A few retrospective articles regarding the recent passing of automotive innovator Carroll Shelby:
USA Today: Auto Legend Carroll Shelby Dies
USA Today: Shelby And Ford: A Timeline
And a slideshow over at Yahoo:
Yaho: Slideshow: Legacy of Carroll Shelby
I’ve never been the biggest follower of Shelby and his Cobra offerings over the years, but I’ll say this: The 1968 Shelby GT500 in that slideshow is pretty damn sweet!
Those of you with a cool fifteen grand burning a hole in your Dockers will probably be interested to hear about this:
Detroit Bureau: Ford Launches ‘New’ 1965 Mustang
That’s right: For a mere $15,000, you too can be the proud owner of a body shell (minus hood, fenders, glass, and everything else) of a 1965 Mustang. Such a bargain, right?
If you own a classic car and plan to join the “fix it yourself” club, at some point you’re going to have to track down wiring problems. And to do that, one of the things you’ll need to know how to do is to test for continuity in a circuit or wire.
Today’s small digital multimeters make continuity testing a simple task. My multitester happens to be the uber-common GE Digital Multimeter GE2524, which I probably picked up at Wal-Mart or Home Depot at some point. That bright yellow thing has come in handy more times than I can count.
Here’s how I think of it: Continuity means you have an unbroken electrical connection between two points. For example, a three-foot strand of 12-gauge wire has continuity if electricity can go from one end of it to the other. That same wire, cut in half, would not have continuity, assuming you’re still trying to get electrical power to the same end, three feet away.
And obviously, a four-foot roll of rubber tubing does NOT have continuity, because rubber doesn’t conduct electricity.
Suppose you have a wiring harness which contains three separate wires — red, green, and blue — and which runs for, say, twenty feet. Consider a harness like this:
The harness is wrapped inside plastic sheathing, so visually inspecting for wire breaks and such would be a pain — particularly so if it’s already installed in your car. But if you have a multimeter and can test for continuity, then it’s a snap to determine whether each wire is “closed,” or continuous, and whether any of the wires are broken inside the harness.
Obviously, when you touch one end of the harness’s red wire to the multimeter’s red probe, and the other end of the red wire to the multimeter’s black probe, you want to see something on the screen to indicate continuity. If you don’t, then somewhere in that harness is a break in the red wire.
Further, suppose you’re wondering whether one of your wires is coming into contact with another wire inside the harness. Maybe you suspect that the green and blue wires have chafed somehow, and are contacting each other inside the harness somewhere. By touching one multimeter probe to an end of the green wire, and the other multimeter probe to an end of the blue wire, you can see whether the circuit is continuous — which, of course, would validate your suspicions. Naughty, naughty wires.
Here’s a shot of the settings I need to select on my GE multimeter in order to test for continuity:
Note that the dial is turned to the figure which looks kind of like an arrow (→) overlapping a plus sign (+). The red probe wire is plugged into the “VΩmA” port, and the black probe wire connects to the COM port.
Note the screen readout on the multimeter pic below: The screen reads simply “1″, which shows on the very left side of the screen. This “1″ tells me that there is no electrical connection between the two probes — the circuit is “open.” They’re not touching each other, and they’re not connected by a completed wire or circuit which conducts electrical power from one end to the other.
Now, if I were to touch the two probes together, this would complete the circuit in the simplest way possible, thus making it “continuous” or “closed.” The same thing occurs if I touch the probes to either end of a good, non-broken wire.
How does the multitester do this? Well, when testing, the multimeter sends out small-voltage signals through one probe, which, if the circuit is continuous, it then picks up in the other probe.
In cases where “continuity” exists, then, I would expect to see something else — well, in the case of the GE multitester, pretty much anything else — in the multimeter screen. For example:
In the above image, the two probes are touching, which completes the circuit. Thus, we have continuity, and the multitester displays something other than “1″ on its screen.
On the GE tester, when continuity exists, the screen shows a wide range of numbers on its right-hand side. What these numbers mean, I have no idea. All I really need to know is that there’s continuity in the circuit because something other than a left-side “1″ appears on the tester screen!
Now that my dash lights are looking better, and (more importantly) the weather has cooled off considerably, I decided it was time to tackle the problem of piss-poor headlamps in our Mustang.
Given how dim the old headlights (a pair of Sylvania 6014s running on what I presume was stock factory wiring) were, I have to wonder just how it is that folks manage to drive at all at night with these classic cars. In my case, after-dark driving in the Mustang was not something I wanted to do if it could be avoided. But with no A/C, and consistent 100-degree Oklahoma summer days, when else ya gonna drive the thing (and not be sweat-soaked and miserable)?
So, if you want to boost the headlight performance of an old Mustang, the first thing to realize is that the factory headlight-wiring setup was never intended to handle much current. Aside from forty-year-old wire, which is likely not in great shape, the largest drawback is that the headlamp’s power doesn’t come directly from the battery. Rather, the circuit runs through the headlight switch itself. That, at least, is what I’ve gleaned from lots of internet reading on the topic. Makes sense to me.
Today’s newer, brighter halogen headlamps — which actually DO light up the road, rather than just throw a splash of yellow/brown haze over it — work great, but they need significantly more power than did the lamps of thirty or forty years ago.
Sure, you could plug a pair of 55-watt halogens into the factory sockets, and change nothing else. But flickering lamps usually follow — as does smoke from behind the dash, if you really push things. (That 1960s-era headlamp switch can handle only so much abuse, ya know.)
The solution here is to install a new harness in place of some of the aged, brittle factory harness that’s already there. In this new harness — which gets power straight from the battery — are a couple of relays. The new harness connects to both of the headlamps, as well as to one of the old harness’ light sockets. Thus, when you turn on the headlights, the headlamp switch’s signal activates the relays, which in turn send current directly from the battery to the headlamps. This accomplishes the goal of getting full battery power to the headlamps via new, heavier-gauge wire. It relegates the old harness to use only as a small-current pathway whose only task is to activate the relays.
To my knowledge, there are a couple of makers of such a harness. The first is Reenmachine:
Reenmachine: Halogen Conversion Kit
And, of course, Scott Drake:
Scott Drake: Headlamp Relay Harness
The Reenmachine kit comes with two Hella halogen lamps, and currently runs $225. The Scott Drake harness doesn’t come with lamps, and can be had for $120 or so at a host of retailers.
For those of you with the motivation for building your own relays-and-harness setup (or who need schematics to do a little troubleshooting), here are a few helpful links:
Daniel Stern Lighting: Headlamp Circuit Upgrade
Mustang Grabber Registry: Install Headlight Relays
And a decent overview of the classic Mustang electrical system:
Mustang Monthly: Troubleshooting Your Electrical System
I purchased the Scott Drake relay-installed harness from CJ Pony (CJP part number WHLR; Scott Drake part number C5ZZ-14290-RH). This harness, as described, is compatible with 1965 to 1973 Mustangs; it set me back a litle over a hundred bucks. (I’ve read that the same stuff could be bought from Radio Shack for less than $20, plus wire. But going that route would presuppose that one knows what the heck one is doing when it comes to relay- and harness-building, which I most assuredly do not.)
The Drake harness contains two relays, one fuse, two female headlamp sockets (connect to new headlamps), and a single male socket (connects to one of the old harnesses’ sockets). And it comes with a wonderful installation “manual”, too.
As it turned out, I also had to buy an additional $3 headlamp socket from O’Reilly. This was because the socket on my factory harness (I chose to use the passenger-side socket) didn’t come close to matching the male socket on the Scott Drake harness. No biggie — just a simple cut-splice-and-wrap removed the original socket and replaced it with a new-style one, which fit perfectly.
I also needed several feet of 14-gauge power wire, which I already had on hand. No matter how I routed the new harness, I could not get the new passenger-side socket to reach the passenger headlamp itself. I tried three different routing combinations, to no avail. So again I had to do the splice-and-wrap thing, adding a few extra feet of 14-gauge wire to the Scott Drake product. Once that was done, I had plenty of harness to make it to both headlamps, with the dual relays and fuse mounted just beneath the battery (pic above). From there, the red power wire from the Drake harness connected easily to the battery side of the starter solenoid, and there were plenty of opportune spots for a grounding connection.
My upgrade headlamps were a pair of Sylvania H6024 ST Silverstars (12v; 65/55w). These are sealed-beam halogen headlamps, and are currently Sylvania’s “high performance” offering. I purchased them from my local O’Reilly Auto Parts store. Cost was $52 for the pair, plus tax.
Though it uses the Reenmachine harness (noted above), a Mustang Monthly “Upgrade the Headlights” how-to gave me a lot of assistance. Still, what had been billed as an “easy” job that should take perhaps a couple of hours didn’t quite turn out that way. Most of my time was spent routing and rerouting the new harness, looking for possible combinations that wouldn’t require my extending the passenger side of the harness. Alas, I wasn’t able to find any.
With that, plus a couple of trips to my nearest parts joint (O’Reilly), the harness install took me most of a day.
Wow … what an improvement! My first drive with the new headlamps was at a nicely-dark 9pm, and the halogens lit up my neighborhood roads far, FAR better than their predecessors. Now I just need to get them aimed, and we’ll be all set to tackle whatever nighttime driving comes our way!
It’s a task that I’ve been working on sporadically for several weeks: The dash-gauge lighting in our Mustang has never been particularly useful, nor attractive. What, if anything, could be done to improve it?
Well, with LED lighting technology now mainstream, I figured it’d be worth a shot to replace the Mustang’s cluster bulbs (your standard 1395 incandescent) with modern LEDs purchased from National Parts Depot. I was hoping to see better color (more blue, than blue-green) and brighter lighting on the gauge faces.
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Certainly the lighting is much more “true blue” than it was previously, which, while it isn’t the original stock look, I greatly prefer. In the images above, thanks to my Nikon’s extended exposure time, the lighting appears to be much brighter than it really is to the naked eye. So while I believe the LEDs make the light somewhat better, and make the gauges easier to read at night, the improvement really isn’t that great.
Well, I replaced the old 1895 bulbs with clear LED equivalents (eight of them in all), as stated before. The old bulb filters were cloudy and brittle, so I replaced those as well. (Bulbs were from National Parts Depot; filter kit from CJ Pony Parts.)
According to my Ford service manual, the gauge bulbs themselves can be replaced simply by reaching under the dash and up behind the cluster. The blue filters, on the other hand, can only be changed or removed once the front bezel is taken off and the gauges (including the speedo) removed temporarily.
The back of the gauge bezel is designed to reflect the bulbs’ light onto the gauge faces, so I repainted the reflective parts of the bezel backs with a white gloss paint — Model Master #4696 Gloss White, to be exact.
In the photo at right, the gauge housing and the bezel have been separated, and the gauge faces cleaned up a bit. I’ve found the bezel plastic and surface “camera case” paint to be extremely delicate, so I recommend to always place it down on a protected surface. Note that the concave bezel surfaces are already partially white — though it’s a flat white. This is presumably to help reflect light onto the gauge faces, but it doesn’t do much of that. So, to remedy this, my first instinct was to repaint these surfaces with a gloss white paint.
However, the paint didn’t do all that much to improve the brightness. So I then lined the two largest gauge-bezel rims with super-shiny duct tape, figuring this would provide even more relectivity. (Pic at right shows the speedo- and pressure-gauge bezels after taping.)
While I had the cluster assembly apart, I also cleaned off all the gauge faces, repainted the needles (Model Master Enamel / Fluorescent Red #FS 28915), and generally cleaned up the wiring harnesses and stuff on the back of the cluster.
I wanted to see how both kinds of bulbs would look on their own, without filters, so I spent some time experimenting with this angle. As expected, the incandescent 1895 bulbs cast a brighter, yet horribly ugly, shade of yellowish light on the Mustang’s gauges. Totally unacceptable.
On the other hand, the LED light was clear and clean … and brighter. But darn it, I’ve grown used to seeing those gauges in color. Clear light just didn’t seem at all correct. So back on went the filters!
Now that I’ve installed LED bulbs in the cluster, the gauge lights no longer dim when we rotate the Mustang’s headlamp knob. This doesn’t bother me a bit, though. Why would I want to dim the lights at all, when they’re already so dim at full power?
I like the “bluer blue” color that the LEDs and new filters give me, certainly. But I don’t know that brightness has improved all that much. Just for kicks and giggles, I may replace the clear LEDs with blue LEDs at some point, and remove the blue filters over the bulbs. I wonder how much different that would look. I suspect — and this is purely a hunch — that the blue filters restrict a pretty good amount of light.
Know what I’ve done to the Mustang this summer? A whole lot of NOTHING; that’s what.
With temperatures in the 100s day-in and day-out, working on the Mustang just isn’t much fun — nor is driving it, given that the only A/C available is what you get when you roll down the windows. One thing is certain: You can’t really appreciate auto A/C until you go without it in the Oklahoma summertime.
Actually, I may be overstating, just a bit. With the Mustang, evening driving isn’t too bad. However, the Mustang’s dash lights and headlamps leave a LOT to be desired once the sun dips below the horizon. Neither is bright enough to make me a confident night driver.
However, in anticipation of cooler weather, I do have a few projects lined up. Parts for the following upgrades have been delivered, and are waiting in my garage:
Before the summer heat really got rolling (not to mention the annual Oklahoma water-use restrictions), I did manage to give the engine compartment a good high-pressure hose-down. (Hey! The engine block’s still blue under all that dust and grime!) While I was at it, I repainted the air-filter housing, as it was looking more rusty than blue.
Per recommendations from a couple of auto techs I trust, I’ve been driving the Mustang at least once per week. A few miles on the highway, coupled with laps around various city blocks, ought to be far better for the car than just sitting in the garage 24/7.
One part of our Mustang which was never going to be stock (or even look like stock) was the audio system. There are a handful of reasons for this:
You have to know this: I love good car audio. There’s just something about driving around, with good music playing through a good system, that feels right. Yeah, you can have a great-sounding home system (and we do), but it’s just . . . different . . . when you’re cranking out clean Billy Joel, Eric Clapton, and Stevie Ray Vaughn on the road. No, I don’t know why it’s different. But it is.
In high school, you could hear my ’83 Buick Regal — and its two 12-inch MTX subs — coming from blocks away. That car’s system sounded nice, and was far louder than any sensible parent would approve of.
But I got older, got married, and the Regal got traded in. For years, the car-audio lover in me was pushed to the shed out back. Had to make way for automotive reliability, family, fuel mileage, and stuff like that. (Plus the fact that decent car audio systems aren’t exactly cheap. When you’re young, paying off student loans and building savings are far more important than making sure crystal-clear “Layla” guitar riffs scream from your windows at stop lights.)
In any case, I’d done a few audio installs with friends in my younger days, and built a few speaker boxes. It was always fun, sometimes frustrating, and I learned enough that “car audio” was the one part of an automobile’s makeup that didn’t scare me to death.
Once we decided to restore the ’67 Mustang, and its body and powertrain were taken care of, I knew I’d have a great opportunity to get back to the road music I loved.
The original radio had long since been removed from our Mustang. In its place was a scratched-up, non-working Audiovox cassette player with a green LED display similar to what you’d see on a digital alarm clock. If I had to guess, I’d say it was an early 1980s or late 1970s tape deck.
The rear package tray held a pair of Roadmaster two-way 6x9s. Whether they worked or not, I don’t know. They’d been beaten and scuffed-up over the years, the once-black speaker cones now faded to brown paper.
In the engine compartment was a small amplifier, mounted to the passenger-side wall. There was no recognizable brand name, but it was marked as “Distributed by JC Penney.”
I don’t know when J.C. Penney stopped selling car-audio components, but I bet it’s been a while. (Early 1980s?)
I’ve always had great luck with Pioneer head units, so they were my first choice for the new Mustang system. I watched local sales ads, and eventually picked up a Pioneer DEH-6300UB CD receiver
With the DIN dash adapter (part number RB12) from CJ Pony Parts, the head-unit installation was pretty simple. Plumber’s strap from Home Depot came in handy when it was time to secure the rear of the Pioneer deck to the frame of the dash.
Admittedly, your vehicle’s kick panels are not an optimal place to mount speakers. The location tends to be low, and if your kick-panel speakers don’t have component (read: separately-mounted) tweeters, then you can lose a lot of your music’s high notes. After all, those very directional high frequencies will be aimed right at your lower legs, most likely. In a perfect world, you’d want them aimed toward your ears, or close to it.
Unfortunately, there aren’t many other places to mount front-speaker pairs in 1967 Mustang coupes. Door panels might work, if you don’t mind cutting metal — but that’s something which I avoid if at all possible. Outside of that, there’s the dash, where the vehicle originally had one speaker mounted right smack in the middle. Not exactly an audio-friendly setup there, either.
So kick panels it was. Thankfully, there are reproduction kick panels made which already have openings for 6.5″ speakers. Even better, because the Mustang has metal body panels directly behind its stock kick panels, those repro kick-panel openings slope outward and allow for (1) a decent bit of depth for the speaker to mount in, and (2) a slight angle toward the driver and front passenger listening zones.
As with most of my restoration parts, my kick panels came from CJ Pony (part number SPK22). They looked good, and felt sturdy enough. Into them, I mounted a pair of Infinity Reference 6032si 6.5-Inch
By themselves, without grilles, the Infinity speaker bodies (which are actually a bit larger than 6.5″) fit the kick panels almost perfectly. However, once I installed the Infinity grilles (sold separately), which are even wider, problems arose.
Because the grilles did not line up well with the kick-panel openings, I was left with a roughly half-inch gap between the speaker grilles and the kick-panels themselves. This turned out to be an easy fix, though. A quick trip to Michael’s Arts & Crafts store allowed me to pick up a small (less than 20″) sheet of thin rubber foam. From this I was able to cut two strips which I wrapped around the speaker bodies — they’re the lighter-gray strips you see in the accompanying pics. These foam-rubber strips, when cut just a tad wider than half-inch, secured into and filled the speaker gaps nicely.
For the rear package tray, I mounted a pair of Infinity Reference 9633cf 6×9-inch
I didn’t want the speakers to show back here, so I purchased a new package tray (CJ Pony Parts part number PT1) and cut openings for the 6x9s using a jigsaw. My wife and I then covered the tray with black speaker cloth purchased from Parts Express (part number 260-335). We used spray adhesive (plus super-heavy tape on the underside) to hold the fabric secure against the board while we installed it.
Stay tuned for my next post, where I’ll discuss “What’s in the trunk?” as well as various aspects of wiring all this stuff up!
After reading some positive comments regarding shifter performance after replacing the shift-lever bolts and grommets, I decided to see if this was something I could do myself. (Without harming any children or small animals in the process, of course.)
“Best twenty-five bucks and thirty minutes you’ll ever invest in your Mustang,” was the general message-board sentiment.
Well, the “twenty-five bucks” part was right; the “thirty minutes” part, not so much. But that’s to be expected, as I’m not at all a car guy. I can drive ‘em, gas ‘em, and keep ‘em clean, but that’s about it.
To know how big an improvement the shifter rebuild gave us, you have to know what shifting was like before that. Before I dug into it, the shifter was, in two words:
Yeah, the shifter lever was extremely loose — all over the place. “Broomstick in a barrel” is the expression I often see, and that matched our shifter feel precisely. Were you in gear? Weren’t you in gear? Only one way to find out: Let off the clutch, and see what happens.
That, obviously, is not what you’d call “optimal performance.” Add it to the fact that, at certain transmission resonances, we’d get a nasty metallic rattle from inside the shifter assembly in the floor. Pretty annoying, that, especially after having gone to the trouble to sound-deaden a bit when the floor carpet and other interior items were being replaced.
Our ’67 Mustang has a 3-speed manual transmission, but for the shifter-lever rebuild, I decided to follow the advice of a couple of message-board enthusiasts and use the 4-speed rebuild kit (part number HW1622 at CJ Pony Parts). The difference? The 4-speed kit utilizes springs beneath the metal shifter cups, whereas the 3-speed kit uses rubber grommets. The springs apparently give a tighter shifting feel (and hold up better over time, I’d imagine). That “tight feel” is most of what I was aiming for anyway.
As it turns out, the new 4-speed metal cups appeared to be just a tad — and I mean just a tad — larger than the 3-speed cups which came out of my shifter. But that wasn’t a problem, as you’ll see below.
There was nothing difficult about the rebuild, which consists of replacing some large bolts, washers, cups, and rubber grommets at the bottom of the shift-lever itself. Even for a guy like me, whose mechanical knowledge is just to the right of zero, it wasn’t a big deal. Took me far more than thirty minutes, though. More like a Saturday morning.
Here’s the article to which I referred for guidance:
Mustang Monthly: How to Rebuild a Manual Shifter
Aside from the rebuild kit itself and a set of standard wrenches, a few other garage supplies came in handy:
Additionally, I bought a selection of heavy-gauge metal 3/8″ and 7/16″ grade 8 split lock washers from my local AutoZone. Since our shifter lever had some mismatched, deteriorated washers around the two large bolts which attach it to the u-bracket inside the shifter box, I have to assume that such washers are, in fact, needed for a correct shifter rebuild. Given the size of the mounting bolts, the washers seem pretty integral. Why they aren’t included in the purchased rebuild kit is beyond me.
I performed the entire repair from inside the car — no underbody access required.
While the article above states that seats must be removed, I found that that wasn’t necessary. Once the chrome shifter plate, both lower kick panels, and both door sill plates were off, I simply pulled the carpet back from the firewall, folding it rearward toward the seats, and maneuvering it up and over the shifter lever. The carpet was pretty stiff, so I had to do this slowly and carefully to prevent tearing.
I then unbolted and removed the rubber shifter boot. This gave me pretty clear access to the lower shift-lever assembly. Getting the shifter lever’s two large bolts loose from the shifter-box mechanism was a bit of a task, as they were super tight and dirt-crusted in there.
Once I had access to the shift lever and its mounting bolts, it was easy to see where the sloppy shifting originated. The rubber grommets — both those around the large mounting bolts and those around the cups — were either entirely gone, or worn into fragments so small they were hardly discernible as rubber. Yes, forty-plus years of gear-shifting can do that to you.
(Thankfully, the cups came right out of the shifter, and hadn’t been previously hammered in, minus grommets — something that I’ve heard people used to do. As a matter of fact, the cup grommets were so deteriorated and dry that one of the cups fell out as I removed the shifter itself. This is where having the telescoping magnet came in real handy, as it made fishing out the loose cup a snap.)
With the shift lever out of the car, I gave it a stout cleaning with spray parts cleaner, rags, and a metal brush. No matter how much I tried to clean the inside of the shifter cup-holes, though, I couldn’t seem to get them debris-free enough for the sturdy four-speed cups to slide in without binding. There was just too much caked-on grease and dirt that my brush couldn’t get to.
So I reached for the one tool that, to this day, my wife says I don’t use nearly enough (given the price she paid for it when it was gifted to me): my Dremel.
Sure enough, with its small metal routering head attached, the Dremel quickly ate away the hard black grime inside the shifter cup-holes. A few minutes of Dremel-work, and the cup/spring assemblies slid oh-so-smoothly into their notches in the shift-lever base. Surrounding them with lithium grease made them move even better, and gave the additional benefit of securing the cups/springs in the shifter while I reinstalled it.
It was hard for me to imagine, beforehand, that twenty-five dollars’ worth of bolts, grommets, cups and springs could make such a difference in the feel and performance of our Mustang’s shifter, but OH BOY DID IT EVER.
Shifting is now entirely different: It’s tight, precise, and the annoying metallic rattles are GONE. I’m not sure why, but I find that it’s nice to think that THIS is what the shifter might’ve felt like when it was fresh off the factory line in the late 1960s.
The improvement, in short, is just astounding.
I’ll say this: I didn’t realize how much I used cupholders, and a right-side armrest, until I didn’t have them.
Our Mustang, being a base-model coupe (200ci engine with a 3-speed manual transmission), of course, had neither. So after a bit of research — and a lot of “Where do I put this cherry limeade?” — I elected to give the Humphugger console a try. (Purchased mine from CJ Pony Parts.)
Before ordering, I looked around the ‘net for some size dimensions of the Humphugger, and really couldn’t find any. So, for those of you who, like me, want to know how something will fit before you buy it, here goes:
Console Body: 10″ tall x 20″ long x 7 3/4 ” wide
Compartment: 5 1/2″ deep x 10 1/2″ long x 5 1/2″ wide
Cupholders: 3″ deep, and just wide enough for a soda can
Initially I was worried that the Humphugger would be too long, front-to-back, and would interfere with the Mustang’s 3-speed shifter … which sits very low and forward when in first or third gear. Thankfully, this wasn’t the case. In my opinion, the Humphugger’s fit was darn near perfect. (Images below.)
There are two strips of velcro on the bottom of the console which “stick” to the Mustang’s factory carpet. And they stick well. So this thing’s not going anywhere when you take a corner.
If you’re going to be removing/reinstalling the console a lot, be ready: The velcro is going to fray your carpet modestly. Because, like I said, it grips well.
Here are the “before and after” shots of the Humphugger install:
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Looks about as good as I could’ve hoped for! And a few more photos, from various angles:
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I have to say that I’m really pleased with my Humphugger console purchase. I don’t think durability will be a problem, as the console seems to be built pretty well. (Even if the Mustang were a daily driver for us, which it isn’t, I think the console would hold up over time.)
The Humphugger’s black-vinyl appearance matches our seats nicely, and blends well with the rest of the interior. Some message-board commenters noted that the consoles looked cheap and out-of-place in vintage Mustangs, but I don’t have that impression at all. (Then again, I’m not a classic-car junkie, either.)
So, for a little over a hundred bucks, I now have a pair of cupholders (albeit small ones), a compartment in which to store CDs and whatever else, plus a place to rest my right arm. Sounds like a winner to me!
