400 more for the rims without center caps and nuts.  The center caps were ordered from the same location as the rims but the company I purchased them from told me they were having problems getting the caps and maybe I should buy them on Ebay instead.  So here’s what went down.  The company that made the rims and center caps was bought out by another company that was bought out by Holley…..which apparently may have been bought out by a bigger company.   This company told the original wheel maker that they needed to lose 40% of their products that were not fast sellers.  The rep for the wheel company told my supplier that if a note of “Coming Soon” was listed after ordering from them then this was code words for “Fat Chance Getting These From Us Ever!”  I was getting them from my supplier for $268 but ended up paying $340 from Ebay after shipping, brokerage fees, duty, etc.  Here was the kicker……the seller on Ebay was Holley!  So they would sell their remaining stock on Ebay for more money than selling it to their long time trusted specialty shops to resell and make a profit.  Oh joy!  I just love being the “End User” and paying out the rear end.   Now on to the tires.  I have used BF GoodrichTA tires with  raised white letters for my builds.  It is common place in the industry to use these tires.  They are the accepted norms for tires.  They are non existent as I write this paragraph.  My supplier has none of the size that I needed so I went to Cooper Cobra white letter tires instead.  In  recent months I have seen several cars with these tires in various You Tube videos of other people’s builds.  These tires overall were cheaper by about $200 a set compared to the BF G’s.  In 2022 my BFG’s were $400 a set cheaper than they are listed today.  They went up $100 a tire in four years.   The shipping for the rims which came from Calgary Alberta was more expensive than it was four years ago.  This is why this hobby is getting ridiculous.  So for rims, center caps, lug nuts and tires I spent $900 more than in 2022 and this is considering that I changed the tires to cheaper Cooper Cobras.  Had I been able to get BFG’s the difference would have been $1100 plus taxes.