Junkyard Find: 1977 and 1978 Ford Mustangs
The Mustang II stands as the poster child of the Malaise Era; based on a miserable economy car yet bearing the name of a beloved icon from a more optimistic period. You don’t see many Mustang IIs these days, for obvious reasons, but a few are being kept alive by enthusiasts. Here’s a pair of well-stripped examples that appear to have come from the reject bin of a Mustang II collector.
The ’78 has King Cobra decals on the doors. Could it be one of the very rare 1978-only King Cobra Mustang IIs?
Well, maybe, but there’s no King Cobra decal on the hood, and the underside of the hood has this emissions sticker for the never-installed-in-the-King-Cobra 2.8 liter Cologne V6. Maybe it’s a King Cobra with a hood swap, or an ordinary V6 Mustang with a door swap, or a random collection of Mustang II parts with King Cobra decals slapped on.
Whatever it is, we must admire the 70s-ness of the T-tops. Sure, all T-tops leaked like crazy, but that’s like saying that Quaaludes had unpleasant side effects.
Then there’s the ’77, which has a sort of Harlequin Mustang II effect with its multicolored body components.
If the chrome Moroso air cleaner don’t fit, cut a hole! Then, when you put your hot-rod 351W engine in some other Pinto family member, apply duct tape over the hole to keep the rain off the 2300.
Murilee Martin is the pen name of Phil Greden, a writer who has lived in Minnesota, California, Georgia and (now) Colorado. He has toiled at copywriting, technical writing, junkmail writing, fiction writing and now automotive writing. He has owned many terrible vehicles and some good ones. He spends a great deal of time in self-service junkyards. These days, he writes for publications including Autoweek, Autoblog, Hagerty, The Truth About Cars and Capital One.
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if it wasnt for the mustang ii the ford mustangs would of died in 70's. y'all should be thanking that they created the mustang ii for saving the whole mustang generation.
I rather resent the slams on 1970's vehicles - yeah, they weren't well put together, but the unions had something to do with this as well as the management - it was a totally different era - and not one company during the 1970's in this sector built great products - this was a transition period where Government Regulations really were non-sensical - arbitrary - and not well thought out - like those 5 mph bumpers. it was like a perfect storm of stupidity at all levels of government (we are now emulating this today). The automotive sector was one that for nearly 20 years that had yearly styling changes and very little intervention from regulations. Companies were now adopting to the new intervention of do-gooders that never once worked in the sector and never understood engineering. Stupid laws were being passed (i.e. bumpers) and not well thought out environmental regulations which made products unreliable and wasted even more petrol. I think we have to view products through the prism of when they were built. I can certainly refute "they don't build 'em like they used to" when my first car, a 1964 Falcon that was 16 years old when I got it had only 64K on the odometer and it was ragged out. My current car built in August 1996 has 168,000 miles and it drives like new. It is all about the times the vehicles were built, not by our new adjusted mores.