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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! Italy held on to its PCH Superpower crown in our last Choose Your Eternity poll, with the Alfa Romeo Duetto taking a 53-47 victory over the British contestant. After admiring the lovely surfboard-friendly Hang Ten Dodge Dart in yesterday's Moment of Zen , we had no choice today but to pit a basket case totally restorable Hang Ten against an equally awesome Malaise Era Special Edition AMC, complete with tape stripes and low-performance engine. The Hang 10 Dodge Dart didn't come with a surfboard, but it did feature a rear seat that folded down, enabling Slant-Six-powered hodaddies to avoid that unsightly board-out-the-window look. You got cool Hang 10 graphics and a bunch of other special stuff to make you forget that the base Slant Six only made 95 horsepower and the 318 V8 just 145. We all want a Hang 10, of course, but where can you find one these...
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We love to pit one high-end Italian car against another in this series ; we've had Ferrari 250 versus Lamborghini Diablo , Espada versus Espada , Ferrari Mondial versus Maserati Coupe , among others. Up until now, however, a Lamborghini has never vied with a Maserati for a place in your Garage Of Eternal Suffering. We've managed to find a couple of quite affordable classics from those two manufacturers, so it's time to triple the size of your tool collection and buy some asbestos coveralls! You don't see too many Lamborghini Jaramas around, and for good reason: only 327 were built. Yes, 327... so it stands to reason that you could never hope to own one. You can give that pessimism a big negatory, good buddy, because BZR has found this 1974 Lamborghini Jarama 400GT for us. It's been stored since 1986, so that means it's really only 13 years old! Skeptics might ask why it was stored for so long. It seems that there's some crankshaft damage; the seller states only...
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It looks like Italy has been knocked off the PCH Superpower throne by the UK, according to the results of yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll . That means that PCH SuperGigaPower France awaits the chance to take on its historical PCH rival from across the Channel. But first, let's see how Britain fares against a rival that, though falling somewhat short of true PCH Superpower status due to the stubborn reliability of so many of its vehicles, still puts forward some strong Hell Project competition. And, just to make things interesting, let's get our contestants from Canada, where an iron atom never found an oxygen atom it didn't want to establish a caring, lifelong relationship with. We can thank HoserDave for these tips, and of course a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt will soon be thrown into a dogsled and mushed all the way up to his igloo. We had a Triumph GT6 just last week, but somehow that wasn't enough British Leyland Hell! Plus it sat for 23 years, which may...
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The 429 Mustang II put up a good fight in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , but only a French or Italian car really stands a chance against a Triumph GT6 when it comes to true Project Car Hell. Still, every so often you need to let a PCH underdog take on one of the superpowers. We're going to try it again today, with a British machine squaring off against a German-American mashup, only this time the theme is much different. One thing I've noticed with the cheaper PCH cars is the Super LeMons Potential many commenters observe in the entrants, and so today we're going to look at a couple of cars that would immediately bestow Legend In Their Own Time status upon any team entering either one in a 24 Hours of LeMons race. Each is priced below the $500 mark, each could (in theory) be a credible race car, and each would leave onlookers stunned with a potent mixture of awe, fear, and pity. When you're showing up at the track with your $500 race car, four cylinders under...
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For reasons that no doubt made sense at the time, the utterly hopeless Cord triumphed over the absolutely impossible Lamborghini in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll . After those two high-ticket machines, I figured we should take a look at some good old American muscle, from the Golden Age of V8-powered rear-drive machines. The problem we run into with most of the Detroit muscle machines from the 1964-73 era (in terms of this series) is that it's just too easy to get parts for them, particularly for the likes of GM A- and F-bodies and Chrysler B- and E-bodies. But those guys in Detroit weren't the only ones building such cars; that's why we've packed up the Pink Pig (official vehicle of the Mobile PCH Spotters' Brigade) and headed right for Kenosha, Wisconsin, where the ghost of George Romney (yes, Mitt's father) pointed out a couple of fine AMC muscle monsters for today's matchup... The AMC AMX, though not being on the receiving end of anywhere near...
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Our last Choose Your Eternity poll showed us that a rustbucket BMW 2002 beats a fossilized Nissan 300ZX , albeit by a fairly narrow margin. And that's good to know, though such knowledge won't be applicable to the cars our friend Mike sent in to us. Even though Mike didn't get a Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt for the burnt Subaru he sent in earlier, he does get one for today's Choose Your Eternity contestants. You'd have to look pretty hard to find a pair of cars that better epitomize everything this series stands for; the combo of amazing car any sane gearhead would kill to own and near-impossibility of ever fixing the thing up... well, just check 'em out! We should warn you right off that today's first contestant requires some travel for most potential buyers, since it's in Italy. But don't let that deter you from slapping down a thick stack of British pound notes (5,000 pounds, to be exact), because what we've got here is a genuine 1973 Lamborghini...
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We had another near-tie in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , with the '80 Rolls beating the '59 Triumph by just a few percentage points. Today, we've decided to present you with two starkly different options, either of which would be pretty damn cool to have in your personal automotive stable... after the copious application of time, money, and heartbreak, of course. Owning a finned Cadillac limousine would make you feel like Dean Martin on the way to a gig at the Sands, with a suitcase full of cash in the trunk and a couple of showgirls pouring your martinis. Or, better still, like J. Edgar Hoover on the way to a wiretap, with a trunk full of incriminating files condemning your enemies to lives of misery! What would you say if you had a chance to buy a limo originally purchased by J. Edgar himself? According to its seller, this 1964 seven-passenger Cadillac Limousine is just such a car. The seller claims that GM Heritage has verified Mr. Hoover as the original purchaser...
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So we had another near-tie in yesterday's DKW-versus-Fairlady Choose Your Eternity poll , which may be partially attributable to the hard-to-decipher photos in each vehicle's listing. If you can't see the whole car, you can't tell how hellish and/or cool it really is, right? However, those photos were bad just because the sellers were too lazy to move the crap that's blocking the camera. How about the seller who can't seem to operate the camera at all? What does that tell you about the sort of hell you'd be getting into with the car- not just when trying to fix it up, but when negotiating to buy it in the first place? You can just imagine the sequence of events that will transpire when you try to buy a car from someone who uses photographs like the one in this ad for a 1972 Midget . It appears that the seller used a 1974-vintage tube-based video camera to get the photos, then used a disposable film camera to grab images off a malfunctioning first-gen color TV...
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It turns out that almost 60% of our readers prefer a drivetrain-free Lambo to a Ferrari with a fried engine, according to Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll . And that's as it should be, given the creative suggestions we got about the type of engine(s) best suited to Il Diablo. For this Monday, however, we've decided to return to Package Deal Hell. See, it's not really Hell unless your neighbors are enraged from the moment you create your Instant Junkyard, and thanks to eagle-eyed tipster JimmyTheFly , we've got a pair of Seattle-style 3-in-1 deals that'll make you fell like the rain will never stop. Thing is, the difference between Hell and Seattle is that it rains water in Seattle and flaming starter fluid in Hell! What's the first thing you look for in a project car? Wait, there's no need to answer- we all know it's shiny bolts! Fortunately for you, this batch of three 1973 Fiat 850 Spiders comes with "lots of cleaned and polished parts and bolts," so you know the hard part is already...
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It looks like the Sterling just wasn't able to dump as much weight on both sides of the hell/cool scale as the Impulse in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , with the Isuzu vaporizing the Rover by a 4-to-1 vote-ratio landslide. Today we're going north...
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With the Mopar Minivan getting the win over the Blown Buick in Friday''s PCH Turbo Sleeper Edition poll , today seems like a good day to return to some good ol' no-replacement-for-displacement Dee -troit muscle. Sure, you could always whip out a fat roll...
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We had another close one yesterday, with the '41 Ford eking out a narrow victory over the '51 Merc in the Woodless Woody competition . Since everyone is probably too busy trying to use waterlogged particleboard to "restore" their Woodies, we should probably...
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