We own a 1964 Ford Mustang that my Grandpa had bought brand new back in 1964.
When my Dad received his driver’s license, my Grandpa gave the car to him and he has had it
ever since. But for about the past 20 years it has been sitting in our driveway without moving.
When I received my driving permit about 14 months ago my dad explained to me that like him
the Mustang was going to be my first car. I was very excited for a while until I learned that we
were going to fix everything with the car ourselves.



When I received my permit it was July of 2008 and as of now the car is still sitting up on
jack stands even though I have now had my license for eight months. But back in July of 2008
we had set a deadline to finish the car by the end of 2008. When we first opened up the old,
rusty hood I got my first glimpse of the engine. It was absolutely horrible. It seemed like every
single part was just covered in grease and rust. It was then that we realized that it was going to
be a lot harder than we thought. I thought that we were going to start right then but my Dad
said that we still had to order all of the replacement parts. This frustrated me because I realized
that we were not even going to come close to finishing by the end of 2008.



When we finally received all of the parts that we thought we needed we began to work.
At the beginning it was so discouraging because it seemed like for every part that we fixed we
would find two or three more decrepit parts that needed fixing. After a few days we had not
only made no progress but actually had made negative progress. After those few days we were
so discouraged that we stopped working for about a week. When we finally started working
again we encountered the same exact problem. This time we realized that we were just going
to have to work through it. By mid November we had actually made quite a bit of progress on
the engine. But right around that time I had been taking the bolts out of the valve cover and
one of the bolts broke in half with the bottom half of it still stuck in the engine. This was the
most frustrating part of the whole project because everything had to be put off until we could
remove the bolt.



Around February we had still not removed the cursed bolt so we decided that we were
going to have to just work around it for a while. We have been working on it on and off since
then, mostly taking breaks because we would get really discouraged about something. Around
early August we finished the engine beside for the broken bolt and started working on the body
which turned out to be just as big of a problem. So now it is still sitting in its same unfinished
position and hasn’t been worked on since before school. This project was the cause of many
family arguments.