Why I deserse to win the ’70 Eliminator
Or Why my wife allows yet another car into the family
My name is Neil Rideout and I hail from Kingston, Ontario Canada. I am 54 years young. I first started playing with cars at 8 years of age, (not because I was bitten), but because I saw my father break spark plugs with a hammer in his ’60 Ford because he didn’t have a deep socket from his socket set. I knew something was wrong with this picture, so I bicycled up the old dirt road in Hartland, New Brunswick , to my uncle’s house for a deep socket. Now my uncle was quite the mechanic, ( he worked at J.Clark & Sons Chevrolet, {the oldest Chevy dealer in Canada}), and he had a lot of tools. I used to hang out with him (Gerald), a lot and play with his son Donnie. He used to work on his Chevy’s and he taught his son and me about tune ups, oil changes, and general maintenance, as well as teaching us the name of tools and how to use them, My uncle was also a neat freak and he always taught us to clean and sort out all tools before putting them away. He would only lend me the tools if I alone would use them, (my dad was not a patient man). So I was lent the deep socket, Ratchet, spark plug gapping tool, a Phillips screwdriver and needle nose pliers, he assumed my father had a flat screwdriver. So I biked back to my house and proceeded to change the plugs, (properly, gap them and put in the points, which I gapped from the specs my uncle gave me), and installed the new condensor, rotor, and new (Western Auto), distributor cap. The car worked great and ran like a top. My father looked at me in a puzzled way and asked me how I knew so much about tune ups and I replied that it just made sense. I didn’t want him to to feel bad about my time spent with my uncle, (dad was away a lot doing hydro work), so I told him I watched the mechanics on the farm do things. That seemed to work and from that day forward my father let me do tune ups on his cars until I went away to university. So I did tune-ups on dad’s ’60 Ford, his ’63 Ford, (both 6-cylindars, his ’67 Impala, {my first V-8}, ’67 Bel-Air, and his ’73 LTD).
As I grew up I made a lot of 1/25th scale car models, and, ( in those days the model kits explained about the cars and their engines), and at 12 I started entering the models into model contests. I would also do little scenes with the models. We had moved to Michigan, (my father worked for the power company there and put in high voltage towers and underground cables for new sub-divisions. My first 1st place trophy came for a nascar model of the ’71 Charger that Bobby Isaac drove. I saw a race of him driving the car and he put it in the wall at Taladega, so I built the scene showing him hitting the wall. I heated and bent the plastic to replicate the accident replete with skid marks on an asfault shingle with lane lines painted in it to look like the race track. I was big on detail, so I put in the break lines, fuel lines, spark plug wires out of thread, (my mom was always looking for thread to sew with, {I would take it for my models}.
This attention to detail would serve me well, as I always followed a set pattern of completing one system at a time to perfection when I worked on a car, and would always keep a neat and sorted tool box when working on a car.
….2/
Now my parents didn’t have a lot of money when I was growing up so I had to make do or fix things myself whenever I wanted something, and as long as I kept my dad’s car running, they would let me buy a cheap used car to work on. Now I couldn’t sped more than $250 on a car, my mother held my bank- book and insisted that all my paperwork money and later my earnings from McDonalds, ($1.05 an hour), went into the bank for university. Now by high school in Connecticut, I had made a lot of friends and learned a lot working on the junkers we would all buy, and I did most of the work on their cars to make them go better and faster. Now I’m not going to lie to you but I was into Chevy’s when I was a teenager, (sometimes it takes it takes me longer to see the light), so my purchase was a ’67 belair 2-door with a 396. This thing would go and it really upset my friends with their small b lock Mustangs, Camaros, and Firebirds because I could roast them with this rusty and paint faded Belair with the radio delete, ( I learned how to install stereos with this one). I also painted this car, learned about body-work and painting from the local body shop, (times were easier and kinder then as the owner took time and gave me supplies) to see how I made out. He even let me use his paint booth. The car came out not too bad and I even redid the engine compartment to make it look clean, ( it wasn’t called detailing then).
Now my friends in high school had a wide array of cars, Pat had a ’67 Firebird 6-cylindar convertible, Bird had a ’64 Falcon with rolled on paint, John had a Fiat 124 Spider, and Bob had a Triumph TR250 that I painted purple metal-flake, and Whity with his ’65 Mustang fastback that he needed a hammer wedged into the back rto keep the seat from falling backwards, but the car that made the BIGGEST impression was Ron Boskie’s. The other was a guy that worked for my father. It was a ’67 Mustang fastback that had a 390 4-speed which he took me for a ride in and he drove like a man possessed, (God I loved that car). Now back to Ron’s car. Ron dropped out of high schools in his junior year and went to work so he could save up to but a beautiful ’70 Mack 1 428 cobra-jet 4-speed in Competition Orange. I can still remember going down Interstate 95 at 60 miles per hour and Ron down shifting to third and breaking the rear-end loose and sideways ramming it into 4th, what a car. He later sold the car when he joined the marines, and before he retired was the color guard at Arlington National cemetery. Having said that, that car more than any brought me back to Ford.
Many years went by, I graduated from university, started a family, bought a home, and settled into a decent career at Ma Bell, but decided to change careers and went into insurance. I now own my own insurance agency and have done exceptionally well. The auto bug has never left me and as a chance moment so happened, I stopped at a car show in Kingston Ontario, while visiting my sister one weekend, ( I was still living in Toronto at the time), and started talking to some of the owners of their cars and one guy, named Joey talked to me for at least an hour about his ’66 Fastback.
…3/
When I later moved to Kingston I hooked up with him and we have been best friends ever since. I have to tell you if anyone knows more about early Mustangs I haven’t met him yet. So I helped Joey restore one of his Mustangs and started doing research on the breed as well as getting my MCA judging standard and also became President of our Mustang Club. With Joey’s Knowledge and my anal attention to detail we finished Joey’s ’66 Stang and it became a national trophy winner. I also made a lot of connections in the hobby both in Canada and in the US. You have to remember there was not a lot of parts vendors in those days, so you had to do a lot of fabricating and parts restorations yourself. Now I still didn’t have the money yet to buy a car, kids university and saving for home renovations, (which my wife and myself did, (I rewired, redid the plumbing, and walls, etc. on the house, but the place was by the water and it had a detached garage on the property which I enlarged for any future project I might have).
So I collected and bought tools over the years so that one day I would be ready for the day when I might restore a car one day. I also took my youngest son with me when I went to the local scrap yard for parts when I needed to fix cars and keep them going. This was to be a big part of my son Mackenzie’s life when he was young, as he was growing up. I would give him 2 or 3 tools and tell him to go take a part off a car and bring it to me when I was working on removing something I needed. Every weekend my little boy would ask me after breakfast, “Can we go to see the broken cars today daddy?” Now things started to settle down at home, and my income had become substantial, but of course I was still cautious with my money, and with my wife’s approval I decided to look for an affordable car to restore. So my wife and I looked at want ads for cars that were for sale. We saw this ad in the local paper, (no internet back then), and went out to look this ’69 Cougar. It was an original owner car and Aquamarine. My wife looked at it and was totally smitten with the line and those incredible tail-lights. If I knew then what I know now I would never have bought it. I had to replace the floors, quarters, doors, fenders, trunk, and hood after stripping it, but it was a special order factory 351 Windsor 4-barrel with custom paint and factory custom interior, (leather comfort-weave). Now again, there were not any parts vendors in those days, so anything you did had to come from donor cars. One of my friends in the Mustang club was a real Cougar guy, named Steve Sensestein, (he had a ’70 XR7 m-code convertible, a ’70 Cobra-jet Eliminator, and a ’65 Mustang coupe), hooked me up with a lot of parts and probably the guy who, if it had not been for him, I would never have completed the project. His name was Dick Hunnycutt, from Danville Virginia, and his hobby business, was restoring old Cougars. Steve called me one day and said he had found Cougar heaven and I had to go down to Danville and talk to Dick. About 4 months later, frustrated with my restoration at this point, I drove down with Steve and visited Dick. We talked for what seemed like hours, and I told Dick what I was up to and we became great friends. We would go to his home and his wife Peggy would make a meal and we would talk by the hour. He was the kind of guy that would ask you if he charged you too much when he sold you a part.
…4/
So I bought a shell from him and trailered it home, so I could cut it up and put the parts on my car. I don’t know what prompted him to do this, but one of my visits, when I was getting close to finishing my ’69 cat he took me to his garage and proceeded to give me all the chrome trim for the hood, trunk fender openings and ¼ moldings, (still in the Lincoln/ Mercury wrappings), and told me I should have them for my car.
People like this are what makes this hobby great. I didn’t know at the time but Dick was dying of cancer, and he wanted to make sure my Cougar would look good for car shows. Peggy told me this after Dick passed. I believe that if anyone does an article on the Cougar hobby, it should include Dick in article as he is one of the people with the most integrity and class I have ever met.
Now I had the last pieces of the puzzle to finish my ’69 XR7. I worked 8-10 hours a day to finish my car for the 1995 Cougar Nationals in Connecticut, and finished it at 3AM the day I was to load it up on Joey, (’66 Fastback remember?) The drive was about 9 hours away and I had managed to sleep for 2-1/2 hours when my wife looked at me and said, “ There’s no way you’re driving us to Connecticut looking the way you do.” Apparently I looked like a cross between the wrath of Christ and a shell-shocked zombie, (it wasn’t a pretty sight). So she made me go to bed and I slept for 14 hours. So, needless to say I never made the show. So the following year I worked on the Cougar to fine tune things and DROVE it to the Cougar Nationals in Carlisle, PA. (I had to drive it as I have a big mouth and teased my friends relentlessly about their cars being trailer queens), and they would have lined up at my house to chirp me about trailering my car to a car show. Damn good thing I didn’t trailer it to Connecticut. Now the drive was mostly uneventful until I went to pass a car in the Appelation’s of Pennsylvania when the car started sputtering and lose power. It kept getting worse, so I pulled off into some small town, where only one garage was open. Now I knew the car wouldn’t make it so I started thinking about all the parts I replaced and, through the process of elimination, deduced the it must be the pick-up in the fuel sending unit. I didn’t replace it because I wanted the low fuel light in this unit, (there weren’t any replacements at this time with the low-fuel circuit available at the time). So we put the car on a hoist, drained the tank, removed the sending unit and, low and behold the pick-up was plugged solid with white compressed gunk, so after 3 coat hangers poking and poking, I cleared the gunk and the car ran fine after that. So finally, we arrived in Carlisle, I registered and we registered for the show. It was a great weekend and I received a second overall trophy for my efforts. Not bad for the first national competition. I even sold my services for a while on the quarter trim XR7 emblems for the ‘C’ pillar. (I paint them and then acrylic the paint with clear. The decals eventually fall off because the sun shrinks them. I learned from my judges sheets what I needed to do and the next year my car won the Nat’s in Atlanta. Interestingly enough while I was at the grandstands getting lunch for my wife and me, a guy came up to my wife and said, “I’m going to own that car one day.” 2 years later he tracked me down and put a wad of cash on my dining room table and bought the car.
…5/
Now I had some money in the bank, and was looking for a new project, and as fate would have it, my wife and I were at Ford Carlisle a couple of years later I got into a discussion with Jim and Elaine Pinkerton about their Cougar one. I told them I walked past this car at the Lincoln/ Mercury dealer twice a day when I attended college in Moncton New Brunswick and remembered it. He proceeded to tell us the history of the car and how the dealership burnt and the only car the owner saved was the Cougar. We stayed in touch for quite some time and several months later he called me about this ’68 Cougar he found in Mesa Arizona, and that I should call the owner to buy it. So $600 bucks later I bought the car and a friend of mine, who winters in Arizona, brought it home for me. I started the project in earnest, stripped it to last nut and bolt, and got the body and paint completed. I got sidetracked and at this point my son Mackenzie and I started his car.
Now we had been putting money away monthly in a mutual fund for Mackenzie and the dot com bubble had burst so the money wasn’t making much. We decided to purchase a ’67 Mustang fastback. Mackenzie had seen the movie Gone In 60 Seconds and was totally smitten by Eleanor, so the goal was to build one. After several months or searching eBay and Craigslist we found an original owner ’67 fastback from Shelby, Alabama, (I can’t make this stuff up), and after purchasing it, one of my friends towed it to South Carolina where we picked it up. It was red and had a new red interior, (the only good part of the car). The car drove and we did mange to drive it around for about 2 months before the start of the restoration, but the motor just kept getting worse. When we pulled the engine and dropped the enginge there was a quart of gas in the oil pan. The rings were broken and the 289 motor was toast. Now it was much easier to restore a car now and there were many vendors, so I started buying parts on the internet, and reading Mustang magazines like a fiend. So I bought the body kit from a guy in Virginia, and the interior from Tony Branda, (we kept it red and it looks really cool). We put in rack-and-pinion steering from Total control, power brake booster set-up from Mark Jeffrie’s Trans-Am racing in California, put in a built T-5 5-speed and cable set-up form Ron Morris, all new suspension, brakes, ceramic headers from JDL and the coup-de-gras, a 351 Windsor Lightning Crate engine. The story on the engine is a friend of mine was going to put it in his ’71 Datsun 240Z. I told him it wouldn’t fit and he would have to cut the engine compartment because it is bigger than a 5 liter. So he asked me where he could get a 5-liter and I told him I just happen to have a 5-liter, 5-speed, and wiring harness, (it was the car we were going to take the driveline out of for Eleanor). I took the car to him, he heard it run and swapped it for the Lightning crate engine that now sits in Eleanor.
…6/
Eleanor was the test bed for my ’68 Cougar, and now I had the vision for the reto-mod I am building. My ’68 Cougar that I’m now completing after the Eleanor build is my vision of what it would be if it were built today. I have lowered it 2-1/2 inches. It has the full Chris Alston Total Control front suspension with 1-1/8 inch sway bar. The brakes and booster are Mark Jeffrie’s Trans Am racing set-up. The engine is a 351 Windsor from a Loomis armored car, (full floating wrist pins, roller set-up, SVO heads ported, polished, port matched. I have taken 250 pounds off the front end of the car, and relocated the battery to the trunk. I have rebuit an AOD with solid input shaft. I rewired the whole interior to be an XR7, (WCCC parts), had the tach redone to 8000RPM and concourse correct, changed the Amp meter to a voltmeter, customized the interior to leather and cherry wood and am putting a real vintage T-5 independent rear-end, { this is the rear-end that was supposed to go in the original Mustang, but ford decided it was not necessary because the Mustang was selling so well). I will be putting in power windows soon and have installed a Vintage Air A/C system. (The car is black on black on black so I really need it).
The father son project of Eleanor has brought my hobby full circle and the knowledge and friendships I have picked up along the way have been shared with my son. To me, this is what the hobby is all about and what should be payed-forward.
If I had the ’70 Eliminator I would restore it to original, (I still have a numbers matching 351 Cleveland 4-speed from a ’70 Cougar I had for parts). I believe Eliminators are as important as Mach 1’s and Boss 302’s. They need to be preserved and I believe I, my son, and my friends, could do a service to the Eliminator chapter of Muscle cars. Even so it was fun telling you my story. Thanks for letting me.
Neil Rideout
e-mail: gr8xr7@kos.net
