Double TROUBLE

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

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.