A rusting 1968 Ford Mustang sat untouched in a Pennsylvania barn for more than a decade – until a father decided to keep a promise he’d made to his daughter when she was just 6 years old.
Larry Zimmerman Jr. purchased the disassembled Mustang in 2006 from a widow whose husband had taken it apart in the 1980s but passed away before he could restore it. That same year, Larry’s daughter Sophia was born, and he figured the car would make a perfect long-term project for a devoted car guy with time on his side.
But life has a way of filling up the calendar. The Mustang gathered dust and rust while the years slipped by, its only spark of hope coming when a young Sophia spotted the shell in the family barn and asked her dad if it could be hers someday. Larry promised it would be.
By the time she turned 16, that rusting shell still hadn’t moved, but neither had Sophia’s interest. She still wanted the car – and Larry, now 47, realized he had a choice: break a decade-old promise or finally get to work on what would become a year-long daddy-daughter rebuild.
With three generations of family pitching in, the pair documented their progress in a series of videos and photos, capturing the grease-stained weekends and late-night sessions that slowly brought the classic pony car back to life at their home in Limerick, Pennsylvania.
“For me, I got to spend one of the best years of my life as a car guy building a dream car with my little girl,” Larry said. “Even the days I wanted to strangle her, she would make me laugh. She was always smiling.”
As the project neared completion in 2022, Larry wanted to end it with a surprise. He secretly enlisted a close friend who owns BCT Customs to color sand and buff the Mustang over two days while Sophia was none the wiser, then stayed up all night adding the final chrome touches himself.
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The next morning, he woke his daughter early and asked her to come to the barn, where a camera captured her stunned reaction as Larry drove out their finished creation—the car she’d claimed as her own when she was barely old enough to see over the dashboard. Inside the trunk, they left one final mark: their handprints, painted side by side.
Three years later, Sophia still drives that Mustang every day—to high school, to work, and now to college.
“The biggest thing that Sophia has learned from this process is if you work really hard and put 100 percent effort into something, you’ll be successful,” Larry said. “A life lesson for sure.”
The video Larry posted of the reveal has resonated far beyond their Pennsylvania barn, with thousands of fathers reaching out to say they’re now planning similar projects with their own children.
“That really hits hard with me, because if done with patience and love, it really creates such a special bond and memories that will never be forgotten,” he said. “It’s a lot more than just an old car to us, and always will be.”
