I spent some quality time with the cat today cleaning and found a couple things. Seems the trans crossmember (4 speed) was never painted from the factory, not a hint of paint or primer. The engine crossmember between the shock towers seems to be galvanized, no paint at all but still shiny. Anybody got a comment on these two things? Got lucky and found the paint colors on the front coil springs, will post later. Car appears to still have the factory shocks on the front with all original suspension parts. Bad news is the shock towers have faint evidence of common rust under aprons, one more thing to fix dang it.
Both of those items could be either painted or natural from the factory.
In my personal experience with unrestored parts cars, the front crossmember is usually painted and the transmission crossmember is usually unpainted. But as BossElim69 noted, they could come either way. It would be interesting to know if the differences are related to early vs. late model-year production, assembly plant variations, or simply random. But since you’re dealing with an original car, if you keep it like you found it, it’ll definitely be correct.
Thanks guys! Event though the car is original you never know what a PO has done. This car was obviously drag raced HARD and has had numerous drive train configurations. It is amazing that the thing has the original block still. The date code on the cross member matches within 3 days of build so I am confident it is original. Natural finish it will be.
This has been my experience as well. I thought all the CJ Cougars were Dearborn cars, so when “filling in the blanks” in a restoration it’s safe to default to “how they did it in Dearborn”.
There were some 1969 Cougars with 428 CJ’s that came out of San Jose. The ram air cars are referred to as ‘double R’s’ .
Not many produced, production of San Jose Cougar’s was eliminated by late November 1968.
Thanks Scott! I learned sumpin new today. 