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Welcome to Project Car Hell , where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! When we last dove into the triazadienyl fluoride -filled Garage-O-Pain, we learned that eternity with a Lancia Scorpion would be better- or maybe worse- than eternity with an Austin Healey Sprite race car. We've been neglecting our four-wheelin' friends for too long; in fact, the last time we pitted one four-wheel-drive truck against another was last winter's Farm Equipment Edition PCH . So here we go- does PCH Microbe Japan have any hope whatsoever against PCH Superpower Britain? We'll find out today! You hear a lot about the Toyota Land Cruiser , but don't forget that Nissan also made an off-road truck back in the day! That's right, we mean the Nissan Patrol, and you can get this '69 (go here if the ad disappears) for under a thousand bucks. Well, that's the asking price; reading the statement "i have it parked behind...
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There's no end to the Nice Price Or Crack Pipe choices here, even after 57% of voters went with "Nice Price" on the $4,500 Twin Stick Turbo Colt Bumper Car yesterday. Today we're going to explore the value of fame in a car, in this case a '69 Cadillac Fleetwood- a cool machine in its own right- that was once owned by Jack Haley , the man who played the Tin Man in The Wizard Of Oz . The last time it went up on eBay, the $9,600 top bid failed to meet the reserve, so it's apparent that the seller feels the Tin Man connection to be an extremely valuable one. That's apparent in his selection of photographs; when the car itself isn't as important as its intangibles , you shoot the photos with the sun behind the car and your family posed in front of it, throwing in a single shot of the hood emblem for good measure. Well, what do you think? Cool car, interesting past… but worth over $9,600? galleryPost('NPOCPTinManCad', 3, 'The Tin Man Fleetwood'...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. It's Truck Monday again, and we're overdue for a Ford F series pickup; the last one was nearly three months ago. How about this no-frills F100 I found parked a little ways down from the '62 Falcon ? This thing is just concentrated essence of truck. Oh, sure, the original buyer splurged on the optional chrome side moldings, but we can assume the standard 240-cube inline six engine is present; why pour money down the drain for the 300 six or the 360/390 V8s? Or carpeting, air conditioning, AM radio, or anything else. This country is getting soft , by damn, when pickup trucks are seen as comfy commuter appliances! You should be able to spill a five-gallon bucket of paint in your truck's bed and not care! OK, requisite 2000s truck rant over with. Back in '69, the price tag on this truck, with no options, was $2,393. That was about...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Even though we had a GM A-Body here just last week , I liked the look of this Skylark so much that I just can't wait to share it. This could mean that Chrysler A-Body fans might feel slighted (yes, nearly a month has gone by since our last one ), but not to worry- there's a Valiant in the queue now! When you go to car shows full of Detroit machinery, you'll probably see more of the Buick GS than you will of the regular Skylark, much as you do with the GTO-versus-LeMans situation. Here's a Skylark owner who took the best-looking feature of the GS (the hood) and kept the rest of the Skylark badging and trim, which I think works pretty well. This car isn't perfect by any means- in fact, it's a little battered- but it's in excellent shape for what it is: a nearly 40-year-old car that parks in a busy downtown urban area and...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Today we're going to look at an example of the kind of car that dominated my early gearhead experiences on the island: a beat-to-hell big-block 60s muscle car! There was once a time when primered-out Chevelles, Satellites, Fairlanes, and the like (along with hooned-up Beetles and 510s) could be found lowering property values on just about every block of Alameda… but most of those cars have been hooned into nothingness or restored to gilded-cage, car-show-only condition by now. Just a few survivors, like this '69 Chevelle, remain. First, let's get in the right frame of mind by listening to a song that captures the wholesome appeal of the SS396: Well, maybe this car is a little more menacing than what those Wonder Bread-eating boys had in mind when they wrote that song. I talked to the owner's father, who verifies that it is indeed a...
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Those of you who watch a lot of automotive TV shows are probably familiar with Year One's Keith Maney, who appears on My Classic Car, Dream Car Garage, American Muscle Car, Hot Rod TV, MuscleCar TV, Horsepower TV , etc. What you may not know about is Keith's insidious influence on this site; both yours truly and Andrew Stoy worked for Keith at YO (along with Driveshaft Through The Skull creator Walker Canada and military-vehicle expert commenter Clinto ), and he's a bad, bad influence on anyone who might want to retain some semblance of vehicular sanity. Naturally, I figured he'd be perfect for the 24 Hours Of LeMons , and he agreed that building a car for next year's LeMons South race would be a fine idea. The initial plan was to use "The World's Rustiest '78 Trans Am," conveniently sitting in the woods behind Year One's Georgia HQ, but that's not what happened… galleryPost('KeithDatsunHell', 3, '1969 Datsun Roadster Heading For...
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Dodge Darts are very common on the Alameda street; we've seen a '64 coupe, a '64 wagon , a '69 convertible , another '69 convertible , a '70 sedan , and a '75 Swinger so far, and that's not even counting the Valiant siblings. By comparison, Falcons and Novas are quite rare. Clearly, that Slant Six is an engine to be reckoned with! I found this car parked between the '69 Olds Cutlass convertible and the '56 Morris (all three cars are owned by the same person), and right across the street from the '54 Ford and '47 Plymouth . Yes, it's that kind of block. Two doors, vinyl top, original black plates- great to see this car still going strong. While it most likely has a Slant Six, it was possible to buy this car new with a 383 or 440 big-block and experience the joys of zero header clearance. galleryPost...
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newVideoPlayer("/69_AMC_Rebel_494.flv", 506, 423,""); Back in the late 1960s, American Motors didn't just focus on cheapness in their ads. Oh no, they wanted potential car buyers to realize that you could beat the living crap out of their cars and they'd still stay in- more or less- one piece. We think the actor playing the driving instructor here should have won an award for the "I can't turn while you're looking at me" sequence!
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newVideoPlayer("/60s_SuBARu_476.flv", 506, 423,""); Back when Malcolm Bricklin decided to import the 66 MPG Subaru 360 to the United States, there was just one selling point: cheapness! This trio of ads, featuring a bell-bottomed babe and painfully dated flute-and-harpsichord soundtrack, gave no hint that one day SOO-bar-oo would sell huge quantities of somewhat less tin-can-esque vehicles in North America. When was the last time you saw a car ad trumpeting the cheapness of spare parts? Thanks to SOS10 for the tip!
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Welcome to Down On The Street , where we admire old vehicles found parked on the streets of the Island That Rust Forgot: Alameda, California. Can you believe, with all the first-generation Camaros built, that we're on the 327th Alameda DOTS car and we're seeing our very first one? Are they just too valuable to be allowed on the street? Or did they all go out in blazes of hoonic glory back in the day? If either is true, why do we see so many early Mustangs still on the street? Note: Yes, I was off by a year on this one, which is what sometimes happens with cars I assume I know well enough to allow me to skip the reference books. Apologies to all you first-gen Camaro fans outraged by my mistake. I found this car parked at a meter in front of Jim's Coffee House downtown. Realizing I didn't have time to run home and get my good camera, I decided to make do with the camera in my cellphone . The General made 230,799 Camaros for the '69 model year, compared to Ford's 299...
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newVideoPlayer("/Honda_1300_JDM_476.flv", 506, 423,""); The Coupe 9 version of the Honda 1300 now resides in the Jalopnik Fantasy Garage (as well as in Junkman's garage ), but the standard 1300 sedan was a pretty interesting car as well. You got an air-cooled engine with four carbs and dry-sump oil system sending 100 horses to the front wheels and styling that must have made Soichiro proud (though maybe he wasn't so proud of this headache-inducing TV ad).
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For those of you who thought the last '69 Dart GT convertible we saw in this series was just too nice , here's one that's taken a much rougher route during its nearly 40 years. Looks like it already had quite a bit of Bondo-centric rear bodywork when it took some sort of impact above the left rear wheel and went from "slightly rough" to "beater" just like that. Still, it's a convertible and the top still looks intact, so it will stay on the road. Perhaps some ambitious owner will get the bodywork done at some point... or use it as a parts car for a nicer Dart convertible. The "GT" badging means this was the top trim level for the Dart in '69; the GT came standard with a Slant Six, though the dual exhausts on this example suggest the presence of a V8 under the hood. The '69 Dart GT with optional 273-inch V8 listed for $2,976 new. That was 39 bucks more than the 302-equipped '69 Mustang convertible and $330 more than the '69 Corvair...
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A few months have gone by since we had a Truck Monday featuring a Chevy truck of this era (by the way, Alameda native Belvedere Adrian is old friends with the owner of the '71 Chevy pickup, and he reports that a 454 lurks under its battered hood). For some reason, Alameda has many more mid-60s Chevy trucks than it has late-60s/early-70s examples, but I found this '69 still earning its keep, just down the block from the '63 Ford Falcon . The standard powerplant for the '69 C10 was the General's reliable 250-cube inline six, but you could get the added grunt of the mighty 292 or any of the usual small- and big-block Chevy V8s. We see another fine example of California-style rust here; it's taken nearly 40 years to get to this point. Most likely the cab interior smells like mildew during the rainy winter months, but so what? It still hauls stuff! Though one must wonder how expensive gas needs to get before all the 30- and 40-year-old Detroit-built work pickups are retired...
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It would appear that our readers are Lamborghini purists, given the 82/18 shellacking the V12-powered Espada issued to the Chevy-powered Espada in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll. Either way, who would have imagined owning a genuine, almost-running Lamborghini for the price of a new base Camry? Project Car Hell beckons! As we say so often here: what could go wrong? Today we're going to leave PCH Superpower Italy and head to a nation not so well known for maddeningly difficult Hell Projects; yes, we're feeling so inspired by the vintage Japanese steel at the Motoring J Style show that we have no choice but to descend into the fiery furnace of Vintage Japanese Car Hell. The Japanese have been building super-reliable, easy-to-repair vehicles with good parts availability for so long now that we tend to forget that at one time they built crazy cars. Cars that rusted to nothingness before your eyes, full of components and designs from Britain and Italy... while at the same time...
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1969 was a great year for Cadillac sales (and 1970 was better still), so it's no surprise that we're now looking at the third '69 Cadillac in this series. That's as good a reason as any to have a poll to determine the readers' favorite street-parked Alameda Cad on this fine Friday morning. I found this '69 parked just down the street from the Checker Marathon , and it has the look of a low-mileage original-owner car: solid, some rough spots but overall pretty nice. This may well be one of those old cars that only rarely ventures off the island. High sales figures or not, at $5,924 the '69 Sedan de Ville wasn't cheap. In fact, for just $3,776 the big-car buyer could pick up a '69 Impala sedan with the 425-horse 427 and 4-speed manual transmission. So let's say it's 1969, you're an up-and-coming strip-club owner in Dallas, and you're car shopping. Do you get the Cadillac with 375 horsepower or the cheaper Impala with 425 horsepower and a...
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