#1963 ford thunderbird custom tv

At the rear, the panels there received the same stretching treatment as the front fenders. It lowers itself into one of the most glamorous grilles a car from this family has ever seen, flanked on either side by headlights enclosed in custom frames.īehind the grille and under the hood we're treated with extended fenders that fade into more pronounced doors with no handles. Starting up front we see a 1961 Thunderbird hood that's been stretched and received a restyled scoop. And a heavily modified body is not something we get to see every day for this model.Ī roof chopped by three inches was carefully lowered onto the rest of the metalwork, it too far from what it used to be back when it rolled off the factory floor. There is still some 1963 Thunderbird left in there, but you can barely notice it hiding under the extremely modded body. A specialist in roadsters, he really seems to have gone overboard with this Thunderbird here, one the world got to know over the years as the Tango.

#1963 ford thunderbird custom tv

The car in this form is the work of someone named Rick Dore, one of the most potent names of the custom car industry ever since back in the 1990s, and a sort of TV personality thanks to Discovery Channel's Lords of the Car Hoards show. Especially when we're talking about a custom build as extreme as this one. Whereas the first and second iterations of the model are quite common on collectors' lots and at auctions, the third one and beyond are somewhat more akin to exotic appearances. Not ugly per se, the third-gen did mark a serious departure from what came before, not only from a design standpoint but also when it comes to the engine and other mechanical bits. Starting with this model, round began to turn into square, flowing into edgy, and class into punch. It was, if you will, a transition model that switched the Thunderbird design language from the style of the 1950s beauties into the more utilitarian, performance-oriented style of the muscle car era. The car that brought us here today is not part of these first two generations, but a member of the third (1961 - 1963).

That's probably because the Thunderbirds made during those years retained all the flowing lines and incredible details of the age's design, while at the same time coming across like a machine unlike anything the competition was doing. Gen one and gen two, the cars made under this name between 1955 – 19 – 1960, respectively, are the pure definition of beauty for me. In all, the life of the Ford Thunderbird spanned half a century and eleven generations, briefly interrupted at the end of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s.