Operation EFI: Project History

	When I was but a lad in Junior High, the only thing I knew about cars is that they could carry my computer to my friend's house so we could play some video games over the network. It took a father hoping to live vicariously through one of his children to bring me up to speed and develop an appreciation in me for the technical side of cars.

Oddly enough, I wasn't the one my father first chose to persuade; it was my older sister. Two years ahead of me, my sister started looking for cars hoping to find one hip enough to set her apart from the rest of the high-school crowd. My father suggested she find an older Mustang to restore, a classic. Since these were the days before Nicolas Cage debuted in a mostly-new and not-quite 1967 Shelby Mustang, the cars were reasonably priced and rare.With the support of my mother, they launched into the restoration.

Seeing that '68 slowly transform into a classic beauty sparked something inside me and at age fourteen I knew I would restore one of my own. Having located a mysteriously close 1967 coupe only a mile from my house, I contacted the landowners and discovered the car had been sitting since the early 1980's. Nobody had the title and they told me to take the car. After applying for a bonded title the car was as good as mine, and I threw myself into the restoration.

Under the tutelage of my father, very much a product of the drag racing and speed scene in the late 1970's, I left no nut unturned in my restoration. Working summers pouring concrete paid for the parts I wanted, and the parts I needed came from my parents. Knowing the value of a dollar by building your first car piece-by-piece is a lesson not often learned, and I found myself pouring more and more time into making something, and less into tweaking my computer game skills.

 

 It wasn't the prettiest hunk of metal when I got it, but it had potential.

The restoration took three years, and what a restoration it was. The car was nothing short of a disaster when I got it. Rotting floor pans, destroyed interior, it was a travesty of a car. But, through years of love and patience, with perhaps a few choice words about the cars heritage and probable familial lineage, and I had a running, breathing car.

It was a labor of love, and now that I have had time to reflect on the restoration, the time has come to update, to modernize, to replace the box of magic that sat on top of the intake manifold and merge my two loves. I would computerize it, I would tune it, and I would make it the meanest street machine I could on a modest budget and limited time. Thus began Operation EFI.