[MOstang]

Hello,

As most of you know I've been working towards returning my 1993 Missouri State Highway Patrol SSP Mustang to in-service condition. It's getting close to almost 2 years now.

A quick recap, ImEvil1 (Mike) knew that I was looking for an MSHP. He tipped me off that Jeff Gill (USPS SSP) had listed one for sale over on .Org. Jeff had bought the SSP from Eric Prince (MustangRetriever) approx 1 year earlier. Eric had the pleasure of buying it directly from the City of Cottleville, Missouri who were using this originally all white MSHP SSP as a black and white DARE car. Eric purchased it "equipped and marked" in the manner that Cottleville had set it up as a DARE car. This SSP has a great history and has document in-service pictures with 2 different law enforcement agencies, which I find to be pretty cool.

Well a trip to New York later to visit Jeff and see this SSP in person and a deal was done to purchase it. A couple weeks later it was in my garage. My goal all along has been to return it back to correct in-service setup and to do it right the first time to avoid redoing something later. To that end, unfortunately, to be completely satisfied I needed to have the old paint jobs completely stripped down to bare metal for the return to all white.

About 15 months ago I had the pleasure of meeting the Trooper in person who was assigned to my SSP the entire time in service with the MSHP (Lt. Vince Rice who is now Asst. Director of Internal Affairs). That was a great experience. I've continued to correspond with him and look forward to getting my SSP out to Missouri in the near future to visit my family back there and provide him an opportunity to take take his old MSHP SSP out for a spin!

I would like to extend a BIG thanks to Eric Prince for his support with my project. Without all your help no way this could have been done. The path you paved by researching and documenting these cars culminating in the MSHP History & Restoration Guidebook has been a great advantage. This allowed me to learn so much about the MSHP SSP's. I appreciate your patience with the countless questions that I posed to you about this project.

It's just been finished so these photos were just taken and the sun was mostly down. I'll take some more in next couple days when I can get some better light. Looks like we're going to get some snow so that might slow me down. The MSHP gave me permission to purchase the period correct emblems from their supplier and I have them mounted on magnetic backings. Will be fun to get a quick picture with those on it as well.

To provide a timeline...attached is an in-service photo taken by Vince Rice, the Trooper who was assigned to it. Also have attached a photo Eric took just after buying from Cottleville as well as a couple photos from this evening back in MSHP in-service condition (w/out emblems of course for now)!

Thanks for reading...this has been a great deal of fun!