With the engine in and brakes repaired I buttoned up the exterior by replacing the broken left rear quarter window and added for looks a hood scoop I had laying around.
It was now time to work on the wiring and the interior changes.
In order to clean things up properly we removed all the seats and I pulled the entire dash to get to the wire harness and work on finding a location for the engine computer.
One early interior change was the removal of the 4 spoke "Fairmont style" steering wheel and installed the steering wheel that I had removed from my 87 LX.
The car was not equipped with air conditioning so I was able to tuck the computer in between the heater box and the inner firewall near where the computer is mounted in Mustangs with EFI.
The instrument cluster in the car was was faded and the plastic cover was very scratched up so we got a cluster from a newer Mustang. When testing the panel out I discovered that even though the instrument layout was the same the printed circuit on the back was set up different so I had to install the 79 set onto the new cluster.
With the computer in place and the new instrument cluster done I re-installed the dash.
Around this time my GF and I moved to Tucson/Marana and took the car with us. I really don't have many pictures of the rest of the work that was done.
The original seats where put back in at first but where later replaced with cloth seats from an aero LX hatch including the fold down rear seat that I made functional like I had done to my 87 LX.
The most difficult part of this conversion was the wiring. The engine control system was easy i just used the harness from the Ranger including the engine bay fuse block. Were it got difficult was converting the rest of the system to go from 1990 truck instrumentation to the 1979 four-eye instrument cluster.
With the wiring diagram for the truck and Mustang laid side by side I was able to trace each circuit and match them up. When I was done everything electrical in the car worked except the tach.
For the exhaust I dumped the tiny factory system and used the trucks down pipe/catalytic converter and for the cat-back I used an old 5.0 HO. LX tail pipe out the back. Giving the car a free flowing exhaust system with what was a decent sound and the LX tip out back really looked nice.
Other enhancements where thicker 5.0 swaybars front and rear but keeping the 4 cyl springs for a softer ride but nice and responsive in the corners.
Overall it was a fun car to drive in my honest opinion. The handling was great with the lightweight motor up front, sometimes it felt to me it responded better than my 87.
While it never gave me any issues when I drove it long or short distances, It seam to give my GF and the guy who became her future BF problems. I could never figure out why it did that. Eventually somehow they ended up burning up the little motor and the car was dead again.
After we split up I was "given" the car back and I held on to it for a few more years but never got the chance to get it running again. Eventually I needed to move back to the Phoenix area closer to work and ended up selling the 79 and my 83 convertible at a considerable loss. While putting this page together I kinda regret getting rid of the car and wish I could have kept it.