1987 Thunderbird Turbo Coupe

Owner: Bruce Jansen

This Turbo Coupe holds a lot of sentimental value and memories for Bruce, it has been well used and he wants to bring it back to it's former glory. This will be a full restoration with some modifications.

Damage like this is common...some of the Turbo Coupe specific parts are becoming increasingly harder to find. We will replace the fender and nose with nicer parts rather than fix these.

Original 5 Speed in Silver with blue interior, overall the car isn't too bad. These are great cars to drive.

The interior isn't too bad considering the mileage but much work still needs to be done.

We gutted the interior....this is a complete restoration and probably the ONLY one you have ever seen performed on a Turbo Coupe as of this date!

We have our own dolly we made to support the front end without the K member. Here the car is gutted and ready to be soda blasted.

Soda blasting complete we now rinse the soda off the car and bring it back inside.

The shock towers have rust....bad enough that there is a couple of holes in them at the rail and the rail is swelled.

We decided amputation was the best method of fixing this....a process on a Fox body we have done numerous times for crash damage or rust damage as in this case.

Here is our donor clip....remember our black project T-bird....well it will live on in this car. We had this soda blasted at the same time as the rest of the car.

Here we start to prepare the front frame/shock tower section for removal.

Here it is removed....

We found this crack in the firewall on the Driver side which we will repair....

....and this crack on the passenger side which has been there for some time, this will also be repaired.

Now it's time to do some more cleaning and prepare to install the donor front cage.

Here we have the donor front clip welded on. We transferred the original braces with the original VIN numbers back onto the chassis. The exterior of the aprons and shock towers have been cleaned and undercoated.

The cracks in the firewall were welded up from the back side and will be ground and finished....these repairs will not be noticeable when completed.

After the bumper cover was stripped, we repaired the license plate holes and minor cracks with a plastic welder, dressed the repairs and applied an etching primer.

After hours of getting the basic body work done to remove all the 20+ years of dings and road wear and time spent making sure we have nice gaps and everything fits better than it did new....we have our first coat of primer. Here it has a guide coat applied and after a cure time we will block sand and re-prime the car.

Overall the car wasn't too bad but it had it's share of injuries from parking lot doors and other minor mishaps that needed attention.

If this hood looks familiar it should....this is a custom one-off hood that we made for one of our own previous project cars that we parted out in favor of other projects. Bruce liked the hood and ended up with it for his car. This is an all metal hood and one of a kind. The lines flow extremely well with the Turbo Coupe lines.

More to come soon!