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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! Yesterday, the Warsaw Pact Hell Truck Projects ran just about neck and neck, with the trio of Romanian AROs beating the Soviet GAZ-69 in a 51:49 split. Today… well, after looking at all the backyard Lambos I've found lately, it seems like a good idea to have some real Lamborghini Hell Projects. Most of the time, it's tough to find a Lamborghini that isn't in great shape, since most of them don't exactly wear out their odometers during their lifetimes, but we've got a couple of genuine projects for you! You know what really counts most in the hearts of rabid highly devoted Italian-car freaks aficionados? Originality. A low-mileage original Italian supercar is sure to shatter your sanity knock 'em dead, but the prices- holy crap! Still, if you're willing to expend a lot of blood a little elbow grease, you can find a nice original...
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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! Yesterday, the Warsaw Pact Hell Truck Projects ran just about neck and neck, with the trio of Romanian AROs beating the Soviet GAZ-69 in a 51:49 split. Today… well, after looking at all the backyard Lambos I've found lately, it seems like a good idea to have some real Lamborghini Hell Projects. Most of the time, it's tough to find a Lamborghini that isn't in great shape, since most of them don't exactly wear out their odometers during their lifetimes, but we've got a couple of genuine projects for you! You know what really counts most in the hearts of rabid highly devoted Italian-car freaks aficionados? Originality. A low-mileage original Italian supercar is sure to shatter your sanity knock 'em dead, but the prices- holy crap! Still, if you're willing to expend a lot of blood a little elbow grease, you can find a nice original...
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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! We saw the '49 Rolls Silver Wraith hold its own against the obviously unbeatable burn-victim Countach, gaining a respectable 41% of the vote in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll. Today we need to contemplate a couple of Porsche 911 projects; sure, we see 928s here on a regular basis (for obvious reasons), but it's pretty tough to find a real 911 for a PCH-worthy price. Today we've done even better, with a pair of turbocharged 911s, each priced in used-Honda-Civic territory! When most of us try to sell a car using an online classified advertisement, we do our best to take a useful photograph or two and write some sort of description laying out the good and bad facts, if only to avoid having to answer the same questions from every single potential buyer. When you're trying to sell a Porsche 911 , this becomes way more important, because...
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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! It seems that the Japanese won't be celebrating an improbable victory over PCH Superpower Britain this time around, with the Land Rover beating the Nissan Patrol 57% to 43% in our poll . Today we're going to return to a couple of perennial PCH heavy hitters, cars that we all really really want , yet make us stagger back in awe and horror when contemplating the magnitude of the task they represent: the Mercedes-Benz 6.9 and the Jaguar V12! There are ordinary Project Car Hell vehicles, and then there are the heavyweights . The projects that, in the words of the prophet John in Revelations 20:10, will have you "thrown into the lake of burning sulfur, where the beast and the false prophet had been thrown. They will be tormented day and night for ever and ever." In fact, the Book Of Revelations is the only shop manual you'll need with a PCH...
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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! Yesterday, the Ferrari 328GTS vanquished the Japanese upstart NSX in a PCH Superpower Smackdown, which should make fellow PCH Superpowers Britain and France- unsettled since a Glas beat a Lotus day before yesterday - breathe a sigh of relief. Today we're going to let a couple of Superpowers have at it, in a Sub-$500 Race Car Challenge: Britain versus Italy! With UDMan's '63 Corvair raising the Index Of Effluency stakes for next year's New England 24 Hours Of LeMons , anyone who shows up with the same ol' snoozeworthy RX-7 or Camaro will be the object of well-deserved ridicule by his or her peers. You need to limp roar onto the track in a car manufactured by one of the Big Three PCH Superpowers, and we've managed to find one that already has a roll cage! In fact, this '68 Austin Healey Sprite is a proven racing champion, having...
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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! Yesterday, we found a way for a Citroën SM to lose a PCH challenge: set up a pretty nice example as a clay pigeon to be blasted to dust by a heap of vaguely Ferrari-ish parts. No, it wasn't fair, but it proves the point that the SM still reigns as the King Of Project Car Hell. Now that we're in an upset sort of mood, let's see if it's possible for a German project to take on one of the Big Three PCH Superpowers and win! What the hell is a Glas ? Glas was the company that built the beloved Goggomobil , but it got gobbled up by mean ol' BMW and the marque disappeared after 1968. Before BMW axed Glas, however, you could buy the sporty 1700 GT from BMW dealers as a sort of Glas/BMW branding mashup, and that appears to be what this 1967 Glas is. The top bid of $260.55 failed to meet the reserve price, so we're pretty sure the seller will...
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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! We all knew that the Nixonian Cadillac Fleetwood limo had no chance against a Citroën, and our most recent Choose Your Eternity poll confirmed our assumptions. Any Citroën is tough to beat in a Project Car Hell Challenge, due to the off-the-scale readings Citroëns always register on both the Hell-O-Meter and the Cool-O-Meter. And a Citroën SM? Forget it! Even with a fairly nice SM, you'd need some kind of weapons grade project to have any hope against the car made by the French and Italian governments, the pure Essence Of Hell Project centrifuged down from a large quantity of seriously cool machinery and then offered at a price that draws you in like a black hole dragging you past its event horizon. Well, guess what? Even if we'd found an ad for the actual Apollo 16 Lunar Rover , hauled back to Earth by a North Korean spaceship, burned up on reentry...
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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! Yesterday, the "get out of jail free" supercharged Beretta edged out the "must stand 100 feet back to take the photo" Mazda Millenia in the Choose Your Eternity poll , in a 54:46 split vote. For today, we're going with a couple of cars suggested by 24 Hours Of LeMons -loving readers who were inspired by the Corvair and Peugeot 505 Turbo racers to look for even better LeMons entries… When you think about a Chrysler-engined British car, the Jensen Interceptor is probably the first thing that comes to mind. While the Interceptor makes a fine Project Car Hell candidate , its perceived value to Jensen masochists aficionados is such that you'll never find one for anywhere close to the 500-buck 24 Hours Of LeMons limit. Hold on, though- what about the Bristol 408 ? Powered by the good ol' reliable Chrysler 313 , the Bristol combined...
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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! Yesterday, we had the chance to choose between two potential moonshine runners, with either of which one might keep bread on the table during the coming Financiapocalypse , and the Mercury Maruader beat the BMW 850i like Junior Johnson beat the North Carolina Highway Patrol's '53 Ford Mainlines back in the day. However, some of you- I'm not going to use the word "whiners," though it did occur to me- complained that those two cars didn't rate high enough readings on the Hell-O-Meter™. In other words, Hell isn't hot enough for you! We aim to please here, so let's flood the garage with chlorine triflouride , park some more challenging projects inside, and slam the door on you… for eternity! We all thought it was a pretty good score when Seatbelt123 picked up two Alfa Romeo Milanos for his 24 Hours Of LeMons team for just $299...
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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! Last time around, 64% of you opted for an eternity in the trunk of Coyote Shivers' 1984 Volvo DL rather than having your bodices ripped by Fabio's Lancia, according to the Choose Your Eternity poll . But enough with the pseudo-celebrity cars- today we need to get back to basics , with a return to the very soul of project car hell: France versus Italy! Right now, Italy is in sole possession of the PCH Superpower trophy- which is in the shop with a bad oil leak and a rod knock- thanks to a very one-sided Pantera-versus-Lotus drubbing , but can the Italians hold firm against the Tsar Bomba of Hell Projects? We'll find out! Remember the Lancia Zagato? Of course not, and you Europeans are probably totally confused about that name slapped on what's obviously some kind of Americanized Beta , but enough of them were sold on these shores that it's...
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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! 1973 was quite a memorable year; engine compression ratios were down as US emissions laws sprouted some sharp claws, the Arabs got so pissed about their ass-whooping in the Yom Kippur war that they cut off the oil , and Richard Nixon was forced to fire Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in the Saturday Night Massacre , in order to save the country from those pinko traitors who would see a Viet Cong flag flying over the White House and celebrate their victory by dumping a megaton of pure LSD in the nation's water supply! Yes, that was a simpler time, a happier bygone era captured in little square Instamatic photographs; think about that next time you're hearing those oldies wheezing out of the speakers at a car show and some grumpy old guy sitting on an ice chest next to his numbers-matching '74 Charger gripes about how much better things were...
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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! Yesterday we saw more evidence of what happens when a German car takes on PCH Superpower Italy in a Choose Your Eternity challenge: a 68-32 drubbing of the BMW by the Ferrari. Going up against a Superpower is no picnic, but we're going to give Germany another shot at a stunning upset today. Who will triumph, the Benz or the Lambo? Which one do you want more? Which one scares you more? Mix those two factors together and you'll know what to do! The Mercedes-Benz 600 may well be the ultimate vintage German land yacht; the list of 600 owners includes such luminaries as Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Leonid Brezhnev, and John Lennon. In 1972, the four-door Pullman 600 listed at $37,928, or about $199,000 in 2008 dollars… but why limit yourself to a proletarian four doors? You're a high roller! A whale! Your entourage is so big (and so heavily armed) that only...
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Not very shockingly, the Mercedes-Benz 450SEL beat up on the Pontiac Bonneville in our 6.9 Liters Of Misery Choose Your Eternity poll on Friday, no doubt because voters were counting camshafts or dollars in the original purchase price or something. Today we're going to have the traditional post-24 Hours Of LeMons PCH, only instead of letting you choose between the cars that finished #1 and #2 (in this case, a Supra and a Jetta) we're going to choose between two cars we really, really want to see someone bring to a LeMons race. They were expensive when new, featured sophisticated DOHC V8s and rear-wheel-drive, and came equipped with dizzyingly complicated electronics and plush luxury gear… yet it's possible to pick either one up for a LeMons-friendly price today! We've seen the Porsche 928 in the Hel l Garage before ; in fact, we've had more 928s here than any other car! Why is that, you ask? They were insanely expensive, insanely hard to fix, and insanely (for their...
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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! The spirit of the Madman couldn't push the '53 Muntz Jet over the 16 Peugeots in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity challenge , although the Jet did give the Instant French Junkyard a good run for their money. Today we're going with a new concept: two very different cars with very similar engine displacements. Yes, it's Detroit versus Stuttgart, with the super-sophisticated 6.9 V8 taking on the blunt-instrument 421 V8. It's always fun to have a Jalopnik Fantasy Garage inhabitant in Project Car Hell, and JFG-meister Loverman himself gets the blame credit for sending in this tip. Would you believe just 1,200 bucks for this '77 Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 (go here if the ad disappears)? No, we haven't been huffing starter fluid again- that's the for-real price. Yes, a car that sold for the equivalent of $143,000 (in 2008 dollars...
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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! We had a couple of 2-fer-1 Hell Project deals go toe-to-toe on Monday, and the Nash/Hudson combo triumphed over the pair of '57 Cadillacs by a 2-to-1 margin in the poll. Aren't multiple-car projects fun? Sure they are! And what's more fun than two projects dripping oil in your yard? Sixteen projects, of course… unless you're the type who prefers the challenge of a single project with no possibility of parts obtainment to the "instant junkyard" approach. That's the choice we're giving you today! Madman Muntz was a genuine American legend, and he didn't just sell cars, car stereos, and TVs- he manufactured cars, car stereos, and TVs! His car was the Muntz Jet, a Cadillac V8-powered, heavily-modified Kurtis Kraft Sport , and it was quite the performer for its era. Only about 400 Muntz Jets were ever built, so you're...
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