Reviving a beloved Mach 1

For Bill Smith, getting his college car restored was a little like rekindling a long-lost friendship that seemed to have slipped away forever.

“I bought the car in 1980 from a friend’s dad, Ernie Skoog, a used car dealer in Des Moines. I paid $1,350 for it, a 1970 Mustang Mach 1,” Smith recalled.

He and Chet Skoog, Ernie’s son, had been longtime friends, playing in rock bands together and sharing their love of cool cars.

“It was a lime green metallic and I couldn’t live with that color, so I repainted it Grabber Orange in 1982. I drove it for six years and then parked it. It just sat outside.”

Smith got his engineering degree and eventually moved to Wichita, where he worked first for Boeing and now at Spirit Aerosystems. But the plan was always to someday restore the car with his buddy Chet Skoog.

“The intention was to start on it in 1986, but like so many projects, life intervened and the car slowly rotted in a pasture,” said Mae Smith, Bill’s wife. “Beginning in 2011, on his 50th birthday, he set a goal to finish it.”

What greeted him was no easy task, a quarter century after the Mach 1 had been parked.

“The car should have returned to earth,” he said. “It had become an animal sanctuary. The weeds had grown up around it and when we took the hood off, a corn snake crawled out of it.” All kinds of animals had taken up residence inside the car and the interior was in really rough shape.

“Rust had taken hold, but we saved a surprising amount of it. I tried the best I could to save as much of it as possible.”

The hulk was disassembled in Chet Skoog’s home shop in Dexter, Iowa, and the long journey back began.

And it was not just a figurative long journey, but a geographic one as well.

“He drove up once a month for three-and-a-half years, all the while dragging parts home from each trip to work on in between,” Mae Smith said.

“I’m a pilot and I used to fly up there, until I realized that for what it cost to fly there, I could buy a lot of car parts,” Bill Smith said. “It was exactly 800 miles round-trip, door to door and I could rent a car for $19 at weekend rates.” He figures he logged roughly 32,000 miles traveling back and forth to work on the Mach 1.

Meantime, Mae was building an extensive scrapbook, winnowing down approximately 1,200 photographs of the build process to tell the restoration story.

“I needed something to do one weekend a month,” she said.

“It was pretty much a rotisserie restoration, just with no rotisserie, but a lot of jack stands,” Bill Smith said. Skoog was an accomplished body and paint professional, as well as a skilled fabricator.

“The nice thing about Mustangs is you can buy almost everything you need, from decals to correct numbered hoses and sheet metal,” Smith said. Hard-to-find parts, like the ribbed aluminum Mach 1 rocker panel trim, were located online and restored to like new condition. The original factory Mach 1 14-inch wheel covers aren’t reproduced, so they, too were painstakingly refurbished.

The Mach 1 was equipped with a replacement Windsor 351 cubic inch engine when Smith bought it. Luckily, he was able to find a correct Cleveland 351 with high performance heads that had originally been in a Torino station wagon, of all things.

Ostrich Racing Engines in Des Moines rebuilt the Cleveland, using a Shelby medium high-rise intake manifold, a Speed Demon 750 cfm carburetor, a “kinda thumpy” Crower Camshaft, Pertronix distributor and Hooker headers.

“It dynoed at 400 horsepower at the flywheel, an improvement over the 300 horsepower stock,” Smith said.

A correct top-loader 4-speed manual transmission and Hurst shifter now direct that power back to a 9-inch Ford rear end fitted with 3.50 gears. The suspension on the car, along with the 4-wheel drum brakes, were rebuilt to factory specifications, with Lorac Powdering coating doing the stripping and powder coating chores. Kevin Kaiser’s American Muffler Shop handled final fitting of the Flowmaster exhaust system.

The bumpers on the Mach 1 were too far gone to save, so reproduction pieces were installed. But the original rear windshield louvers and all their fittings were cleaned up and saved, along with the distinctive rear deck spoiler and pop-open gas cap. The honeycombed black rear valance panel was replaced.

Stephan Smith, Bill’s son, traveled from Denver to help sand the body panels and rebuild the power steering system. All of the original glass in the car was retained and when the bodywork was completed, Skoog gave the entire car some fresh Grabber Orange paint, with a satin black hood scoop, striping and chin spoiler for bold accents.

Inside, the original rim-blow steering wheel, woodgrained dash accents, center console and AM radio were returned to showroom condition. Mike’s Custom Upholstery in Wichita installed a new black vinyl seat upholstery kit.

The Mach 1 was finished in time for a grand unveiling at a Halloween party at Skoog’s place last fall.

“They pulled one behind my back,” Bill Smith said. “It was a shock to me when I saw that guitar sitting there.

“They knew I wanted a nice Stratocaster, so Chet found one on eBay and stripped it down and painted it to match the car. That’s a friend for you.”

“Jeff Speegle, a national Mustang judge and Chet’s nemesis during the restoration, signed a picture of the finished car printed on canvas, which I presented to Chet during the reveal.”

“There are three people who really sacrificed to make this possible,” Bill Smith said. “My wife, who let me take off one weekend a month and didn’t ask to see my encrypted spread sheets on what this all cost, Chet and his wife, Holly.”

And now, the Mach 1 looks and runs great and the guitar sounds great: mission accomplished.

This story was originally published April 3, 2015 at 5:03 PM with the headline "Reviving a beloved Mach 1."