The Buy
Not really looking for another car project with the ’69 Stang really not completed but I did have a Galaxie in the back of my head as a fun semi daily driver by plugging all the 5.0 EFI stuff I had collected for the 69 Stang but ended up NOT using. Kind of out of the blue our son mentioned wanting to build an old car. Initial discussions were around another Mustang or similar but he always did like the old big 60’s cars and some Craigslist searches revealed a few options.
This ’66 “Galaxi” came up in the list when searching for old Fords. Spelled wrong I hadn’t seen it in previous Galaxie searches and was a little interested with the $700 listed price. Obviously the car was very rough in the pics but some looking at the location shown on the map in the ad revealed it was right on the way home from our son’s college route and he was coming home the next day. Worth a stop at least.
As Found
As found the car was pretty nasty. It had been outside for many, many years and junk stored inside of it and in the trunk. Of course the mice and rats had built up their new home with plenty of rat crap and other remains so it was a little hard to see how bad the floors and trunk were in the car. I actually liked the BBS type Ford wheel on the driver’s rear side but our son had different ideas I believe for the attitude in the long run.
The Interior was obviously trashed and someone had begun taking it all apart. It was a personal concern but the seller was pretty adamant that all the trim should be in the trunk. We couldn’t look in the trunk to validate that but we could see quite a bit of trim there along with the gas tank which had been removed as well.
The trunk was completely full of both parts for this car and others as well and made it difficult to see how bad things may be under all the parts and debris. I figured the trunk was going to be rusted up as I understood this was common to these cars and along with the obviously missing trunk seal it would need patched up eventually.
It was nice seeing all that interior trim in there though and just browsing through it we felt reasonably comfortable that most of the parts where there. Since the car had two or three flat tires, it wasn’t easy to look underneath it but Austin stuck his phone under the car and took a pic on the passenger front side to get some idea of how the underside looked. Still hard to tell BUT it did appear to HAVE a floor there.
After Austin texted me the pics, we decided it was worth a look the next day so we both drove up to take a look. Being able to prod and poke at the car a bit more and check the VIN information at the scene revealed a few things to consider. The car was sitting there with a 289/302 engine in it but the VIN obviously listed the car as V code original inline 240 CID 6 cylinder car. It was a full manual steering and manual drum brake car as well which for our purposes didn’t really matter. We were not looking for something to restore but instead for something to resto mod anyhow. At least the motor mounts had been found and the 302 was sitting in the car for a mockup for our needs.
The seller gave a back story that the car was an elderly gentleman that had passed away and the grandkids of some sort where going to fix up the car because it was “grandpas”. After pulling out the interior, etc they realized the project was over their head or they got bored and sold it off. That sounds ok but the someone had started a small block Ford conversion on the car. We really am not sure if the existing engine swap was actually ever completed. The engine looks like a mid 70’s to 80’s 302 as the balancer is a four bolt but otherwise there is no real way of telling if the swap was completed and done or not. The seller said the only reason he got the car in a trade was to use the 302 in his “Fastback Mustang” but after turning the engine over by hand he didn’t like how it sounded. The seller listed the car at $700 and when we asked if he had any room on the price he said the ad “did say or best offer”. It actually didn’t say that but I offered him $500 and he said how about $550. We all figured the car could easily be parted out for that much money since nearly all the outside and inside trim, bumpers, etc were there and in pretty good shape so we settled on $550 and the car was ours.
Unfortunately the seller did NOT have a title so we signed a bill or sale and we knew we would have to use a Title 42 process to get a title for the car and hopefully not have any problems.Somewhat interesting is the VIN does code out as a D – Dallas Text built car and the DSO on the door tag is Oklahoma City so it is VERY likely the car is a local Oklahoma car and hasn’t left the state since it’s birth.
