Mid-60s Fairlanes have clean, crisp styling all around. We imagine that most people, though, have grown to appreciate the rear of Duanes car as his taillights fade into the distance.
Its pretty rare to see a body shop manager tackle an interior restoration, but the impeccable cockpit qualifies Duane as quite the automotive Renaissance man. He told us the reproduction red vinyl interior kit fit perfectly, and we wont argue. The chalk-marking, paint-dabbing resto guys will immediately spot the Hurst shifter and Auto Meter gauges, but we think they blend pretty well into the stock appointmentswell enough that the street competition wont be tipped off to the powerhouse under hood. Cmon man, its just a stock 390. Gimme two car lengths and the leave.
Duane took his time with the body and paintwork, and it shows in the detail of the engine compartment. The motor was built with 9.5:1 compression, so its still very streetable. The free-flowing Edelbrock Performer RPM aluminum heads really complement the big roller cam. Hooker headers coupled to a Flowmaster-muffled 3-inch exhaust ensure the combusted stuff enters the atmosphere in a hurry. Check out the trick Monte Carlo bar that Duane fabbed up.
The full-resto image extends to the trunk, where a factory-style mat and tire cover tidies up the cargo space.
A wise man once said, If you want a happy life, first decide what two pastimes you enjoy the most. Make a career out of the second, and keep your favorite pastime as a hobby. Maybe those werent his exact words, but you get the idea. Its easy to get burned out on your hobby when you rely on it to pay the bills. Take Duane Wissmann, the owner of this gorgeous 67 Fairlane, as an example. He rescued the car in 1987 and immediately tore it down for a restoration. But you cant expect a guy who spends all day straightening and painting cars at the body shop to want to work overtime on his own car. And so the Fairlane sat under a tarp for nearly nine years. In the fall of 1996, Duane got tired of his car-guy friends asking, Wheres your car? So off came the tarp and the rebirth was begun.
Of course, the car was no longer the solid, clean Fairlane hed had in 1987the quarter-panels and floorpans had since dissolved in the humid Missouri air. Undaunted, Duane built a rotisserie, bolted up the forlorn Ford, stripped the metal clean, and installed full quarter-panels and floorpans. Duane monopolized two of the bays in his shop for two years, and worked nights and weekends to turn his dream into a candy-apple red reality.
The original 289/four-speed powertrain was mothballed in favor of a roller-cammed, 428-cranked, 67 390 FE Ford backed by an indestructible Top loader. Duane outfitted the Fairlanes gutted interior with a reproduction kit in red vinyl, and he augmented the factory instrumentserr, fuel gaugewith Auto Meter Ultra-Lites to keep tabs on the stroked FE motor. Rolling stock consists of 15-inch Magnum 500s, which complement the period-correct musclecar stance. In fact, its pretty scary how stock this car looks to a non-Blue-Oval guy. Duane drives the Fairlane to cruise-ins and shows as far away as Illinois and admits that a few late-model SS Camaros and GT Mustangs have fallen prey to the showroom-stock resto aura of the car.
He has yet to run the 67 on the strip, but he mentioned that such late-model musclecars have given him little competition on the street. Nothing, at least, that 430-plus cubic inches of Ford didnt settle.