The 2015 Ford Mustang Called For Some Assembly Before Being Displayed Above The Streets Of Manhattan
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Julie Piatek
In honor of 50 years of the Ford Mustang, during the New York Auto Show the 2015 Mustang will be displayed at the Empire State Building on the 86th floor observation deck.
In order to make this happen, it required six weeks of preparation. The 2015 Ford Mustang convertible will be displayed 1,000 feet above the streets of Manhattan.
Ford Motor Company and Romulus, a Michigan based DST industry have been collaborators for nearly six decades. In fact, a DST crew was a part of the 1965 Empire State Building’s Mustang convertible showing. The two have teamed up again to get the Mustang to the top of the Empire State Building.
The 2015 Ford Mustang is all-new, but old-school techniques were able to get the job done.
“When we sat down to start plotting this out in mid-February, everyone quickly realized that some old-school craftsmanship would be needed to successfully place this car more than 1,000 feet above the crowded streets of Manhattan,” said George Samulski, manager, Ford North America design fabrication. “The deck is too high to reach with a portable crane from the street, and the spire that towers more than 400 feet above that narrow deck makes helicopter delivery impossible.”
After measuring elevators and doors, the engineering team in Dearborn started drawing lines on a scale model to show where the Mustang should be cut in order for it to fit. The team worked with two early prototype Mustang convertible body shells. The Mustang that is making the trip to New York was stripped down and the surface was cleaned to ensure that everything was perfect before it was sectioned and painted.
Then the second body was used as a donor by the metal fabricators to decide where to make the cuts and to fit a custom-built tubular steel subframe that would be used to hold the sections together.
The team has spent several days practicing the entire assembly process. Once the car is in the loading deck it will ride two separate passenger elevators to get to the observation deck. They only have six hours to put the car together.
The 2015 Mustang convertible will be on display for visitors to the Empire State Building observation deck April 16-17. When the deck closes 2 a.m. on April 18, the crew will reverse the entire process and remove it before visitors return at 8 a.m.
What do you think about the Ford Mustang returning to the Empire State Building? Comment or Tweet us @ChiAutoShow
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