One-of-None Ford T-Bird Is a Cool Restoration, Can You Tell the Model Year by Looks Alone?

To be specific, from the 1967-1969 timeframe of the nameplate’s fifth generation. The mid-to-late sixties were the age of the Mustang (and other pony cars) and of raging muscle cars. The Thunderbird stood as America’s Personal Luxury Car (a segment Ford first laid claim upon in ’55, with the not-a-sports-car two-door, two-seater Thunderbird of the first generation).

Just over a decade later, Ford made several major changes to the moniker. First, in 1967, the traditional architecture of a two-door, two rows of seats personal luxury car changed to accommodate a four-door body style. Second, the Thunderbird grew in size and lost the convertible option while taking on a more distinct look, hiding the headlamps behind vacuum-actuated panels on the grille. The sequential taillights were another cool feature.

Also, the fifth generation, which debuted in 1967, marked a paradigm change for Ford Motor Company: unlike the three-model-year production run for each of the preceding variants of the Thunderbird, the Thunderbird was now slated for a five-year run (’67-’71 and ‘72-‘76), with a mid-life-cycle design do-over.

The ‘67-’69 models are nearly identical brothers, with only minor trim changes between the years, and for an untrained eye, it’s fairly easy to get them confused. Well, Kelly Castle made it even harder and built himself a mongrel of a Glamor Bird using leftover parts from his other projects. All his other four T-Birds cars were restored (by himself, mostly), so when he ran across a derelict, abandoned carcass of a 1968 example, he didn’t give it much thought and took it to his shop.

Since he already had two 1968 model year examples sitting alongside a ‘67 and a ’69, he went all in and made an all-in-one classic Ford. From front to back, his latest Thunderbird is a 1969-1968-1967 model: the face is from the last year before the style change, and between the bumpers, it’s a neatly rebuilt 1968 car. The rearmost panel is from a 1967 model, and the beauty of it is that nothing looks really out of place.

The second half of the sixties was not a kind period for personal luxury cars. Thunderbird sales dropped in each of the five years of the fifth generation’s production, from nearly 78,000 units assembled in 1967 to less than half that volume (36,000) at the end of 1971. It was a painful rock-bottom slam for the nameplate – lesser numbers had been recorded only in the first generation (1955-1957).

Sales wouldn’t plummet to such abyssal figures until the last-generation mishaps from 2002 onward. To be historically accurate, 1969 and 1970 saw a small rebound from 49,272 to 50,364, but the difference isn’t enough to call it a trend change.

The personal luxury car came of age in the late second part of the Malaise when Thunderbird sales exploded from 53,000 in 1976 to six times that in the following year (318,000). The all-time high was reached in 1978, with a staggering 352,000-car production run. However, the late-sixties models had an ace up their sleeves – a 429 cubic-inch motor released as a Thunderbird-exclusive powerplant in 1968.

The seven-liter Thunder-Jet block later served as the basis for some legendary Blue Oval eight-piston main guns, the 429 Cobra Jet and the Big Boss. But in 1968, only the T-Bird got bragging rights for the new big-block. Replacing the 427 and 428 V8s, the new motor was conservatively rated at just 360 hp (365 PS) and a stump-pulling 480 lb-ft (651 Nm).

Low-octane, lead-free gasoline wasn’t yet a thing for American motoring back then, so the four-barrel carb sprayed premium fuel into the 10.5:1 combustion chamber. Being a personal luxury automobile, the transmission was self-shifting only, the fabled SelectShift Cruise-O-Matic Drive three-speed box.

Among the options on this particular automobile, we’ll find glitzy features like a til-away steering wheel that snaps out of place when the driver’s door opens (and locks back into position when said door is closed), an overhead console with warning lights, the wraparound lounge-like back seat, or air conditioning (not functional at the time of filming, in January of this year, due to a missing line).

A power antenna, power deck lid release, or cornering lights on the front fenders were some of the popular optional extras ordered on T-Birds from that era. One not-so-liked but nonetheless super-cool feature was the hideaway headlamps (watch the vacuum actuators sluggishly operate them in the video below) that weren’t in any hurry to open or close. The owner of this three-vintage grafted Thunderbird kept it as close to the original as possible, sticking with the slow and out-of-sync system instead of retrofitting an electric motor.