Since the 1970s Keith Mowat has slowly accumulated and restored a variety of vehicles that pique his interest. It doesn’t matter that the Edmontonian has only a single car garage and no real place to work on them – he’s got ways around that issue.
When restoring a vehicle, he will often rent a workspace next door to Accord Collision, a shop where he’s well-known to the owners, the Smylski brothers. That’s where the bulk of the work on his most recent project, a 1966 Ford Galaxie 500, took place during this COVID-19 lockdown.
“I didn’t have a particular make or model of car in mind when I was looking for something to build this last time,” Mowat told me, and he continues, “I just felt I’d know what I’d want when I saw it.”
For the better part of two years Mowat surfed Kijiji looking at hundreds of ads for classic cars. Late last year, he stumbled across one for the ’66 Ford Galaxie. He went to look at the vehicle, and says, “The car had sat for 20 or 30 years in a garage as a stalled project. I got to hear the engine run, and that had already been rebuilt along with the transmission. The front sheet metal was off, and it needed more body work together with brake and suspension work but most of the parts to complete the car were included in the package.
“The seller was genuine and straightforward and I talked to him for a long time before we agreed to what I thought was a fair price for the project.”
Mowat clearly recalls how he fell in love with cars. While growing up living near an Esso gas station at the corner of 127 Street and 127 Avenue in Edmonton, he’d watch the cars come and go from both the pumps and the garage. He especially liked what he described as the “jacked-up hot rods that were likely just noisier than anything else.”
Humble beginnings
At 16, Mowat found his first car. It wasn’t a hot rod, though. Rather, it was a humble Volkswagen Beetle.
“I passed the car on my way to work on a farm near Lacombe,” he recalls. “It was parked on a corner, looking sort of derelict, with a For Sale sign in the window. Anyone else would have known there was something wrong with it, but not me.
“I got the VW and started to tinker with it as I drove it. There were lots of things wrong with it, but I learned about mechanics on that car.”
Shortly after, he traded the VW for a 1957 Chevy that wasn’t in any better mechanical condition. At that point, he left school to work in a garage and apprenticed the old-fashioned way.
“You just shut up, watched how the work was done, and did all of the cleaning,” Mowat chuckles. He never earned his mechanics ticket, though, instead moving on to focus on heavy duty equipment repair and crane operation.
After buying the project Galaxie, Mowat had it towed to his rental workspace where he proceeded to replace all of the shocks and springs and bushings and ball joints. The brakes were repaired and renewed. To the existing headers, Mowat added dual exhaust pipes and mufflers.
The worst rust on the car was the driver’s rear quarter panel, but a replacement piece of sheet metal had come with the project. With help from his auto body friend Wilf Killam, the pair cut out the offending panel and set the new one in place. Mowat did some of the welding work to join the new metal to the existing car. Surprisingly, the floor pans weren’t rotted away, and not much other body work was required to get the Galaxie to the point where it was ready for a coat of the original candy apple red paint.
Fitted with the rebuilt 390 cubic-inch engine, original to the Galaxie, the power plant has been upgraded with a mild cam and a lightweight aluminum intake with an Edelbrock four-barrel carburetor. The C4 automatic, or so-called ‘green dot’ transmission thanks to its dual range capability denoted by two dots on the gear selector — the small dot was for second gear only driving in snow and ice, the large green dot for regular use — had already been serviced. Interior panels, including the carpet and headliner were in remarkably good original condition, as was all glass and door and trunk weatherstripping. After the paint was applied Mowat added new American Racing Torq Thrust wheels topped with fresh tires.
Mowat wants to have one small seam in a seat resewn and he’d like to get the original AM radio working again. But he says the Galaxie is approximately 90 per cent finished thanks to having had some extra time to focus on the build during the lockdown. He has lately beeb driving the car on a regular basis.
He concludes, “I’m out on the road with it and I hope some will be encouraged by my story to finish up their own projects.”
—Greg Williams is a member of the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC).
Copyright PostMedia Network Inc., 2020
