An admission: This 1965 Ford was like bulk meat in a storage case. I could see it from afar but it required specific effort to procure it.
There was an unbelievable amount of new content in the 1965 Ford full-sized line. With coil rear suspension, a new frame, a new six-cylinder engine, and various other significant upgrades, this was one of the newest cars Ford ever built. While we have discussed some of these elements previously, this Custom 500 is significant and deserves a meaty discussion.
Not everybody procures their meat at a grocery store. While Mrs. Jason and I aren’t hunters in the traditional sense, there have been numerous times over the years we have hunted deals from various meat lockers for purchasing a half or quarter beef (or hog) for our use.
Using meat lockers has been a periodic thing in my family for eons. As a child I vividly remember accompanying my maternal grandfather to visit Maurice, the owner of the meat locker down the road from their house. Maurice (although everyone pronounced it as “Morse” in that part of the world) was a perpetually busy man, processing all varieties of livestock for people in the area.
My grandparents would raise the cows Maurice butchered for them. While my grandfather was perfectly capable of butchering, he drew the line at bovines. Hogs, yes; I have helped him butcher hogs. Cows were a no-go. As he said “they’re big and a hell of a lot of trouble”. So when the time came he would haul the cow to Maurice for the dirty work.
Maurice’s meat locker had a terrific smell, which seems to be universal among such establishments, along with what seemed like acres of stainless steel. When purchasing from a locker, the unit price is tough to compare with typical grocery store fare as it’s a flat rate regardless of cut. It takes the same effort to process the animal, much like the design and engineering costs are similar on cars be they large or small.
The only real downside of purchasing from a locker is the higher degree of planning involved with pickup and storage.
When making the purchase, the processor will ask what percentage of the meat we want ground and what cuts we want ground. This also requires planning as our decision will dictate how lean, or fatty, the ground meat will be. Naturally the fattier meat tastes better but a lot of grease is created when cooking it.
The choice is a dilemma. While steaks are great, ground beef can be used in a seemingly countless number of dishes.
The 1965 Ford, like most Ford products, is the ground beef of the automotive world. Like ground beef, the 1965 Ford allowed for a variety of uses (family sedan, taxi, police car, business transport, etc.) and could be obtained at a relatively more attractive price than many of the other cuts, uh, competitors. Think of Ford as the Hereford of automobiles; it’s easy to find and relatively cheap to procure. Think of more premium brands as being, say, Black Angus or even Wagyu.
However, this comparison of Ford to ground beef is compromised. Why? This Custom 500 is on the leaner side. In the beef world, more lean ground beef generally dictates a higher price as it contains more desirable cuts. So what’s the opposite of ground beef? Veal? Bison? Calamari?
Our featured Custom 500 with a V8 had a unit price which was much less than the related Galaxie 500 and LTD. At a price of $2,573, this V8 powered Custom 500 cost $0.75 per pound. In comparison, a Galaxie 500 cost $0.788 per pound with the LTD setting one back a whopping $0.904 per pound.
We all pay more for lean meat, but Ford was doing the exact opposite in 1965.
The base Custom with a six-banger was the leanest of all the four-doors at $0.706 per pound. However, a person needs a little fat in their meat as otherwise it will be too tough to enjoy or it will scorch when cooked – which encapsulates my concern about a Custom with a six-shooter.
The LTD was obviously the fattiest cut among Ford branded automotive meat. With a standard V8, automatic transmission, more thickly padded seats, walnut appliqué all over the interior, and courtesy lights galore (even in the ashtrays), along with its vinyl roof and fancy-shmancy panty cloth seat upholstery, the fat certainly made for a fantastically fine tasting Ford. Ford’s decision to dip the LTD into the tallow bucket paid off. The LTD, in four-door guise, sold just over 68,000 copies for 1965.
There’s no argument the LTD was tastier than the other Ford branded offerings, but put a little heat to it and a lot grease will be cooked right out.
Here’s a trivia nugget. Just like how not everyone knows a cow has four sections in its stomach, not everybody knows our Custom 500 four-door outsold the four-door LTD by around 3,700 examples. The two doors were a different story but we need to compare ground beef to ground beef, not Kansas City Strip to beef tongue.
Charging more for something with a much higher fat content was rather shrewd on Ford’s part.
Logically, the Galaxie 500 was somewhat less fatty than the LTD but Ford still offered plenty of garnishments on this burger. For many it was the optimum blend of lean and fatty cuts as it outsold everything else in Ford’s lineup and not by a small margin. Often when one finds the right recipe, they stick with it.
In the big scheme of things, Ford found a very good breed for use in their ground beef for 1965. Full-sized sales, excluding wagons, were just over 800,000, up around 20,000 from the year prior. In comparison to the 1965 models, the 1964 Fords looked oxidized.
With all this talk about beef, let’s discuss pork for a minute. We all know while Ford makes good ground beef they have certainly dabbled in ground pork over the years. Case in point is the 1964 Ford Custom 500 in comparison to our featured 1965 Custom 500. The 1965 model, with a V8, was well over 220 pounds lighter than a comparable 1964 model. Weight was now on par with Chevrolet with the lightest 1965 Ford being the six-cylinder Custom two-door sedan pegging the scales at a modest 3,278 pounds.
This particular Custom 500 is not the leanest 1965 Ford to be found, but it is flirting with it. Our featured car certainly looks nifty in black with its red interior but this girl is plain. Steel roof, basic seats – hell, it’s even got a three-on-the-tree. There is nothing fatty about this Ford. However, the cuts ground up for this example had some nice marbling as there is a 289 under the hood, not the new for 1965 240 cubic inch six.
No doubt some likely prefer the 240 six over the prior 223 as it seems to have more moo in its juice.
Many people prefer lean meat. That’s fine as in 1965 Ford had a person covered from all angles. If a shopper was hyper-concerned about cholesterol from red meat, there was the ground chicken Falcon. It was very lean but a little spiciness could be added, yielding what was called Mustang.
There are roughly 1,000 breeds of cattle worldwide. Ford didn’t provide such variety in their full-sized line as they offered only six series and seventeen models. Regardless, there was still enough variety to provide a degree of taste and leanness for most any palette – whether you had your bovine butchered by someone or bought it at the store.
Found October 2020 at a dealership in Jefferson City, Missouri
I still have a fondness for Fords of this era, which comes from my Dad’s 66 Country Squire from when I was a kid and the 67 convertible that was my first car. It is hard to describe just how differently these cars “feel” from the pre-65 Fords. The bodies feel different, the controls feel different, and the driving experience is different too. Only the engine and transmission sounds carried over. These cars’ bodies have a subjective feel to them that makes their relationship to Fords into the early 90s apparent.
In my location growing up anything lower than the Galaxie 500/Impala/Fury III trim was not common at all.
At a Ford dealer? It would be a hoot for you to roll up in your 63 and tell the salesman you are thinking of trading for something a little newer. Oh, and I’m really hungry for a hamburger right now.
Several years ago I did almost take the ’63 to the dealer with the intent of saying I wanted a new version of what I had. No doubt he would have pointed me to an F-150.
The regional variations in what one sees are interesting. Growing up, when these were getting a few years on them, seeing a ’66 was commonplace. A ’65? Never.
seeing a ’66 was commonplace. A ’65? Never.
Given that the ’65 outsold the ’66, that really is odd.
Maybe the various Quinn Martin productions of the time like The Fugitive, The Invaders, The F.B.I. along with later series like Cannon and Streets of San Francisco showed more 1966 models than 1965 models might played a role in this.
And it’s worth to repeat then the 1965-66 Custom/Galaxie body founded a second life in Brazil, soldiering to the early 1980s.
It was. And once I discovered the ’65 outsold the ’66, it seemed even more bizarre.
Great article!
As a 6 year old in 1970, the ’65 Ford really stood out for me, and they seemed to be everywhere. Most other cars were still anonymous to me.
It was the distinctive wheel cover that most of them had that made it stand out. It was a lot like the paint on the wheels on my metal pull wagon.
I still love this wheel cover…..
These cars’ bodies have a subjective feel to them that makes their relationship to Fords into the early 90s apparent.
Understandably so, as the same basic perimeter frame and chassis would be used for decades to come. The evolution of the big American BOF car essentially peaked or ended in 1965; it was just subtle refinements after that. No wonder all the effort from here on out was put into things like padded roofs and opera windows. 🙂
Agreed, what a shame they didn’t continue with more sophisticated irs and other ride & handling advancements, and OHC V8s 25 years earlier than they did. I’d submit that the traditional really big Chevies peaked about 5 yrs later in ’70 with VR steering, better suspension, and other late ’60s GM refinements beyond what Ford did in ’65, and before their broughamification in the ’70s. Luckily GM did follow those up with the great ’77s, the best driving full-sized US cars ever.
Memories of the summers of 1969 and 1970, working as a student engineer for the Pennsylvania Electric Company (aka, Penelec) taking noise level readings off of 500kv transmission lines as Penelec attempted to handle customer complaints about degraded television reception. For the young folks, this is back in the day when “cable” consisted entirely of putting antennas on a mountain top and running the signal to customers down in the valley who were blocked from the television signal by said mountains.
Penelec’s entire motor pool fleet consisted almost entirely of 65 and 66 model Custom 500’s. And I had a partner who hated to drive. Probably put in 150+ miles per day, five days a week, for three months. The cars were a good example of “transportation.” They got the job done with absolutely no noteworthy characteristics. And I seem to remember they were all 6 cylinder automatics with an AM radio and heater. Period.
I love how there’s a BBQ joint in the background of one of the pictures. But am curious how you were able to skip right over the double cheeseburger Thunderbird next to this Ford with your appreciation of that particular menu item?
Oddly, it didn’t occur to me until now I have no pictures of that Thunderbird. Why that happened is a true mystery.
That said, I did get pictures of the car on the other side of this Ford. It’s an example of one I don’t think we’ve covered here, particularly as equipped.
Mmmm… a tasty follow-on to yesterday’s discussion of chicken and bacon in relation to Caprices.
First, on the topic of butchering — I have a somewhat suppressed fondness for butchering meat. This fall, for the first time in over a decade, I was able to go hunting, and while good luck eluded me, my brother-in-law, who was hunting about 100 yards away, shot a huge buck. So, I got to experience the satisfaction of processing a deer again, and I was able to introduce my daughters to hunting and butchering as well, which they loved.
I just checked my field guide to butchering (a necessity for a novice like me), and it says this about butchering cows: “If you can round up at least one good helper and preferably two or three, and if you have the courage to try, you can butcher a beef more easily than any other animal, on a pound-for-pound basis.”
So the necessary ingredients for successful beef butchering are: a cow, three good (and presumably knowledgeable) helpers, and courage. Absent all of the above, I don’t blame your family for skipping the ritual and taking it to Maurice instead.
Regarding our subject Custom 500 — to me, this car reminds me of scrapple (and yes, scrapple is available in beef as well as the more common pork). In the olden days, scrapple was a food that folks consumed out of necessity when they couldn’t afford the “good” stuff. I bet that in the 1960s, there weren’t many “fans” of scrapple, but plenty of folks who frequently ate it. But in more recent years, people have discovered that scrapple itself has certain appeal, and that instead of shunning frugal products, that a certain enjoyment can be found in them.
Not too long ago, I wouldn’t have given this Custom much thought… and likely would have been disappointed that it wasn’t an LTD or some other gourmet Ford delicacy. But now with the benefit of hindsight, I like the simplicity of these cars all on their own. A fine slice of thrifty Ford here!
I would suggest that scrapple is the perfect metaphor for the 1965 Studebaker. Made from what’s available, not many people like it, but the few who do won’t be happy with anything else. 🙂
And FWIW, my father grew up in Philly and I absolutely love Habersett scrapple. There is some in my freezer at this moment.
I remember you mentioning about your father’s Philadelphia roots, and your appreciation for scrapple. I’m also a Philly native, and Habersett was the go-to brand when I was growing up. Nowadays, I live on the very fringe of the Great Scrapple Belt, and the supermarkets here just carry Rapa brand (if they carry any at all)… Rapa is sort of the Camry of the scrapple world.
Yes, the ’65 Studebaker would be a better analogy to our favorite variety meat. But to me these lower-end cars do remind of foods like scrapple (“hardship foods” that now have a devoted following… including foods like haggis, chitlins, cod tongues, and so on… I’m sure every region has its own example). Once shunned, but now appreciated.
I live on the Jersey Shore and yesterday walked into a Lidl grocery store. I was looking at the cold cut / sausage displays noticed something that said “Rapa” on the package. It was scrapple! OK, I’ve heard of scrapple, seen it on menus in PA and some parts of south Jersey, but never seen it in it’s raw state. But then again, I’ve never looked for it. Its just sounds so unappealing.
I never tried scrapple, or plan on trying it in the future. Heck, I’ve never even had Pork Roll (or Taylor Ham as it’s called in some parts of Jersey) and I have lived in Jersey a very long time. Pork Roll (or Taylor Ham) is an extremely popular ingredient in a breakfast sandwich here in NJ. It’s “Pork Roll, Egg, and Cheese on a Hard Roll”, or “Taylor Ham, Egg, and Cheese on a Hard Roll”,
Haha, a niece’s husband is a Jersey guy whose reply every time I mention scrapple is “How ’bout pork roll?” Last time they were out this way they brought me scrapple along with a single Taylor pork roll, which I just cooked up this past weekend. A distant second to me, but my middle son loved the stuff. That was my method – english muffin, egg, cheese and a slice of Taylor.
I had scrapple a few times while sleeping over at a friend’s house when I was maybe 13 or 14 years old, they hailed from Pennsylvania but this was in Los Angeles so I had never heard of scrapple. They used it at breakfast like others might use bacon. At the time it tasted pretty good although those are the last and only times I’ve had it.
I figure it’s kind of like hot dogs, they can taste quite good but you really don’t want to look into the manufacture too deeply if you enjoy them. I’m sure there’s worse things to eat from a health perspective and if you’re not super picky as to diet try it, you might like it.
I’ve mentioned before that I grew up in Pittsburgh, so never heard of scrapple until I went to college in the suburbs of Philly. It was a staple at breakfast in the cafeteria, but I could never bring myself to sample it, based on its looks.
Pork roll on the other hand, I’ve tried much more recently in NJ and liked it.
I actually ran this down once and learned that Habersett and Rapa are now owned by the same company and made in the same plant, but using different recipes and on different days. This was the result of my research:
https://jpcavanaugh.com/2019/08/16/scrapple-a-love-letter/
Wow, so Habersett is now a badge-engineered brick of Rapa? Is nothing sacred anymore??
I enjoyed your blog post — left you a more detailed scrapple-oriented comment there. Thanks!
My parents are from NE Pennsylvania, and though I’ve never lived there myself, have visited hundreds of times since both sides grandparents (and Uncles/Aunts/Cousins) we used to visit pretty often…but for the last 40 years we’ve lived in Texas so don’t get back very often.
So..my Father was used to scrapple, and we learned to love it. One time my sister’s husband (native Vermonter, not from PA) had a business trip to Harrisburg and described to my sister the odd breakfast meat they served him with eggs….my sister gave an “ahhh” sound and my brother-in-law didn’t quite get why she was so enticed by just some odd thing they served in place of bacon. We don’t get it very often, so it is very much like a delicacy to us when we can.
Back to the Custom 500, I remember my Dad test driving a Ford Wagon, must have been in 1967….it had that odd side window deflector to keep the rear window clear. We had a ’65 F85 Wagon, which was still pretty new, so I’m not sure why my Dad was looking, and he ended up not buying it, but must have planted bug as 2 years later he traded up the midsized F85 for a ’69 Country Squire with the 2bbl 351….and bought full sized wagons as our primary family car from then on….he only kept the ’69 for a few years, replacing it with a ’73 Ranch Wagon.
As a native of Baltimore I grew up on RAPA (Ralph and Paul Adams) scrapple from Delaware. To this day it’s our favorite breakfast, at least 2 x a week. It’s about 30% corn-meal so actually has some fiber, probably making it better than bacon, sausage &c healthwise. When we moved to VT then NY we found Jones brand scrapple available, made by the good Germans in Wisconsin, it’s the Germans of PA/MD/DE that made it popular. We like Jones about as much, and were recently thrilled to find it at King Soopers in Denver, where we now visit family regularly. Yay for scrapple!
I grew up in Chester County PA, which is arguably the original home of scrapple. We usually bought Strodes, which was a small local brand. Habbersett was the bigger brand – they even had TV ads in the ’70s (“HabberSETT your table with Habbersett” was the jingle). Never heard of Rapa at the time.
When I had college friends visit from upstate NY, my dad made it for breakfast, and then after they said they liked it and asked what it was, he took great glee in dramatically reading the ingredients list.
An apt metaphor, Jason!
Worked through high school in a butcher shop. The owner used to pitch freezer beef to the customers during the summer, when the days were longer, and we kid butchers were out of school, for more available hours of breaking down beef (we kids worked very cheap, and could go full speed for hours). Other times, the prices at the slaughterhouses would drop, and it was an incentive to load up the order book with bulk orders.
Freezer beef is like fleet sales for cars, slim margins, but you made it up in bulk and efficiency of processing. We’d get a bunch of freezer beef orders lined up, and there was never a slow moment in the shop, even when the front counter was quiet. It was pure math, the number of pounds, times the margin per pound, minus the processing labor costs. Lots of orders, and run them through quickly, without interruption. Fleet orders of cars were no doubt looked at and handled in the same fashion. Also, I’m sure the car manufacturers worked a little harder for fleet sales when the inventory standing outside the front door began to build, and sales were a bit slow.
I still wonder if the 1969 Ford was based upon the 1965 or was a brand new design. Also the 1967 Thunderbird moved to body on frame. Was the 1967 Thunderbird based upon the 1965 Ford.
All of the subsequent big FoMoCo cars (until downsized) were based on the same basic perimeter frame and suspension architecture, and that essentially includes the mid-sized cars starting in 1972 when they switched to BOF. I’m sure there were some detail differences, but fundamentally they were the same in principle. This allowed economy of scale across a huge swath of FoMoCo production.
It was essentially the same at GM too. GM and Ford’s BOF cars had reached a developmental stage where there was no real incentive to change them anymore, except to downsize them in the late ’70s.
1965 was a great year for the big three, with total redesigns of the big cars by all of them. Quite similar to 1955 and 1957. The angular big Fords looked quite different from the curvy, Coke bottle GM offerings, but both were quite successful. The Chrysler products shared more with Ford that GM, but were also huge improvements over the prior generation. Take a look at these ‘65 sales figures for Ford, Chevy and Plymouth:
Chevy – 2,375,000; Ford- 2,170,000; Plymouth – 728,200.
These are incredible numbers for Chevy and Ford. Chevy sold over 1 million Impalas alone! Plymouth paled in comparison, but their total was still a record. Accord and Camry would kill for numbers like this.
But those are for the full division sales. Full size Ford and Chevy sales increased just slightly in ’65. despite being all-new, but they both lost a considerable amount of market share (about two percentage points each), as big car sales were already very deep in their terminal decline of market share. The new ’65 Plymouth also lost market share.
The market in ’65 boomed because of the Mustang, as well as strong sales of intermediates and smaller cars.
For that matter it shows how strong GM had gotten in the full- and mid-size segments since Ford was selling every Mustang it could build and Chevy significantly fewer Corvairs while the Falcon and Chevy II were more-or-less level, but Ford Division as a whole was still a couple hundred thousand units short of Chevrolet as a whole.
The fat vs. lean is an interesting analogy. In current times, being seen as lean is good and popular. But in other eras, being lean meant you couldn’t afford to eat enough to make you fat.
We have friends who live part-time on the other side of the mountains east of us. They’re part of a ranch that raises grass-fed cattle, and every year they offer us the opportunity to go in on a cow, which we’re glad to do. We get an eighth of a cow, with an assortment of cuts and some ground beef. We never know quite what we’re going to get, so that’s kind of fun.
Years ago, when these cars were new, I remember the pastor at our church coming a few times to bring Communion to my mother. He drove a Custom 500, with what seemed an oddity at the time: a power seat. Of course, now I realize that all kinds of stuff was available as options even in mid-level models. Another priest at the same church drove a 1960 Chevy Impala for quite a few years.
These days I have more respect for at least the mid-level cars (the Bel Air, Custom 500, Fury II and such) than I used to; not as plush as the top-level models, but a good bit nicer than the very bottom level cars.
Looks like a fun cruiser, especially with a 289 three-speed.
I learned so much about cow today! A great, informative piece, and as others have said, the metaphor with the featured car really works.
I’m still stuck on the round taillights stuck in the hexagonal housings intended for the larger units fitted to the more upscale cars.
I’m suddenly extra-hungry for beef for dinner. I can imagine that part of the cumbersome aspects of slaughtering cows for beef is their sheer size.
Joe, I’ll let you in on a secret – I wasn’t able to just rattle all the bovine information off my tongue. I would wager the ability to butcher cattle isn’t as prevalent now as it was even fifty years ago.
Never would have made the beef connection on my own, but well done as always, Jason. It’s nice to see a Custom instead of another Galaxy.
I’ve mentioned it before, but this one heightens memories of the 1966 Custom 500 we owned when I was a little kid, even more since this one’s a manual, although I don’t see the O/D handle. My Dad punted the 1959 IH Travelall and drove up in a snazzy 2-tone Ford sedan…….a white top over that beautiful coppertone, with a 289, no A/C, no P/S, and no power brakes, but Dad sprung for a limited slip rear end for the snow. I don’t know whether the rear seatbelts were an option, but we were expected to wear them….and not click the metal ashtrays on the rear armrests.
The Custom was replaced by a new 1972 K-5 Blazer, and I just can’t remember whether rust had reared it’s head to any extent in that 6 year span.
Thanks again, Jason.
Going from an IH to a Ford sedan and back to a Blazer – it sounds like the Ford was the outlier in your family.
Well done? Thank you. Although medium-rare often tastes good, too. 🙂
I like these Fords, which looked superior to the broadly similar Australian Ford Fairlanes of the latter half of the 1960s.
I spotted in the brochure a feature that I was unaware of, a folding rear seat. Did all sedans and hardtops wether or not Custom or Galaxie or Ltd have this festure?
As it states in the caption (although it isn’t the easiest to read) it was an option.
For those familiar with representative cuts, which was the source of ’65 Ford’s 427 engine option?
You have to ask? 🙂
What’s next? A Coupe deVeal? Fleetwood Broug-ham? Buick Pork Avenue or Pontiac Bone-ville? It’s enough to make one go Veguan.
Good suggestions! Maybe we can also examine a steak-bed truck or something with a chop top. 🙂
Not any butchered chop top, either.
When we moved to Florida n 1974, my divorced, swinger aunt here had a ‘65 Custom 500 two-door sedan. Dark green with a white painted roof, poverty caps, and that straight six with an automatic. I was already a fan of ‘65 and ‘66 Fords then, but hers had under-dash air-conditioning. Nobody I knew had air-conditioning in their cars then, most still had box fans in the windows cooling their houses, too. To make thar car even more unusual, it was a beater. The paint was dull and full of scratches, the seats were looking rough, and the dash over the cluster was curling up, like all ‘65 through ‘68 Fords tended to suffer. Quite simply, it was beat and on it’s last miles by that time. But, man, it had ice cold air! However, truth be told, we all know a nine year old car was considered ancient back then. In the summer of ‘74, this eleven year old spent many weekends going to be beach in air-conditioned comfort.
This was a really interesting article but it’s a bit frustrating to see the analogy-carrying price per pound metric without the actual prices and weights (for the Fords not the beef purchases).
I’ve long wondered about the Custom 500/Bel Air/Fury II buyer in the four-trim-level era that started with the LTD being added to the top of the Ford line. At least into the early ’70s there was enough of a market for these cars, a touch fancier than the no-frills “Prices Starting At” Biscayne/Custom/Fury I but still plainer and cheaper than the mainstream private-buyer big cars at the Impala/Galaxie 500/Fury III level.
I recall being disappointed, in High School, when the 1965 Fords were introduced. They seemed to be a big let down from the 1964 Fords, which had expensive body sculpting including a fitted rear bumper like the Oldsmobile, and also very upscale Thunderbird looking interiors on the XL models. Very simple body sculpting with “bent” frond fenders and no fitted rear bumper.
However, as the years have gone by, I have come to appreciate the 1965 Fords including the LTD, which you never see anymore. But the one that really gets my attention, is the crisp, taunt and clean looking 2 door hardtop in all white, as in this picture. In my mind, this is a very sharp looking design. Too bad they did not get collected, for you never ever see one.
Dad bought a 1965 Custom 500 in Wimbledon white with a blue vinyl interior. It was part of a regional promotion, where you could get a Custom 300 in Red, White or Blue. I seem to remember that it was the 352 ci V8 with Cruise-O-Matic, and in a first for our family, Factory Air Conditioning. Our home didn’t have even a window unit air conditioner. He traded a Sandstone Beige,1963 Ford Country Sedan, 8 passenger wagon with a power window in the tailgate. He scarred me for life buying that car, after bringing home a bright red Country Squire Wagon with a 390. Mom put the kibosh on the Country Squire, and as a result, I find myself irresistibly drawn to red cars. My last two have been red. Damn it Dad.
I for one much preferred the looks of the ’64 but dynamically the ’65s were a step forward. Dad had a ’64 Custom 500 289 with C-O-M, and a neighbor bought a new ’65 Custom 500 with the new 5 bearing Six and automatic that I got a ride in when it was still near new. I was very impressed with the smooth quiet ride and decent power, seemingly equivalent to the V8, of the new Ford. I still prefer the ’64 but can appreciate now how much of an advance the newly designed Ford was.
One word comes to mind when I look at this car: honest. It’s just a plain, simple, honest, no-nonsense sedan—the kind that folks in the area where my parents grew up (rural Manitoba, Canada) would have been partial to, much more so than than an LTD or even a Galaxie. In fact the step up to the 289 would probably have been considered extravagant by most. I love this car—and I guess it’s that heritage that makes me lean towards lean (sorry), as well.
No doubt some likely prefer the 240 six over the prior 223 as it seems to have more moo in its juice.
And the 240 had seven main bearings instead of the 223’s four? I’ve been searching the internet and that’s my impression but I wonder if anyone can confirm. As far as I can tell, the Falcon 200 six got seven main bearings in ’65, and the new 240, whereas all prior OHV inline sixes had four.
This model was manufactured by Ford Brazil in the second half of the 60s, under the name Ford Galaxie 500. It was certainly the biggest car ever manufactured in Brazil, a country in which most models manufactured are based on European and Asian models.it was extremely quiet, soft and spacious. It was a model that made an epoch here
My first car was a copy of that photo, a black 1965 Ford Custom 500 3 speed standard which I bought in Ontario in 1968 with 23,000 miles. It had a blue interior and no radio. The decreased weight became obvious on gravel roads as it was not stable on washboard. I had many little repairs done on it.
Then there was the 240 engine. I kept hearing ticking. It came with a factory defect which was not recalled as far as I know. Near the front one of the valves, stud and lifter were not in line and every several thousand miles the stud which the rocker was bolted onto would have a notch wear into it, so it had to be pulled and replaced. Then a self employed mechanic went to a Ford dealer and questioned them. They admitted the fault. So a co-worker and I ordered a rebuilt head and replaced it ourselves in an evening.
I drove it until it had 92,000 miles and traded it on a 1968 turquoise Galaxie 500 with 40,000 miles. The 1968 was one of the best cars I owned. I sold it to a co-worker at 182,000 miles. I should have kept it as it was rust proofed. It got destroyed in a rear ender a year later. The rear seat still had the factory plastic when I sold it.
Regarding ride stability, the best car I aver drove (not owned) was a 1967 galaxie. It did not fish tail on gravel washboard at high speeds.
I owned another Ford, a CrownVic which I ran up to about 260,000 KM. It was good except the transmission had to be rebuilt while the 1968 was untouched.