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Tag: Ford Mustang

  • 2015 Mustang to Top the Empire State Building

    2015 Mustang to Top the Empire State Building

    The 2015 Ford Mustang will hit dealerships sometime this fall, but before it goes on sale the car will be making an impressive journey to the top of New York’s most famous skyscraper.

    Ford this week announced that it will be placing a 2015 Mustang on the observation deck of the Empire State Building. The stunt is one that commemorates an identical stunt that was performed with the 1965 Ford Mustang.

    To perform the engineering feat, Ford has enlisted the help of DST industries to create a special version of the 2015 Mustang that can be taken apart and fitted into the Empire State Building’s relatively small elevators. The team has worked for six weeks to get the Mustang convertible into shape for delivery to the top of the building.

    “When our engineers sat down with the DST team 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, design fabrication manager at Ford North America. “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.”

    DST engineers created a mock-up of an Empire State Building elevator in their workshop to ensure the pieces of the Mustang will fit. In addition to each of the pieces fitting into the elevator, each load had to be weighed to stay within the elevator’s weight tolerance.

    Once the vehicle pieces reach the observation deck a DST crew will begin assembling it back together. A subframe has been created to hold all the pieces together and the vehicle should look whole when completely assembled.

    This entire process will have to be done early in the morning within the six hours that the Empire State Building observation deck is closed to the public. The preparations and a time-lapsed run-through of the assembly are previewed in a video today released by Ford:

  • Ford Mustang Celebrates 50th Anniversary at Empire State Building

    Two modern American icons will come together when the latest generation of the Mustang convertible appears on the top of the Empire State Building in April to celebrate 50 continuous years of production of the Pony car by Ford.

    The new, 2015 Ford Mustang convertible will be on display on the 86th floor observatory in the Empire State Building.

    The publicity stunt requires that the car be cut into multiple sections, transported up the elevator on wheeled carts, and reassembled by a technical team in the display area. Because of the building’s stunning height at 1,454 feet, there is no portable crane to make the delivery easier. The spire at the top of the building makes a helicopter delivery equally impossible.

    Ford managed the stunt once before in 1965 using a similar process, but the prototype Mustang displayed then was seven inches shorter and four inches narrower than the new model.

    Working from computer engineering data, team members preparing the display car have found places to make the cuts in the car so everything can be loaded onto custom-made racks that can be rolled into the elevators.

    Once everything is on the 86th floor and uncrated, the technicians will have less than six hours to reassemble the sections.

    “Like all good craftsmen, our team is measuring twice and cutting once to make sure we can get this Mustang up in the elevators,” said Dave Pericak, Mustang chief engineer.

    “Like the team that did this in 1965, the current crew visited the Empire State Building before starting and took careful measurements of its new elevators and doors before cutting up the car,” Pericak said.

    The original Mustang was revealed for the first time in a television ad campaign on April 16, 1964, and then first shown to the public at the World’s Fair in New York on April 17, 1964. The car officially went on sale that day with a record 22,000 orders in sales that first day. More than nine million Mustangs have been sold in the past fifty years.

    Visitors can join the celebration and view the 2015 Ford Mustang on display at the Empire State Building’s 86th floor observatory from from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m. on April 16 and 17.

    Image via Wikimedia Commons

  • Ford 3D Printed A Chocolate Mustang For Valentine’s Day

    Ford 3D Printed A Chocolate Mustang For Valentine’s Day

    Ford is known for embracing new technologies before other automakers do. It’s already been working with 3D printers for a while to produce prototypes for testing. Now the company is having a little fun on Valentine’s Day by experimenting with 3D printed chocolate.

    Ford recently teamed up with 3D Systems and its Sugar Lab to produce a 3D printed Mustang out of chocolate. If you recall, Sugar Lab is the branch of 3D Systems that helped to produce the ChefJet and ChefJet Pro that were revealed at CES back in January. Now Ford is taking Sugar Lab’s new prototype 3D sugar printer for a test drive.

    The 3D printer shown in the video below takes a novel approach to printing sugar sculptures. Using an inkjet printer head, it sprays water on a layer of sugar. Another layer of sugar is then spread over the wet sugar to crystalize it and then the process begins anew until a full 3D model is created out of it.

    If you want to know more about the Sugar Lab and the work 3D Systems is doing in food printing, you should check out their talk at CES.

    Image via fordvideo1/YouTube

  • 2015 Corvette Teased Ahead of Detroit Auto Show

    Many folks have been ogling at the reveal of the 2015 Ford Mustang which was released by Ford today. However, there was another large announcement in the auto world yesterday. Not to be outdone by their closest competitor, Chevrolet announced that it will unveil the 2015 Corvette Z06 at the 2014 North American International Auto Show in Detroit next month, along with releasing a teaser photo of the front driver’s side wheel.

    The announcement by GM marks the end of a huge year for the company in regards to performance vehicles. In October, the Chevrolet SS sedan was released to the market. This month, Chevy will start rolling the new 2014 Corvette Stingray Convertible off the assembly lines in Bowling Green, Kentucky. And in the second quarter of 2014, Chevy will be releasing the 2014 Camaro Z/28, which has logged a lap-time of 7:37.40 at the famous Nürburgring course in Germany (Compare this to the track record set by the Porsche 918 Spyder, which completed the course in 6:57.)

    As it currently stands, almost no information has been released concerning the specs of the 2015 Corvette Z06 besides its name. Much speculation was held concerning whether Chevy would keep the Z06 moniker or move on to the Z07. Fortunately for traditionalist, Chevy has yet to patent the Z07 label and thus will maintain the Z06 model for the 2015 Corvette.

    In its press release for the 2015 Corvette, GM states, “It will be the most track-capable Corvette ever, designed to deliver supercar levels of performance through unique powertrain, chassis and aerodynamic features.” From the teaser picture released, one can certainly believe their claim of wanting this to be the most track-capable Corvette yet. Many sources have analyzed the picture to determine the tires the Z06 will be sporting, and most are enthused. Motortrend.com pegs the tires as “ultra-sticky Michelin Pilot Super Sport Cup tires” sized at 285/30/19. These huge front tires are sure to give ultimate traction, supporting GM’s claim of this being the most track-capable Corvette ever.

    Unfortunately, no details have been released concerning the size of the engine. If one is to assume Chevy will be using an engine similar to other Corvette models, one could expect this Corvette to boast either a twin-turbo 4.5 L engine, or a 7.0 L V8, as seen in last year’s model.

    Chevy hopes the release of the 2015 Corvette will help to continue their dominance in performance car sales in the US. Thus far in 2013, Chevy has sold 1 out of every 4 performance cars sold in the United States and is outpacing the Ford Mustang by 4,093 units. With the reveal of both the 2015 Corvette and 2015 Mustang at the same time, now is the true test of which performance car reigns supreme.

    [Image via GM]