Ford Mustang marks 50th anniversary on top of Empire State Building
We’ve been talking about the 2015 Ford Mustang Convertible and how they plan to mark its anniversary well we’re here to report that the vehicle is now on display 305m high atop the 86th floor observation deck of the Empire State Building in New York.
Today we’ll be looking at the process of getting the new Ford Mustang onto the famous sky-scraper because it was a bit of a special project since the observation deck is too high for a portable crane to reach from street level and also the building’s spire makes helicopter delivery impossible. So the only and historic approach involves to cut the car into sections and getting them up by the building’s lift.
The company started planning the whole thing since mid-February and everyone realized very quickly that they’d need some old-school craftsmanship to make it work.
They started with the meticulous measuring of all the Empire State Building’s elevators and doors and then the crew – made up of engineers from Ford and Michigan-based DST Industries who also assisted with the original 1965 display – used a scale model of the new Mustang to work out how it needs to be cut.
They used two early prototype Mustang convertible body shells as well as a wooden mock-up of the building’s smallest elevator and custom rolling carts and wooden crates. The final display car was transported after being completely stripped, cleaned, sectioned and painted.
As you can imagine this is quite the challenge but the thing is that the crew had only six hours to take the pieces up and put them back together.
The crew spent several days practicing how to assemble the car, timing everything down to the minute.
The vehicle will be on display until 2AM on April 18, when the crew will be repeating the process only in reverse.
