Thought I should tell this story here.
Several years ago myself and Jim Pinkerton went to Houston Texas. We were on a mission to see three GT-E’s and also to meet an original owner of one of them.
We saw the first two which turned out to be northern cars where the owner had purchased good sheet metal and then moved the parts over. While the parts were interesting, the cars were not.
Then we went to see the original owner. His name was Bill, and he had quite a story to tell. He had first seen the car at the Dallas Auto Show at Fair Park in 1968 where the car was on display. He decided he had to own that car, and made an offer. The sales man accepted the offer on the condition that the car remain on display for the duration of the show. Bill went home and waited.
A couple weeks later the car was delivered to the local Ford dealer. Bill insisted that the car needed air conditioning - this was Houston Texas after all. So the dealer installed under dash A/C and delivered the car.
The owner said he street raced the car a lot. Eventually I asked him about the smog system. He said he had taken it off and put it all in a box the same day the car came home from the dealer. My comment was “I bet you wish you had that box today”. He said “I still do”. Then he walked across the garage and picked up a dusty box off the shelf. He said “I won’t ever use this, it’s yours if you want it”.
I sat there looking sort of stunned. I looked at Pinkerton and asked him if I should. He said “If you don’t I will”. So I did.
That system is on my GT-E today. Oddly enough that car had the same scheduled build date as mine. One thing happened when I went to install the system. One of the ferrules was rusted solid on one of the tubes. It snapped off. Ultimately I had to replace four ferrules and that bad tube. I kept the snapped off ferrule, not sure about the tube.
