kishy's 1983 Grand Marquis 2dr

[DerekTheGreat]

Didn't know you had this car. Very cool look forward to seeing progress on it next year

So much for that progress. There's still time for some though.

[kishy]

I'll trade you my '69 Plymouth for it.

I like it way too much to get rid of it lol.

The pinstripe on the hood goes all the way down to the bumper!

Thats rad!

Yeah, it's definitely got those "I'm a new 1980s car designed to draw in buyers stuck in the last decade" features to it. They're decent looking at least.

Didn't know you had this car. Very cool look forward to seeing progress on it next year

I've owned it since before I was on this site, but since it's never been a daily driver for me I don't mention it much.

I figured keeping track of each car in its own thread is probably better.

Edit: apparently you did know lol

Wow. Definitely a nice collection! I can only imagine them going up in value with time. They look fantastic.

[TecNickal]

Didn't know you had this car. Very cool look forward to seeing progress on it next year

[87gtVIC]

The pinstripe on the hood goes all the way down to the bumper!

Thats rad!

[DerekTheGreat]

I'll trade you my '69 Plymouth for it.

[kishy]

Branching off from My Rides (I should have done each car individually from the start...hindsight, 20/20). All updates for this car will go in this thread from now on.

I bought this car in October 2013 for $650, at the time making it my second Panther.

And, the '83!

I saw this car sitting in a parking lot for a repair shop for a couple years, not moving. Over a year after I got the '91 I approached the business owner and asked him about it...registered owner had died, family didn't care much about the car or what happened to it. After months of being annoying I finally convinced them to sell it to me. Yay project!

[ATTACH=CONFIG]39318[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]39315[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]39312[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]39317[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]39313[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]39316[/ATTACH][ATTACH=CONFIG]39314[/ATTACH]

This is 100% stock, but will eventually be...not stock. Front brakes need some rehab and rather than spend the money on stock stuff I'm going for a "medium brake upgrade" to tackle all the front end bushings at the same time and get the best value out of the effort put into it.

This car is not currently driven and it will likely be a couple years before it really is, but with the body being in the shape it's in, I decided it was right for me and it won't kill it to sit around a little longer if cared for. It was off the road for 10 years according to when the stickers expired.

To date very little has been done to/with this car. It has a police trunk pack from a modern CVPI. In May of this year it got a 1G>3G alternator upgrade:

...1G-to-3G upgrade complete, minus upgraded ground cable, which is needed on all 3 of the Boxes now. Technically optional but I'd prefer the "weakest link" to always be the fuse, not a length of wire.

This was functionally the same as the 84, but I did a couple things differently this time:

• Added a fuse to the stator wire going to the choke cap. I don't know what the effects of ground-shorting the stator wire are but I suspect it's not ideal, so it's peace of mind.
• Incorporated the noise capacitor which is originally mounted beside the external voltage regulator. I moved it to the ignition coil bracket and fused the feed to it, which "Tees" into the 12V sensing wire from the charging stud to the internal regulator connector. Please forgive terminology misuses here...

I am going to write up a thread that specifically explains the 3G swap for a carb/CFI car with a 1G. Most info I've found online recommends a plug-n-play type arrangement but the wiring alterations are simple enough not to justify spending more than a few bucks on this project.















84/83: swapped rear springs between these two. 83 had CC817 cargo coils. This is related to another thread, Box Town Car Spring Options...

Other than that, sequential turn signals, and the aftermarket centre high mount stop lamp installed by the previous owner, it's stock. Odometer reads 60-something thousand kilometres, but being 5 digits it's hard to be sure how accurate that is. I think at most it has 160, certainly not 260. The body is pretty straight and clean and underneath is surface rust only minus the exhaust which is Swiss cheese.

In my ownership it received its first transmission service (I found the dipstick plug in the pan) and general maintenance is all kept up on. It is a factory carb car but I'm planning to either engine swap or do some sort of FI swap.

I had pulled this and my 91 out of my garage to try to clean up the garage before winter. I finally got the garage about 70% cleaned up, so I washed the 83 and put it back away where it will sit for probably about another year:



The turbines on it are currently wearing my snow tires so I'm going to have to switch those out for another set (at last count I have 20 tires in my garage...) so once I can get access to a tire machine I'll get those on my steelies along with a whole bunch of other dismounts/remounts.

This car currently does not have license plates as I figure I won't be driving it for quite a while really. I have enough other projects on the go.