Cars: Fast, reliable, or cheap. Choose two.
I'm a bit of a motorhead. Well, a retired one, in any case. Over the years, I've now owned five GM muscle cars, all with varying degree of muscle. Three of the Five were F-Body cars (the camaro and firebird body style).
The first one, given to me by a friend at the tender age of 16, was a 1970 Chevy Nova in puke green. No photos exist of it, as far as I know. It was equipped with a 307 V8 and a THD350 3 speed automatic. I thought it was the fastest thing on the planet, but really, it was a gutless wonder. It burned oil like a fiend, and the car was characterized by an ominous rattling noise from the south end of the engine block. Nonetheless, I cobbled together my lunch money, and picked up a Rochester Quadrajet (rottenchester quadrajunk?) and a matching SBC intake manifold from the local junk yard, and I installed in on a saturday afternoon (ok, so Bruce installed it, and I tried to help). The car ran a little faster, a lot louder (which I liked), and was still ugly as sin. I left the car behind when I went to boot camp in 1986, but I understand that it threw a rod not long after I left.
Before we got married in 1988, almost all my money was dumped
into my 1967 RS/SS Camaro. This Camaro, if original and in good
condition, would probably be worth $100,000 today. But alas,
"original" and "in good condition" were not phrases that could be
applied to the Camaro. The body was rotten to
the
core, with some backyard bondo jockey having made significant structural
portions of the car out of the stuff, to cover the cancerous rust.
The car had been a Daytona beach car, and I'd been silly
enough to buy it, with it's "acrylic overhaul". It had reasonably
fresh (but cheap) paint. But the big thing was, it was
BRUTALLY FAST. When I got the car, the fabled 295hp 350 and the
Muncie M21 "rock crusher" 4 speed were only memories, and in the motor
mounts sat a 1972 vintage LS-4 454, backed by a THD400 tranny, and
sporting blackjack headers and a tiny 600CFM vacuum secondary Holly carb.
It DID still have the 12 bolt posi with the 3.73 gears, though.
Not satisfied with the relatively neck-snapping power of a stock 454 in
a 3200 pound car, I made a few upgrades along the way, starting with an
Edelbrock performer intake with a Holly 750 dual feed carb (I tried an
850 double pumper for a bit, and found it to be less than
satisfying), a Crane 565 lift, 304 duration cam, forged 10-1 TRW
flat-top slugs, a stinger HEI ignition, chrome moly rod bolts, melling
oil pump, holly fuel pump, and all the other strength and go-fast
accessories associated with a rebuild street engine.
Oh.
and I topped it off with a 275 Nitrous Oxide Systems NOS Super-powershot
system. Yeah, it'd move pretty good.
To the tune of 11.72 seconds 1/4 mile at 116mph.
(NOT on those wheels and tires in the above picture, obviously!).
Eventually, I learned a lesson in why subframe connectors are important
on high horsepower unibody cars, and I twisted the subframes apart.
The solid motor mounts probably didn't help,
I'm sure. Coupled with being a married E-4 in San Diego by this
time, I hadn't the money to fix it, so I yanked the engine and tranny,
and sold my 1967 RS/SS Camaro (with factory power brakes, power
steering, and power windows) to a junkyard for a paltry $200.
Never mind that today the rear view mirror is worth that much alone.
Next up was my short lived, but much beloved Chevelle. This was
a 1969 Malibu, sans engine and tranny, that I grabbed a year later from
a junkyard. The interior was in good condition, there was one huge
dent in the front left fender, and the car was missing much of it's
wiring. However, it did have front disk brakes, which was a good
thing, and I did have that monster 454 and tranny sitting around .
They say that you need any two of the following three to build a car:
Money, skill, and time. Well, I didn't have any of the three,
really. So, it took me the better part of 2 years to get the car
to running condition. I saved up enough to get a cheap body/paint
job done on it, and I was driving it home from the paint shop, when I
totaled it. The story is a bit more involved, but I won't bother
to repeat it here. Ask me about it sometime. Suffice to say I lost
a wheel (!), went off a small cliff, and should have died, if not for my
seatbelt. As it was, the car definitely died. I walked away
without a scratch.
After the chevelle, we got stationed in Idaho, and I put the engine/tranny in my garage and started looking for a replacement car to wrap around it. I found a 1970 1/2 split bumper camaro in outstanding condition, that just needed a powertrain. Perfect! The car was really in great shape, and only needed me to drop in a powertrain, and it'd be happy. However, I had found a new love by this time in hunting and fly fishing. The project languished, until finally I sold the powertrain for $1400 to finance some new guns. And here ended my time as a motor head, or so I thought.
The next decade I refer to as "the long, dry, years". We went
through a series of SUV's and sedans, until
one day, I woke up in 2001 to find I owned TWO Mini-vans. This
seemed to be just inherently wrong. I took it upon myself to trade
in the ford aerostar that had
become
mine, by default, because Katrina just hated it. Hated it, so
much, in fact, that I'd had to buy her a different Minivan.
I immediately started looking at things like Mazda Miatas and 280Z's.
Even some BMW's and such. My guys in M-div brought me back to
reality with the statement "Chief, if you buy a Miata, we will never
respect you again". And they were right. I had all these
tales of dragstrip glory in a 1st generation camaro. I had chevy
iron all my young life. What was I thinking, looking at 280z's?
I started researching the current state of american muscle, and was
amazed to find out that the horrible 1980's cars were not representative
of the current state. The mustang GT's were decently fast, but the
Trans Ams and Camaros were bonafide muscle cars, eclipsing the best of
the best from the 1960's.
So, now the path was clear. Find a procure an LT1 or LS1 Camaro
or Trans Am. Preferably a 1998 or newer, to get me into the fabled
LS1. After many cars, I decided on the least likely of the whole
4generation F-body, the 1993, first of the generation. Now, for
those not in the know, the 1993 was ....well, different. Many
things changed in 1994, including a move from speed density to mass air
flow control. There were no T-tops in 1993, the rear wings were
different, and the tranny was a 700R4 vice a 4L60E, like the 94-2002's.
Nonetheless, the car I found was sporting only 42,000 miles, ran strong,
and was in as close to perfect condition as one can imagine. It
had obviously been someone's baby. Well, now it's mine.
She has seen some drag strip time, running a 14.29 at 97 mph on the Toyo street tires in stock trim. Since that time, we've seen the addition of an SLP cold air intake (CAI), a custom PCM chip, throttle body coolant bypass, MSD 6A ignition, Hooker super competion cat-back exhaust, 160f thermostat, random technologies performance cat, Transgo shift kit, Stainless steel braided brake lines, Hawk GT brake pads, and Powerslot brake rotors. Not to mention a set of Nito 555DR drag radials (replaced by more friendly BFgoodrich KDWS TA radials in the winter months). So, nothing huge, but a nice little round of bolt-ons. Good enough to net a 13.55 1/4 mile at 102 mph.
I
suppose I should mention Kat's current ride too, as it's pretty
spiffy.
We managed to make a real nice wad of dough selling her 1999 Chevy
Venture min-van leaving Guam. Off-island cars sell very well
there. In all fairness, we'd taken very good care of it, and even
though it was approaching 100k miles, it drove like it had 15k miles on
it. Synthetic oil will do that for you! In any case, when we
got back, we were ready to be done with mini-vans but still needed a
third row. We started looking at Tahoes and Yukons, primarily, but
ended up with GMC's latest addtion, a loaded
2007 Acadia. The thing is a
technological marvel, and is amazingly safe. It's quite pretty
compared to the Tahoes too, in my opinion.