Vehicle Description
For your consideration is a very nice example of a recently rebuilt
1969 Ford Torino GT. This car has been on many long-distance drives
since it was reassembled, including trips to Charleston, West
Virginia, Toronto, Ontario, Chicago, Illinois, and many, many
weekend and day trips around Detroit and Michigan. The second
owner, Mr. Hopper, traded in a '69 Torino Fastback with a 390 and
front bench seat for this used formal roof with the new 351 and
front buckets on July 1st, 1970 at the East Tennessee Motor Company
in Knoxville for a tidy sum of $2775.00 through Mr. Beavers, the
salesman, and his manager, Mr. Whitehead. A questionable trade in
hindsight, as the car he traded is likely more valuable today, but
Mr. Hopper was swayed by the gorgeous lines of the formal roof and
never looked back. Park National Bank in Knoxville held the lien
until it was paid off on October 30, 1972 and Mr. Hopper owned it
free and clear. Over the years the car made its way to Michigan,
where I bought it in 2015 in somewhat worse condition than when Mr.
Hopper did. In the decades since the original purchase, the
original 4-barrel 351 was long gone, as was the automatic
transmission. Some rot had set in under the carpet, and the
headliner was housing mice, but after quite a bit of work all the
rust issues were repaired and the cowl and floor sealed prior to
painting. I painted a rebuild 1969 351C to match the eventual color
of the car and installed it with an electric-choke, vacuum
secondary Holley 600, new dual-core Champion aluminum radiator and
overflow can with dual electric fans in a custom shroud,
self-contained HEI distributor, and new custom spark plug wire
looms. The engine itself has mostly stock internals with a slightly
more aggressive cam, 10:1 flat-top pistons, new bearings all
around, reground crank and rods, new water pump, oil pump, gaskets,
aluminum mid-rise intake, new pushrods, and the heads got a full
going-over. The 351 has a resurfaced original flywheel.
