[FordGtMan]

Hey, my car is all sanded down and in primer and about to go to paint. I bought some side scoops and a hood scoop for my 66 coupe and i was wondering about a few things. Do they have to be rivited on the car before the paint goes on? My father told me we would just slap em on after paint is already there but i feel like there would be a huge gap between the car and the scoop because there wouldn't be any filler. I dont even know how to properly install these things. Any help would be greatly appreciated. thanks in advance.

[66 restomod]

The side scoops I put on did not fit exactly correct.
Put them on before painting to save yourself some headaches.
I had huge problems getting them pop riveted on because I could barely get the tool in the window cavity. I ended up drilling and screwing them on from the outside based on a few peoples advice I met at a car show here.
With pop rivets you will also need to remove the rear window mechanism to get the backside secured.
Just another option if you get frustrated doing pop rivets

Here is our link: Scoops

Good Luck and BE Safe
Ron

[Calponycarsmike]

There are a lot of comanies making scoops be sure to look at a few, some are much better than others.

[FordGtMan]

i believe the ones i got are crap. They dont sit very well and there about a centimeter short of the door when placed correctly. Maybe ill have to look at it again. Thanks for the replies guys. Though i would have thought mustangsunlimited parts would have been a little better in quality...O well, thats what i get for looking for the cheapest.

[andrewmp6]

No fiberglass part fits perfect the first time you have to make it fit so buy them before paint.

[Veronica]

Hello. Here are some pictures of the side scoops on a 66 Shelby. They are supposed to have that gap between the scoop and the door. The car is painted a semi-gloss black inside the scoops.

[FordGtMan]

Thanks veronica, thought i got a bad pair haha. As for the inside of them, i was thinking just epoxy primering them. It would seal well but would it look like crap considering the paint might not be under there completely?

[Veronica]

Hi again. I doubt if you will be very happy with the results of using an epoxy primer in there. Unless you're a pretty good painter, you'll end up making a dickens of a mess of it, one way or another, and the epoxy primers are extremely difficult to remove from a painted surface without damaging the paint. You could probably get the line in the front of the scoop right, but, no matter how well you mask it off, some of the black is going to blow out of the gaps between the top, bottom and back of the scoop and the car. Most folks just rattle can the black. It looks much nicer, it's easy to go back and redo if something, like bugs or rain, speckles it up later on, and, if you are using a base coat/ clear coat, it's easy to clean the inevitable overspray and have your paint be perfect. Something that the Shelbys never did end up being.

[FordGtMan]

I am epoxy primering the entire car this weekend and ill do the scoops and other parts separatly, then add them to the car. Is this the best way to go?

[Veronica]

Hi again. I guess that would depend on what you mean by 'best'

The cars were already painted when Shelby got them, but, they didn't have the side scoops yet. Shelby still had to knock that big hole in the side of the car for the rear brake cooling duct. He would put the duct in, paint that area black and then attached the scoop, which had already been painted the appropriate color. That's the easiest way, but, the results weren't all that they could have been. On unrestored cars, you would always see a little bit of black peeking out somewhere on the top, bottom or back of the scoops, and the line between the black and the body color never matched up perfectly with the top and bottom of the front of the scoop. If those are things that you care anything at all about, you care a lot more than Shelby did. The easiest way to get perfect is to prime the car, prime the scoops separately, paint the car, paint scoops separately, attach the scoops without damaging the paint, and then paint the black.

[FordGtMan]

dont they need to be bondo'd to the car to make a smooth fit? Or screwing em in is good enough?

[Veronica]

Hi again. The cars were already painted before Shelby started hacking away at them, so, the bondo thing wasn't really an option. And, if Carroll Shelby had seen one of his people fiddling around with something like that just to make it look a little better, he would have fired that person on the spot. One thing that must always be considered when duplicating something from a Shelby is that Carroll Shelby was (and still is) a butcher. Left to his own devices, he would have been building nothing but race cars, and the way that people built race cars in the 50s and 60s bore no resemblance to the way people do it now. Those were some really, really rough cars to ride around in. If you ever have the opportunity to drive a 289 A/C Cobra, make sure that you wear some thick soled shoes. The floor gets so hot from the exhaust being right up against it that it will literally blister the soles of your feet. A few of them actually set the carpet on fire. But, fortunately, that isn't a problem for most men. A 289 Cobra fits me perfectly, but, a man's foot won't fit between the tranny tunnel and the brake pedal. Not with shoes on, anyway. And, those were cars that were built to be sold to people, some of which would be driving them to and from work.

They only built about 550 65 Shelby GT-350s, and the original plan was to only build a hundred. Someone got the bright idea of pitching these cars to Hertz in 66 for rentals. The guy that made the pitch came back with some good news and some bad news. The good news was that Hertz went for it. The bad news was that they wanted a thousand of them. That was to be in addition to the regular production of 66 GT-350s that were to be sold. So, they had to turn out nearly 6 times as many cars for 66 as they had for 65, and they had built as many 65s as they could. They simplified the modifications that they made for the 67s and, by 68 Ford had all but taken over, so that has the 66s, which were the only ones that got those particular side scoops, as roughest bunch of slap 'em together and get 'em out of here cars of all the Shelbys. So, you would want to decide whether you want them to look right or good. You can't have both.