So it all started last Saturday morning when my friend Chris called me up to tell me he was about to buy a running and driving 2004 Crown Vic P71 and asked if I wanted to go half on it. He sent me this screenshot and being the impusive ass that I am, I said DO IT.
It looked pretty clean on the surface for 168k and with an obvious but typical cheap Maaco spray job. It ran and drove with a cylinder 6 misfire which is not unusual for a modular and the tranny actually had all 4 gears which was a nice bonus. Also hard to tell but it came with a nice push bar and all the mounting hardware completely free of rust.
The only issues we could see were that none of the door electrics worked and the trunk wouldn’t open either with the key or with the button on the dash. Everything smelled like a gym bag covered in piss on top of it. It was PERFECT for what we were about to do to it.
Within 2 hours we had the whole front completely disassembled and within 6 we had everything gutted that didn’t have to be cut with a sawzall......and then we started gutting everything with a sawzall.
Using the roof support as a guide, my friend started the process of temporarily turning this thing into a ute. We want to keep the B-Pillar so we can still use the factory seat belts in order to keep it as street legal as possible. Once that was cut we used the belt line as a makeshift guide and starting hacking at the C-Pillar until the only thing holding the roof on was the rear window and the inner parcel shelf but neither of those put up much of a fight from an angle grinder and some good leverage.
Tell me this doesn’t look like it could go on a Mercedes 350SL
After this it was a simple matter of cutting the floor behind the front seats and unbolting the body mounts. The whole rear tub came off with almost no effort. and now we’re left with this.
My friend cut the frame rails back to where the gas tank is and used the rear bumper to box the rails. That ended up cutting almost 3 feet out of the car alone.
For now it’s just an amazing burnout machine but we plan on building a full exocage, hence the name, sometime before the end of the month. We’ll fix all the various broken things on it such as the left front shock which is completely broken in half and the upper rear control arm which has about 2 inches of play.
We’re going to make this a flexible platform where we can set it up for Autocross one weekend and rallycross the next. It’s all laid out in the intro to my friend Chris’ video on the build.
Sorry if this post came off like a middle-schooler writing an essay. I haven’t written in this format for almost 15 years lol.