The audio setup that came with Josie seemed to be a throw in in place of a system. There are bits and pieces of sound system that was much higher in quality. I’ve found a short piece of 4 AWG cable in the trunk that presumably went to the battery. There are also sounds deadening pads lined in the trunk to probably get rid of bass/metal vibration. A set of 4″ JVC speakers were put in the back and barely fit. I can see the hole was cut out for either a 6×9 or a 5.25 hardware. Another sign of downgrading.

The first step was to identify the hardware I already have. That starts off with the Stereo deck made my Custom Auto Sounds. This deck is designed to look like an older era radio down to the knobs and push button presets. It has modern features we take for granted nowadays such as search, memory and AUX input. One good point is the deck has pre-amplifier outputs, two sets. I can drive two separate amplifiers one for the sub-woofer and the other for the rest of the speakers. Here’s the online manual location here.

So far I’ve pulled the deck out and cleaned up some of the wiring I’ve identified as not being used. This will help out identifying all the wires. This car is over 50 years old and different times wiring was added for some purpose. You can’t just yank out wires you may end up breaking a connection to some car function like wipers, courtesy lights, power windows etc.

A few weeks ago I had this ingenious idea of removing the stock mufflers and throwing a couple of turn down tips in its place. That was a freakin’ mistake as the tone was so loud it took the fun away from cruising around.

I went to a local performance muffler shop here in Stockton to have a pair of Flowmaster Series 50 installed. It still has some rumble to it but doesn’t sound like a complete muscle car.

What are the odd of going to a muffler shop and the car next to you is a 1963 Thunderbird getting worked done. Well this happened to me yesterday. The 63′ red had a lot of work done on the underside. It had a complete air ride system.

After inspection of the lower side it turned out Josie had glasspack’s up front. The owner of the shop recommended keeping them in and installing the 50 series Flowmasters to give it a classic sound.

The difference is night and day. I would cringe before when taking off since you could here every bit of the motor working taking off. This included the mechanical sounds that were not pleasing to hear.

I can now hear the music playing inside the car without exhaust system drowning it out. It’s a keeper.

So I finally looked up what this button did in my 1963 Ford Thunderbird user manual. It turns out the white button was placed in the parking brake bulb location. I had purchased the electronics needed to make a button operational from the brake light location. The intent was to have a button that would manually turn on the electric fans pulling air through the radiator. After some consideration I decided I don’t want to take the risk of the fans not being on during higher temperatures and just have it on all the time. 

Josie didn’t come with a spare wheel or jacking tools.

I relocated the inline inlet neck for the radiator coolant and used a braided upper while I was at it.

Back in the day I remember the 76 ball sporting from car antennas. These days you rarely see an actual telescopic antenna that goes up and down manually!!

The dice goes without saying…