![]() I did restos and body and paint on 2 of these in the 1990s. This looks like a great car that a person could drive while they tinker with it and either just use it as a unique daily driver or chip away (literally) at the paint as you have time and fix it up to be a nice looking car again. ![]() They say that it runs good and the transmission does fine. This is Ford’s 390 V8 four-barrel with 300 hp. The seller says that it has an exhaust leak and the power steering needs some help, but those should be weekend projects that a shadetree mechanic could tackle. Things don’t look too bad under the hood. You can see the original color on the fender wells here, those are always body color on the ’61-’63 T-Birds and they are most definitely not brown. It seems like more often than not you’re rolling your own windows up and down on cars from this era gosh, the humanity! This car has AC and power windows which even for a luxury/sport car like a 1963 Thunderbird is not always a given. The back seat looks almost perfect and should clean up nicely, but there are no photos of the front seats and I always expect the worst when something isn’t shown in a sales ad. And, there’s the famous “Swing Away” steering wheel that moves to the right side instead of tilting up out of the way so you can get in the front seat easier! This was a standard feature on the 19 Thunderbirds. Other than a couple of cracks in the steering wheel this interior looks super nice to me. This is a third-generation Thunderbird and it’s my personal favorite bodystyle for this series. And, it’s been repainted sort of a bronzy-brown color from it’s original Corinthian White, or that’s what I think the color may have been? Preparation is key when painting, as you all know, and obviously this one wasn’t done correctly. The seller says that the body is good but the paint isn’t too hot. Yep, give me a car like this Thunderbird as a daily driver. Why even bother having a nice vehicle anymore, that’s so disappointing. I came out to the car and there was a beat-up Oldsmobile parked crooked in the spot next to mine with 50 other spots that they could have taken, but they just had to park in that one spot, and then they just had to park too closely on the driver’s side, and then they just had to fling their door open and give me a door ding. I just got yet another door ding today in a parking lot, parked way over in a remote parking spot all by myself with nobody else around for several spaces. This T-Bird is nice enough but not so perfect that you’d be afraid of parking it at a big-box retailer. Here’s another vehicle that looks like it would just be a good driver, as in, not doing a full restoration on it, but just getting everything working perfectly and then just driving it, every day, rain or shine, year-round yes, even in winter (I know that half of the US doesn’t have to deal with snow in the winter but for those of us in the upper half of the US, winter = snow). ![]() It’s on Craigslist for an asking price of $3,500! While the concept of the personal luxury car first realized in the Thunderbird was derived from the European grand tourer popular in Italy and England, it was the English who borrowed from the Thunderbird in the design of the Sunbeam Alpine, a car with styling lifted almost directly from the American car.Missoula, Montana is where this 1963 Ford Thunderbird is located. It impacted other brands even across the Atlantic. The Thunderbird's influence reached farther than Ford, though. They even used the T-Bird as the basis for the most popular Mercury model, the Cougar. When Ford launched the Mercury brand, it was in an effort to capitalize on the personal luxury car market that the Thunderbird had created. The Thunderbird's success is obvious from its long life and high sales figures, but it was also hugely influential on other models. Bridging the gap between sports cars like the Corvette and plush sedans like the Bel Air, the Ford Thunderbird was the best of both worlds. Its combination of luxury and sportiness was a revolution that broke open a whole new market segment. There were sports cars available to satisfy the urge for an exciting drive, but they were small and impractical for much else. That was fine for a pleasant trip from Point A to Point B, but it left the driving experience lacking. However, while cars became increasingly cushy and comfortable, they also became big and clumsy.
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