The Cougar Project

I got my 1967 cougar before I got my license to drive in 1980. I was in 12^th grade and did some wheeling and dealing trading back then to get it. It was my daily driver for years, and I replaced it in that capacity with other cars that got better gas mileage. Whenever those cars would die, The Cougar would be brought back into full time operation. Shown below is the Cougar on the road in the mid 1980s.

I had no budget, and kept the car going with the proverbial chewing gum and bailing wire. This lead to me learning about cars, of course. This combined with my Electrical Engineering background resulted in me getting involved with Electronic Fuel Injection. The resulting system is installed on the final restoration of this car.

Smogging this car became a real hassle, and in the 1990s, I resorted to a little loophole in the California Vehicle code that allowed me to register the car and drive it every other year without a smog test. This meant that for the other years, it was rusting away while parked. This cycle lasted until 1996 when the condition had deteriorated enough to make it impractical to revive it easily. Here is how it sat between 1996 and 2004.

In 2004, I towed this car 150 miles north to my new home in Santa Maria with hopes of restoring it. The original plan was a 100% restoration to showroom condition. This car is a factory GT, which apparently makes it a semi-rarity. I still held out on the originality concept, but with my fuel injection and modern suspension improvements, I caved in to some modernization and this has become a resto-mod effort. I hope to make it look to the casual observer like a stock car. I want the interior to match my high school memories, and it will look stock. I have even procured and repaired a 1967 stereo for the stock look. The car sat for two more years after I towed it here until real work began. The body was badly rusted, as pictures below will show, and if this were not my first car, I would have definitely used a different body for this project. This is still a work in progress, so I will add sections as they are completed

Car right before restoration began

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