Minus the chrome, smoothie rims and the tires, it’s down to $13,500. A compromise in which the DIYer keeps the chrome and smoothies but makes their own white walls from the tires already on the car brings the cost to $8,500.īut what if you don’t want to do it yourself, and you don’t trust the notion of skimming a layer of rubber off the sidewall of your tires? Well, the high end of our non-DIY kit car is around $15,300. If you leave off the chrome plating, the smoothie wheels and the white wall tires that figure changes to $7,500. What does that leave us with? For the Do It Yourselfers, a ‘49 Ford kit car Thunderbird will cost around $9,300. ***Disclaimer: I cannot vouch for the safety of an activity like this, so if you try it and it ends in disaster, don’t blame me. Of course, if you’re feeling like a risk taker, there’s a you tube video showing how to use a right angle grinder and an orbital sander to grind off the 1/64 of an inch layer of black rubber on the side of a regular set of tires with raised narrow white wall or raised white letters to make your own white wall tires. A simple set of chrome-finished smoothie rims will run around $100 per rim, and as long as we’re doing that, we might as well pop for some white wall tires to complete the look for around $200 per tire, so in total, another $1,200 for tires and rims. Optional now would be getting retro style wheels and tires. That‘s just an estimate based on some chrome work I had done some years ago at a small plating shop, so that‘s not a totally accurate figure, just a guess. Throw in another $600 for chrome plating on the grille and bumpers -and that‘s if you chose to chrome them - I would. If you do it yourself, you’re probably looking at spending about $500 at the auto supply store for primer and paint (assuming you’re going with a two stage paint which is clear coat over the body color). So, let’s just say another $1,000-$3,000 for the paint job if you have somebody else do the work for you. However, if you have a friend who has a paint booth, or you’ve got a garage, a decent air compressor, and a nice spray gun, you could try doing it yourself. This can vary greatly depending on where you go and who you know if you’re having somebody else do the paint work for you. Of course, there’s another option, and that’s what our featured real life Easy Rod T-bird features: the 4.6L V8 that’s good for 205HP and 256 lb ft of torque. In fact, on MY hypothetical Tbird with body kit, my hypothetical donor car is a Thunderbird SC. This set up was available on a Thunderbird called the Super Coupe, or Thunderbird SC for short. No, like the Jeffersons, we’re “movin’ on up”.to that same 3.8L V6 with an Eaton roots style supercharger and intercooler that boosts output to 230HP and 330 lb ft of torque and has a 5 speed manual transmission. If we’re going through the hypothetical hassle of building a car like our hypothetical 1949 body kit Tbird, we’re not going to settle for that wimpy stuff. First, there was the base 3.8L V6 that made around 140-150HP. In ’95, you had some choices for engine options. Keep in mind too, that these cars, though not terribly exciting to behold, were technical darlings that featured four wheel independent suspension, disc brakes all around, rear wheel drive, and decent safety features (by 1995 standards, anyway). It’s not a bad choice as it has the benefit of having had its interior upgraded the year prior to feature an instrumentation layout in a wrap-around design. Some places offer to install the kits for anywhere from $1,000 to $3,500, and that doesn’t include any painting or chrome work.įor the sake of simplification, we’re going to shoot for a 1995 model. Also available are custom grille mouth inserts to fit the front fascia with a Mercury or even a Corvette style grille ($950), and fiberglass bumpers with molded in splash pans for $275. The basic body kit costs between $2750-$3,500 from what I’ve found online, with options for things like a frenched rear license plate (recessed into the trunk lid) -which this one I saw at the car show had, by the way, for $275 extra. These kits could be had and used on Ford Thunderbirds and Mercury Cougars built between 1989-1997. Still, I like the look of this body kit better than I like the look of a late 90’s Thunderbird or Cougar. To me, it’s just that the front and back of the car both feature that kind of rounded, inflated sheet metal work of the older Ford, but the sides have the more svelte, slicked back look of a 90’s model vehicle. From the side view, that rear glass is unmistakably 90’s Thunderbird, and I think the profile is the least appealing view of this vehicle as a result.
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