ANR's annual Spring Car Care Section is here with four full pages of automotive tips and information. Leading it off is a feature story on Giltner classic Mustang owner Glenn Nielsen.
When the sun is shining and the weather is good, Giltner resident Glenn Nielsen loves taking his fully restored 1971 Mustang Mach 1 out for a spin.
“(I take) anybody who wants to go for a ride,” Nielsen said. “We drive it to a lot of the car shows and we want to drive it more in the summer.”
A car enthusiast for most of his life, Nielsen has owned several GTOs and Roadrunners and is a fan of muscle cars, popular for racing.
“The old saying was “Win on Sunday, sell on Monday,” Nielsen said, noting that street racing was extremely popular in those days.
He cited the activities depicted the classic movie “American Graffiti” as an example.
Nielsen says because of its top speeds of 120-150 mph, his Roadrunner was expensive to drive.
“I couldn’t afford the insurance on that Roadrunner,” he stated. “Insurance companies... on any of those cars, they just went blatantly crazy and raised the insurance rates up, because too many young guys got hurt. So they figured they were going to end it by making it so you couldn’t afford them.”
After restoring a few muscle cars, Nielsen found the 1971 Mustang for sale in California.
“When we were still living in New Hampshire, the car came up online and it was in California and we shipped it from California to New Hampshire,” he explained.
As a bonus, Nielsen also received the original bill of sale for the vehicle.
“It was originally sold from Roush Motors in Denver, Colorado,” Nielsen said. “Brand new, it sold for $4,129. It was a high option car at the time it had a lot of extra stuff on it.”
That “extra stuff” included a rear window electric defroster and a 351 Cobra jet motor with a ram air.
“The ram air option back at that time was $60,” Nielsen commented. “You can sell these ram air options for $600 today.”
Part of the Mustang’s restoration involved rebuilding the engine.
“It has a high performance cam, it has headers, but otherwise the engine was kept pretty much stock,” Nielsen said. “It was bored 30 over with new pistons... The transmission is a C6 that was rebuilt and a high performance shift kit was put in the transmission.”
While the Mustang is no longer considered stock to when it was first sold, Nielsen wanted to maintain some of its originality. He said while he wishes it had a four speed transmission and has the parts to install one, he is trying to “keep it as close to stock as I can.”
On the interior, Nielsen installed new seat covers from MCI in California, and both the interior and exterior of the car were painted. The got new primer and powder coating. Nielsen said that project was accomplished with the help of several of his friends.
“Alex Humphrey is the one that painted the car,” he said. “My nephew in Grand Island does the powder coating. He did a lot of the pieces for me when we were putting it back together.”
When Nielsen began experiencing heart problems during the restoration process, several fellow Giltner residents jumped into to help complete the project, including Allan Coats and his daughters, Alex and Tori, as well as Alex Humphrey and Dave Eastman.
“They did most of all that work and if it weren’t for them, I would never have gotten that car done,” he commented.
Nielsen credited his wife, Cindy, for helping collect all the parts needed to make the restoration possible.
“My wife pretty much was the one that was online and got all the parts,” he said. “It’s a community project, let me put it that way.”
He said while most of his volunteer assistants have mechanical backgrounds, none of them are professional mechanics, which made fully restoring the Mustang a true accomplishment.
‘This car is stolen’
Neilsen commented that the Mustang’s back story is as interesting as the story of its restoration. For instance, the original owner was from California.
“By the story I heard about it, he used it a lot for drag races in the LA streets,” Nielsen said. “He finally did something to the motor and I guess it sat parked for some time. Then he decided to try to fix the motor and rebuilt the motor in it. It always had a noise like a lifter tick in it and he couldn’t get it out of it so he sold the car.”
Another offbeat chapter in the Mustang’s saga began when the vehicle was being shipped from California to New Hampshire. The couple had hired a shipping company that transported the Mustang along with eight other vehicles.
“(The) transport was worth over a million dollars and (the driver) went back to his place in South Carolina and wouldn’t turn the cars over until the company gave him what he wanted,” Nielsen said. “So he was holding the cars as ransom. Because that’s an interstate theft, the FBI was involved in it. We were getting calls, we had to talk to them, we had to talk to the sheriff down in South Carolina, and we were talking to California.”
It took two months for the Nielsens to get the Mustang and even after they received their vehicle, it wasn’t in the clear yet.
“When I was in New Hampshire, I went down to get it registered and I’ll never forget the look on that sheriff’s face up there when I took the serial number down there because they’ve got to check that and he looked up at me and said, ‘You know this car is stolen,’” he explained. “They never got it cleared so then we had to go back to the FBI, we had to go back to the sheriff and South Carolina and we even had to go clear back to California to the DMV out there to get all the paperwork showing that yes, we own the car. It turned into a real deal.”
Post restoration
Saying he has restored so many cars he can’t keep track of them, Nielsen said the Mach 1 will be his last project car.
“I have come to realize that at my age, I’m on a downhill slide towards 75 and I’m not physically capable of doing it anymore,” he commented. “I had an ‘85 Blazer that I was going to redo and I sold it because I knew I wasn’t going to get it done. There’s a lot of other ones I’ve seen that I really want to get and my wife brings me back to reality to say, ‘You can’t do it anymore.”
But while he’s done with car restorations himself, Nielsen said he hopes to work on getting younger people interested in cars and involved with the Island Area Cruisers Car Club of which he is a member. To that end, he plans to take the Mustang and his ‘71 Ford Ltd. (which is in its complete original condition) to car shows across Nebraska. Last year, the Mustang placed first at the Starlight Motors Car Show in Grand Island.
“That’s the first time that car has actually won,” Nielsen commented. “We’ve won other trophies and stuff. We’ve come in second and third, but it was the first time we actually got a first place trophy. I was pretty excited. It’s just the fact that you put that much work into a car like that and you get the recognition for it. It makes you feel pretty good.”
Nielsen also hopes to participate in car shows in Kansas and Iowa and will be participating in Giltner’s second annual Giltner Daze Car Show on June 8.
The Nielsens have lived in Giltner since 2006. They say they moved there to find a small school that could meet the needs for their grandson.
“We came out here, looked around and found this place and we were really interested in Giltner Public Schools,” he explained. “Which was wonderful and worked out very well.”