El Camino

So I did a silly thing.

In the middle of winter, I sold my nice 4×4 Jeep Cherokee and bought a rear wheel drive, 42 year old, 3500 lb muscle car with street tires on it. It does not do snow well (though I can manage).

I’ve always wanted to own / drive / work on one of these (a 69 or 70 would have been preferred, but this deal was too good), and while building a script for searching Craigslist better, I found one that looked like a really good deal. I drove out there with Aaron and Rob (a 3 hour drive), and found it was pretty much exactly what he’d described. So I bought it.

It’s a 1972 El Camino “Custom” 350 and it was in good enough shape to drive back to Colorado Springs. Not good enough to drive back to Denver since it was snowing pretty hard that night, I had slick tires (almost bald from a bad alignment), no windshield wipers or washer fluid pump, and the headlights point straight down.

There’s some issues for sure. But most of it, the body, is in great shape. It badly needs paint and some touch up body work and definitely needs to be sealed better (I discovered 2 inches of water inside the car after a few snow storms of being parked outside), but after a tune up, new distributor system, rebuilding the carb, a lot of tuning the carb, resetting the timing, and replacing the valve cover gaskets, it’s running strong and fast!

I’m talking with a few folks (shops) right now about parts. The next steps I’m hoping to take is to do a complete engine rebuild and convert it from an automatic to a T5, 5 speed manual transmission. I’ve found a good shop that can bore the engine out to a 383 and do some of the detailed machining. I’m now looking for a shop to sell me a solid rebuild kit for a transmission and for the transmission itself. Then it’s on to the body work and paint, and maybe in a year or so, the interior. Then I’ll just wrench on it forever … upgrading shocks, brakes, gearings, power steering, etc, etc, etc.

In the mean-time, there’s tons of electrical gremlins to deal with. Strange, in a car that hardly has any electrics that almost all of it is bad. I’ve already had to custom build a pigtail to fix my tail lights and do a bit of a duct tape job to replace a sensor plug that disintegrated when we touched it. At some point, all of the electrical (maybe while the engine is out) needs to be entirely redone. That’s just time consuming, though. Not expensive.

In a few months, it looks like I’ll have a 450 horsepower “sleeper” here.

Excited!