Brandon Williams, a valued employee here at LMR.com, recently discovered a black on black Fox Body coupe at his buddy's junkyard and offered to buy it. This was a perfect candidate for a budget-friendly resto, and that is exactly what we did! While we did add the most common Fox Body parts needed for a restoration, we show you how you can refresh your Fox to get it in better condiiton until you can save up for the parts you really want.
The first step was getting the car. Brandon located this vehicle. So, Landan, Jared, and Brandon loaded up the trailer and went to pick it up, saving it from a certain lifetime of rotting away in the Texas heat.
Once we had it back at LMR, we wanted to give it a thorough once over to see what we were working with. With the car on the lift, we could see that there were a few leaks, which is common for 30 year old cars, but more importantly, there was no rust! This was a good sign and a sigh of relief which means we could move onto the engine bay. In the
engine bay, there were a few little leaks that we could address at a later time, but for the most part, this little 2.3L just needed a quick spruce up to get going.
Now that the car was looked over and Scott Hubbard got it in driving condition,
bleeding the brakes, replacing a transmission gasket, it was time to clean it up. Landan and Brandon took it for a drive in the parking lot and up to the wash bay to start washing off the years of built-up dirt and grime.
The guys took the time to thoroughly clean the underside, engine bay, and exterior of the car, giving it new life and making it much easier to work on.
With the exterior as clean as they could get it, it was time to address the interior. While there were plenty of things to be restored and we could have certainly thrown the catalog at it, we wanted to adhere to our budget and show how these cars can be cleaned up while saving for new
Fox Body interior pieces.
Landan disassembled the interior and removed the
carpet, noticing that it was in pretty decent condition. Cameron Bready took it over to the wash bay to clean it up with some solution and the power washer, allowing us to retain the OEM carpet and save us a few bucks. He also cleaned up the seats using a cleaner and a carpet extractor, getting all of the dirt and odors out of the original upholstery.
With the interior refreshed, we turned our attention to the exterior. This included removing some old trim we planned on replacing rather than restoring them. We removed the windshield molding, door trim, mirrors, and a few others. Once all of this was off, we took the time to throughouly clean the rest of the vehicle and remove some surface rust we found in the spare tire compartment.
With all of the trim off and rust gone, it was time to start painting the trim, door handles, and door frames to give this Fox a budget refresh.
Now the fun part! It was time to clean up and condition the interior for reassembly. Landon finished cleaning up the remaining interior trim pieces with a cleaning solution and started to reassemble the interior. This included replacing the seats, repainting a few trim pieces, and reassembling the console. After the interior was completed, we got the final pieces installed on the exterior and added some
5.0 Resto Pony wheels to finish this refresh.
