We are working on our Bullitt at Dave Piercey’s Mustang Performance, which is located just north of Tampa, Florida. Piercey’s expertise is in Fox Mustangs, but will do suspension and exhaust work on later Mustangs, as well.

After driving a Fox Mustang for a couple years, I sold the car and went looking for a new ride. The very day I began searching I found a 2001 Bullitt on Craigslist with a blown engine. After owning a black 2001 Bullitt a couple Mustangs ago, I know they make for a nice daily driver, and that’s what I was looking for. Also, I have always wanted a green Bullitt. Even when I bought the black one, I wanted a green one, but had just missed out on one before settling on the black Bullitt.

Dave Piercey (D1), and David Squire (D2) is helping to bring the Bullitt back to life. Both have experience with Bullitt engine swaps.

For the Black Bullitt, I had put together a new engine for it right before I sold the car. Fortunately, I sold the black Bullitt to a friend of mine along with the old engine. He still had the old engine, and offered it to me at a buddy price. He didn’t ever see himself putting the old engine back in the car, and his efforts at finding a suitable car to swap it into never materialized. Hence, my ability to get the engine for a good price.

So, back to the Bullitt at hand. After looking at the car, it was in such rough shape that I knew I could get it for a price that fit my budget. Also, I felt like I needed to rescue the car. The previous owner didn’t take care of the car at all. The exterior has various body issues from an obvious driver side incident. The interior looked like the family dog had lived in the car, and not that there’s anything wrong with that, but the interior needed a healthy vacuuming. The seats, though the previous owner said they had been recovered, still had rips, and appear to be a shade off from the original Bullitt seats. The trunk area was just as bad. There were potato chips back there, and various screws and clips in the spare tire well.

Here we’re about to drop the fully-operational engine into place. The engine we’re putting in the car is from another Bullitt, and is largely a plug-and-play scenario. We had to clean a lot of the existing parts that had to go back in the car, which added a lot of time to the swap.

All is not lost, though. The Bullitt has recent tires, and shocks and struts. The brakes are in good condition, and it has Flowmaster mufflers on it, which will sound very nice with the BBK Performance X-pipe I’ll be installing with the engine.

First things first, though, we’re in the midst of the engine swap as I type this. And of course, any engine swap that goes too smooth raises an eyebrow, so of course, we’ve ran into issues. The cooling system looked like the car had been at the bottom of a lake, a new clutch pivot ball had to be located, and the heater hoses need sorting out. Specifically, the tee by the firewall crumbled into a million pieces upon engine removal, and guess what, it’s no longer a viable part so we’ll have to figure that out before the engine is up and running.

Hopefully, the transmission and rear end are in working order so we aren’t committed to a psychiatric ward by the weekend.