Double TROUBLE
Street Machine Magazine|March 2020
JOEL SMITH NEEDED A FAMILY CAR TO CRUISE WHILE HE FINISHED HIS ELITE LEVEL MUSTANG, SO HE BUILT AN XC HARDTOP AT THE SAME TIME
TAS McMILLAN
Double TROUBLE
YOU know when your project car’s in the shed with its major organs scattered around the place and all you want to do is just take it for a spin? Joel Smith spent so many years in this very situation with his ’67 Mustang that he built an XC hardtop in just a few months to scratch the cruising itch.

Joel’s no stranger to crafting cars; he even runs his own business, Joel’s Garage Gear, which sells hoists and workshop equipment. “When I was 20 I built an XF with a turbo 250 crossflow, and later I had a 60-series Land Cruiser with a 350 Chev in it,” he says.

With those cars out of the picture, Joel stumbled across the ’Stang while trawling eBay for two-door Falcons. “It only had a few hours left, so I stupidly bought it sight-unseen and shipped it over from Adelaide,” he says. “The first time I drove it down our driveway the power steering shat itself. I turned it around and put it back in the shed, and didn’t drive it again for 12 years!”

In the time-honored tradition of project cars the world over, once Joel started fixing things he found a lot more than he bargained for. Soon the ’67 was completely disassembled to reveal a shell with more holes than a colander. “I should have thrown it straight in the bin, but I didn’t want the money I already had in it to go to waste,” he says. “All the metal on the outside of the car got replaced – the only original panels are the roof and the tops of the quarters.”

While he was repairing the floor, firewall and radiator support, Joel mini-tubbed the rear, relocated the leaf springs inboard of the rails, replaced the boot floor with flat sheet, added chassis connectors and swapped the entire front suspension for a weld-in coil-over package with rack-and-pinion steering.

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