ABANDONED Mustang Cobra Rescued After 27 Years - WILL IT RUN?

howdy folks and thank you so much for subscribing if you haven't already you might want to go ahead and consider it because this thing is awesome it's been sitting for 27 years outside and i have no idea if the engine's any good or not but we're going to try today this thing is probably one of the rarest of the rare the high performance model options of its time and it's really awesome i can't wait to see if this thing will run if you want to see if it will you might want to stick around to the end of the video because i have no idea if it will either i introduced to you a mustang cobra two what don't leave hold on wait just listen wait now look i get it everyone loves to hate on the mustang too it's not the sleek and muscled up rage machine that the 60s and 70s represented [Music] but did you know this car actually saved the mustang yeah believe it throughout the latter half of the 60s the mustang dominated the pony car market unfortunately as the mustang entered into the 1970s the us government was not so keen on our gas guzzling muscle cars the clean air act of 1970 increased government regulation and air pollution control on top of that the oil embargo was in full swing by 1973 leading to a massive shift to more fuel-efficient vehicles after a dismal 1973 sales year the mustang was constantly declining enter 1974. the mustang 2 took the market by storm reverting back to the roots of mustang's heritage the small and agile body sported a new rack and pinion steering that made carving twisty roads a breeze sales from the previous year nearly tripled and was the highest number ford had seen since 1967. the mustang ii was such a revolutionary car it was crowned motor trend's car of the year for 1974. it's in a league of its own yeah sure is it a good thing or a bad thing well it's up to us to determine but was it exactly what ford needed at the time to save the legendary mustang absolutely i found this car by simply driving down the road it was no further than half a mile from me and this is exactly how i found it the story goes that this car lived in tampa bay florida for most of its life until being moved here back in the 90s and just recently the property was sitting on had sold so they had to move the car to this driveway unfortunately like every car sitting this long the brakes were non-existent in order to tackle this issue for our short drive we hooked a long chain to the back of my truck while i piloted the mustang the trick here with the four speed was to use the clutch pedal to slow me down i rolled with the car in gear and let out the clutch pedal if i needed to widen the gap between the truck and myself the brake pedal doesn't do a thing it is absolutely frozen solid and the whole car is shaking because all the tires are flat but we are going down the road in a column well that's not good slowing her down slow water down oh gosh oh no i got my foot out of the clutch you can hear the transmission engage my head's touching the headliner i'm not built for a mustang neighbors are concerned just as much as i am i like that that's a good touch we made it home [Music] now the story of this car is a pretty neat one it lived in florida for most of its life to be specific tampa bay which this tag right here 95 ynf really does prove that tampa bay's home of rock and roll so i really like that tag we might need to put that back on uh what we have is you know a run-of-the-mill v8 four-speed cobra and it's really not run-of-the-mill because back then a cobras could have a v6 or a four-cylinder but this thing had a v8 so it's it's kind of hard to find a cobra with the v8 these days but not many people can say that they own a cobra mustang i do so you've got a lot of really gross stuff in here that uh i don't know how i'm sitting in this thing right now but i am and i i don't see anything in the glove box there's nothing in there in the center console there's some bolts um against the door lock i don't know there's a spring i hear something moving i'm gonna get out now you know it's got the nice hatch back here and it doesn't latch so you can just freely open it as you please there's all of our louvers and that uh rear seat should fold down so we'll have to try that out we've got the rear spoiler in the back as well the undergrowth growing up through the spare wheel so that's really nice and you know overall it's a complete car very solid as you can see so we like this thing and it's been sitting since 1994 which was 27 years ago if you want to know you had something cool back in the day you had this pop out rear windows isn't that nice i mean look at that all that air flow coming in i love this car i don't know if you can tell but this thing is just it screams 70s and everything about it is just way over the top cool i mean the louvers the spoiler all the decals that this thing came with from the factory it's just so cool and i've got every bit of it i've got all the the wing and all the the ground effects that i have but it's got all the louvers with it we just got to put it all back on at some point but we need to get it running first this is a supposedly 302 and which this year model really didn't matter hello there we go because it still came with a basic 302 two barrel nothing insane about this little car but it's still a 302 four speed and the fact that it weighs absolutely nothing makes this thing a fun little ripper and we haven't really checked under anything this is all that's been growing under it set whatever that is off to the side we've got a bolt here there's a spider already excuse me what i can tell this thing looks fairly original i mean i don't see a lot of things that have been touched on it we've got looks like a factory electronic ignition module box and i know that these fords are like the chryslers they they tend to go bad pretty easily but that's not a big deal you can always buy the new so we'll pop the air cleaner off here see the condition of our carburetor and that doesn't look that bad there's a dirt dauber nest that removed thank you thank you throttle linkage still moves so that's a good sign our choke functions but we've got a nice motorcraft 2 barrel so that's that's not a a fairly uncommon carburetor thankfully so we can really make this work and it looks like somebody had already previously disconnected the fuel line so i don't know if the pump ever worked but that doesn't really matter to us because we're not going to use any of that we just want to make sure that we've got what we need you know we've got power steering we've got power brakes and it's that's about it you know it's not a really high frills engine but i think that it's it's all there now the biggest thing is whether or not it's stuck yeah it's moving it's more than the maverick did that ought to run dirt dog nest everywhere that one's got some live beans in it at that one get that out of there we don't need you looks like the rotor still looks okay a little rusty but i think it'll work how's the cap look cat looks fine i think that's usable check the oil in it real quick too it's full where's the line yeah it's showing full kind of smells like gas but not too bad be good enough to start it and then once we actually get it to run and uh you know maybe break up any kind of debris that could possibly be in the engine i'm actually going to take and cut the supply side of the fuel because the you know the this side of the pump on the other side of the pump is disconnected but i don't want to be sucking up any trash that's coming out of the tank so i'm just going to cut that and call it a day even if it does work we'd have to replace this hose so we'll just take that out of the equation altogether so i'd like to put a battery in this thing but there's two problems one we've got side post terminals i didn't know that was the thing for ford probably wasn't somebody probably added that on here it doesn't look like a factory terminal but number two is that we have a nest in here i don't know what's living in it and i'm gonna have to do a little demolition work here to get that out remove that i feel bad for this tool here i really like this thing but i'm using it for the worst possible job well there's what's left of the battery tray it's not a lot it's very rusted out so maybe i should have left the mouse home in it is this even the battery tray it's the only place i see that could possibly hold a battery well i just kind of walked around until i found some top post battery and the right thing to do is probably get some new ones but i just kept looking around found this one in the shop and i found this one on my tractor that i've got and uh this one looks a little bit questionable so we use it for the ground this one's okay i cleaned it up a little bit so hopefully its connectivity will be a little bit more improved all right battery connectors are restored now as for the moment of truth put an actual battery in it come on now this is going to be a struggle okay let's chill out we've got one that fit where's my battery cable going is i hear stuff ready we're in neutral clutch in nothing got a door jar light that came on well that's not what i was hoping to hear which was nothing our starter solenoid could have gone bad or something could have happened to it we've got power going to it we know that so here's the verdict i think our starter relay is dead so what this should do is this has 12 volts on it when the key is turned to the crank position and what it does it bridges the gap and tells this relay hey it's time to send power directly from the battery to the starter and i'm getting a ground here i can see a ground with the power probe and i try to send 12 volts and nothing happens so i'm thinking that i don't necessarily believe it's our uh our wiring but i think that the solenoid may be bad i've seen these things go bad pretty often real quick we'll spray all of our terminals and connectors and bolts with the bb blaster to make sure we don't break everything there's the old one removed something sounds like it's falling apart on the inside so that's good and to replace it is our new starter relay now what i want to do though is take a second and clean up where this thing actually bolts because this thing needs a good ground so i found this piece of sandpaper literally on the ground but whenever i did the maverick i just left it out here on accident but it still works perfectly nice consider it install let's just test it see if anything works if i cross it over at the power pro we should see something happen oh yes yes yes yes oh we've got a runner today that was great starter worked didn't hang all right i'm gonna put the uh the ignition wire that goes from the the key and i'm gonna put that back on and now i'm gonna go back into the car and see if i can start it with the key this time turning key now yes yes yes okay we're making progress typically what i would do is uh check for spark at this point but my battery is running low and we're running out of daylight so i'm just going to pour just just a tiny little bit of gas down the carburetor and just see if i can make it light off and if it does then we'll rig up our fuel pump a little bit of finesse plenty plenty plenty okay put this far far away turning the key nope couldn't get that lucky so i guess we do really need to check for spark heck well should have just done that in the first place but whatever well instead of doing the sensible thing i went got some starting fluid need a little something a little bit more bite to it spray a little bit in here see if it'll fire off at least anything [Music] this video is brought to you by a no spark moment welcome back to day two and what we figured out last night was weak battery isn't fun so the biggest issue that i noticed last night was uh that i was having a voltage drop at the positive side of the coil now what's supposed to happen is you know this wire over here that we had to check to make sure it was getting power on the starter solenoid i checked our wiring diagram and this wire actually goes into our dura spark ignition module and what that wire is supposed to do is actually powers the coil so it's supposed to send 12 volts in the start position so that way it helps in getting the car to start you know if even if the battery was low it's getting a direct 12 volts to help start you know get fire to the the spark plugs and whatnot and then whenever it's running it sends like 9 or 10 volts just to keep the coil from burning itself up over time and what i noticed was i was not getting a direct 12 volts to the coil and even whenever i set a jumper wire over to the hot side of the coil the battery was just so weak that it couldn't work so i charged our battery last night and hopefully fingers crossed it gets a lot better the next course of action here is probably to replace this dura spark ignition module i don't really trust it and if we're not getting 12 volts in the start position of the coil then it's more than likely a bad ignition module so i went and bought this one this is like 25 from o'reilly and we're going to see if this will actually fix the whole situation but first we're gonna take this one out all the tabs were broken on these clips so i'm wondering if somebody has already tried to remove this before had issues with it i don't know okay everything should be good now now we're going to see if we can make this thing actually run for the first time in well 27 years so it's a bit suspect of our coil i have verified we are getting power 12 volts in the run position and the start position but it's not firing because i took a spark plug wire ran it over here to a spark plug on a known ground i know for a fact this is grounded because i checked it and rechecked it before i even tried it and it's not sparking at all so that spark plug is not doing a thing so i suspect that we've got a bad coil now i stole one off of a running vehicle to see if this works so let's keep our fingers crossed that it does well unfortunately that didn't fix our problem and as i was looking and trying to figure out what was going on i noticed that the distributor has a bunch of really chewed up wires on it and we've verified and verified that our coil is getting power and i've checked it on a spark plug so i'm just wondering is the distributor bad and the thing is is that you know it could be the pickup it could be something inside the distributor but if we got chewed up wires like that even if it did end up working this is just going to fall apart i mean it's literally just two or three wires just holding on to the thing so i figured i'll just pull the whole distributor out and try to replace it because i could patch on that wire and it could just get bad little tip here before pulling the distributor to make sure that our timing is going to be the same i put the rotor and pointed it directly to the firewall so that way whenever i have to drop it back in i know exactly where this thing needs to point distributor removed now this is the old distributor out of the mustang it's pretty worn but it's still functioning at least or it was now notice that uh whenever i was trying to diagnose my spark issue that i saw these three wires well what was three wires that are non-existent you'll see that this one right here is totally disconnected from the other side so uh whatever was going on there this distributor probably wasn't getting enough power or any power at all and on top of that the pickups are known to go bad they're pretty common to go bad and i'd have to take the distributor apart so i figured by the time i bought one of those bought a new cap bought a new rotor i'd be pretty close to just having the same money for a new distributor so that's exactly what i did i hate to kind of do stuff like that i'd rather rebuild what i have but it was like 30 or 40 dollars more to just buy a whole new distributor so i didn't see why it would be a bad idea so that's exactly what i got here we got a brand new dura spark ford distributor and want to see how well this thing works i mean like i said with new cap rotor everything inside this is not a reman either this is brand new so i'm hoping that that will fix all of the issues that we're having and it looks pretty good i like it got that fancy-looking black cap you know that's pretty sporty and then the warranty is void if i remove it so anyway let's throw this sucker on and see if anything else can happen when we try to get sparked this time well i got tired of dealing with weak batteries so i borrowed the optima out of my challenger this sucker is brand new and it's got a thousand cranking amps so this thing doesn't turn it over i don't know what wheel now a little trick that i found out is that an aw root beer bottle is the exact size of the distributor hole so that kept any kind of trash getting in there so the biggest trick is to make sure that we have the rotor button pointing exactly where this thing was before now it's not like a chrysler where you can just drop it in and uh and you're good to go it doesn't have like a like a flat edge on the bottom of it with the cam gear this one we have to like basically rotate it a little bit ahead so that when it drops in the taper of these cam gears will cause the rotor button to rotate this way so it might take a couple tries we're going to drop this in here and see if we can get it to line up first try probably not but see if we can get lucky sucks kind of being sedan tall and having to work on a car so short but at least i don't have to stand up straight it's pretty nice [Applause] so while i was there i picked up this new coil when i got the distributor because the dura spark has this interesting little uh connector that goes on the coil and it's not like a typical one where it's got two little threads on it and you you just get like little connectors on the end of it but this one you just slide the coil on it now that my friends is what we call spark so i take this spark plug wire stick it back on its appropriate plug take a little bit of this starting fluid here and see if anything [Applause] happens let's go okay we've got all right we have a runner the coil's hot turn the key off i didn't wow that thing fired up this is the first time this thing has ran in 27 years like literally i'm speechless right yes i cannot believe it give it a little extra this time that starter is toast [Applause] yes all right fuel system fuel system let's go here's what we got this is my nice fancy five gallon jug here we're gonna rig it up to an electric fuel pump right here and all you're gonna do is run it to power to the battery and should fill up our bowls i have a feeling though that this thing's gonna leak like crazy but as long as we can at least maintain enough fuel pressure and have an accelerator pump we should be able to make it run get this old fuel line off here this looks like air hose not even joking so i don't even know if this is any count but see if that'll come off it is absolutely petrified i think it actually just broke that's how bad it is yeah look at that these little picks are good if you have a little bit of life left in the hose but this one is not coming off there we go yes see look we've already got a leak right here at our filter so that'll definitely have to be replaced it's idling we're leaking fuel like crazy though our timing may be a little low oh not a good idea look at that how does it sound out back all factory exhaust listen to that let's run it out of gas real quick and we'll see if we can change that filter can't be having a leak that bad look at that though and it's quiet too i cannot believe this car's idling that long how is it even possible i don't understand how this thing can run that well after sitting for so long i cleared it up a little bit though plugs might have been loaded up some ah there's cooling what is that where's that coming from did it get hot surely not i mean it didn't run it's that long look at that coat see they're splitting the hose oh the overflow hose came off that's why is it cooling get up to here yeah we've got cooling in this thing it looks nasty but it's there huh god man i got showered so i think we need to replace that fuel filter at least get some kind of gasket for it we have an accelerator pump we have something that actually runs i mean this thing started to smooth out as time went on i cannot believe this thing ran as good as it did wow okay this might be my new favorite i'm that close that close i was searching through the tool box and i actually was able to come up with this fitting right here this is for a like a regular barbed bin or a hose and it's got the right type threads i'm going to take a little bit of thread tape and make sure that it does not leak this time and then whenever the time comes and i get my filter in i'll swap this back over but just to be safe because we don't want to run it off the factory tank at all let's give our new fuel fitting a try real quick looks good to me this oh this starter's making me nervous the door jar buzzer works please work come on just catch it's all you got to do too much timing back it off just a touch give it a couple pats of the gas try it again come on oh please this attack work doesn't seem to be working i don't know if the radio works no didn't get that lucky what if we have any lights though nothing out back let's see how smooth this thing's idle now oh wait we do have a light look there's one just barely flickering but it's on and we've got lights over here too i didn't even see it [Music] probably need to replace the bulbs let's check up front hey look at that we've got headlights too wow turn signals maybe can we get that lucky i no this thing has cruise control though does it or no that's just the wipers i don't want to touch that because i'm afraid it'll blow up anything with the fan no listen to the draw the lights were causing the alternator might be a little bit weak it's idling very smooth now i think we probably had some plugs that obviously should be replaced and as time goes on uh it'll pick up some more clean up those plugs better so we do need to replace those at some point and really verify what our timing is but i don't really think this thing's gonna come around i'm most surprised that this thing is smoking right now i've let it idle for probably like five or so minutes and i just want to hear what the exhaust sounds like we're just going to give a little tap of the gas see what she doesn't do that the throttle's a little sticky not bad for sitting that long a little chuchi out the back not bad i like i was wondering why this thing was running rough because i knocked the spark plug moves and about cleaning all that out see it the plug wire just laying on the ground let's add that back and see if it autos out smooth well that's a thousand times better also notice that the thermostat is kicked on it's open so we've at least got up to operating temperature we'll cool it i didn't even have to add to it to it i didn't know that even i was very impressed i mean it's kind of nasty looking in there but it's working for the time being until we need to change it i just can't believe this thing's running right now i'd almost sound a lot better i didn't even have to touch the carburetor guys i didn't do anything to this thing i i really wonder why it was parked not bad now the good news is i know that these tires will hold air long enough to roll it's how long they'll hold air i don't know i really do like these wheels i don't know if they're factory they don't look like the factory ones in the back of the car but kind of nice the only problem with them is that they're 13s but the good news is they hold the car up oh big pop what our goal is now is uh once these tires are aired up let's see if the clutch will work i don't know if it will the brakes are shot uh i doesn't it doesn't have a pedal at all even you push it and it doesn't even move so it's frozen stuck but i'm hoping that we can drive this thing up to the shop and maybe kind of diagnose some of the problems that we're having and once we get this thing up to the shop i would like to maybe try to figure out some of the lighting issues and probably have to replace the starter i'm not looking forward to it but it has to be done and if you guys know of anybody who has a nice set of four lug wheels let me know really preferably like some slot mags or we could convert it to five lug who knows watch this tire be the one that doesn't hold air i really don't remember it's been sitting here for a few weeks so far so good you see it coming out of the ground there stuff growing under it [Music] i think the shifter is so worn out it doesn't want to go all the way over to reverse so i'm going to try and just pull this thing out of here get it straightened out and then we can put it in gear so we're back out here in the open and now that we know that we have forward gears we can at least try to move this thing let's give it a shot so [Music] we did it that's good that's really good come on come check this out we moved a solid 30 40 feet gas jug didn't fall over we're still running i count that as a complete win get a little more smoky as that oil heats up probably needs to be changed that's for sure but hey it could be valve seals for all i know it could be just a old engine but hey look at that still running after all these years and now that we can say that we made it up to the shop i think it's about time we clean this old girl up got a lot of just junk laying in everything in the engine bay just a bunch of rats nests you can see in the lane of the intake there just covered and trash and then we'll take and maybe clean up some of the insides you can see we've got a lot of trash in the floor just uh things that don't really belong in here just to make it a little bit more comfortable really as much as we can make it because kind of nasty [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] do [Music] [Music] so [Music] well the good news is it met expectations the floor is completely gone where the spare tire sits but thankfully around the edges besides that one spot right there it's all solid so all this is still good usable metal and whatever we end up trying to do we can at least go just cut that out and then replace it so i think that uh we can make something we're gonna know if patch panels even exist for this car but i'm starting to think that a 55 gallon drum is about the same size as that spare tire well so if all else fails i'll just cut one up and set it right in there and weld it in but i think we'll be okay but for right now i mean i've seen way worse this is definitely not the worst that we've dealt with i mean if you look at the challenger it was a thousand times worse i mean even the frame rate was gone on it so we could handle it we can definitely make something happen i wonder if this seat will fold over now look at that i don't know what that's supposed to do i think it's hinged but it's so rusty look it won't even move so i think that's supposed to lay flat but it can't so well considering what it was we've made quite the improvement actually see the floors now and this is not the final iteration of cleaning nor shouldn't be the final iteration of cleaning this is just so i can sit in the car without feeling grossed out at least to the level that i was all the stuff that i took out that i felt like i should keep stuck in the back and just so happens that putting the spare tire in there makes me forget about the rust hole so it works out and up in the front on the passenger side same story looks pretty good the good news is i felt around on the floorboard nothing felt soft up here so we will just pretend that everything's okay but i'd say it's good definitely a lot better than where we came from and now that we have a little bit more of an idea of what we're working with i say we can move ahead and get some more work done now it's time to rebuild the brake system completely we know that we can move under our own power but we cannot stop under our own power if you want to see that video go ahead and drop a like on this one i have complete faith you guys can get this to 15 000 likes and that shows me that you're just as excited to see that video as i am to make it now on top of that we've got some really cool stuff here that i want to do a giveaway on because we have a brand new shirt that's come out it's in the link below or in the top right right now i've got the original coil that came off this car i signed it i've got the original ignition module signed it as well and probably coolest of all i've got the original distributor that came off this car and i signed the cap now if you want to win one of these three items all you got to do is go down to that link and buy one of these new mccool auto t-shirts i'm pretty excited about them and i hope you guys are too because every t-shirt you buy gets you one entry to win one of these three items this is probably some high value high dollar ford authentic junkyard parts and i'm probably gonna lose money in the whole altercation so you know my loss is your game but if you want to win one of these three every shirt you buy gets you one entry buy as many shirts as you want get you as many entries as you want so make sure that you're subscribed and have your notifications on because i'm going to announce the winner in the next few videos and i don't want you to miss out on that because if i don't hear a response from you soon enough then i'll have to go on to the next person i hate for you to miss out on some of this gold that i'm holding in my hands so like i said link below go buy a t-shirt i'm excited for it i hope you guys are too and on top of that this car needs a name so whoever has the most like comment down in the comment section below to name this car that's what we'll name it that's all i got thanks again i'll see in the next one you

Channel: Dylan McCool

Views: 594,965

Rating: 4.9351382 out of 5

Keywords: dodge, ford, chevy, plymouth, motor trend, roadkill, hot rod, revival, abndoned, rescued, restoration, rebuild, first start, old start, cold start, 1320, cleetus macfarland, drag race, ls swap, ls1, challenger, charger, dart, demon, hellcat, redeye, helephant, d100, d150, ram, chevelle, nova, c10, camaro, mustang, f100, f150, car, truck, dodge charger, dodge challenger, dodge demon, dodge ram

Id: 5RhjSDNjFC0

Length: 49min 47sec (2987 seconds)

Published: Fri May 07 2021