Say you ordered a 73 in black… What color would your filler panel behind the front bumper be?
Looks like argent to me.
Party spoiler… Notice also this car has a chrome ds remote mirror as per the requirements of a special order paint car. Why? These parts were pre-painted from the suppliers and there was no way for them to guess quantities on special orders.
So the filler panel is argent only on special order paint cars?
It looks pretty good in argent. But I bet it would look better if you replaced the 1973 impact bumper style with the 1971 ones…
The interesting point is - Argent was not a “Stock” color so the bumper filler had to be specially painted - so did the the Factory “stocK” argent fillers in case they would get a special paint car order? and did they did the send somebody out back with a paint can? The chrome mirror is a given - that would have been a bin item for standard cougars/mustangs where a remote was ordered without upgrading to racing mirrors.
Yes otherwise they were body color. The other item of note - like Don mentioned - Note the chrome door mirror. XR7s had standard body color racing mirrors. so a chrome mirror was substituted - then the purchaser received a credit for the cost difference. usually a 2-3.00 credit.
These items were prepainted “bin” items (painted seperately from the car) - so when lets say a red car came down the line they grabbed a red mirror, or red bumper fillers and attached them to the car. With a special order paint car the vendors didn’t have the necessary paint codes so this is how the “substituted” parts so the car could be built with a minimum of hassel.
If the customer wanted these parts to be body color - it was left to the dealer to repaint or replace as necessary.
FWIW, my buddy had a '73 Mustnag 'vert that was special-ordered in a non-standard color - believe it or not there were eight identical '73 Mustang convertibles painted a light metallic green for Cleveland’s St Patrick’s Day parade. All '73 Mustangs had the bigger urethane body-color 5mph front bumpers… Anyway, that whole shebang - bumper and both the front and rear bumper fillers were painted not quite light argent, but close - they were painted with the normal paint code 5A (Pewter Metallic) since that was still a ‘factory’ color.
The thing factories do to save a few pennies instead of doing it right.
Depending on production date- LT pewter was discontinued as a production color I beleive 21 or 22FEB73. My 73 XR7 Conv was painted LT from the factory but since iit was built in March 73 it was a special order paint car.