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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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The French car beat the German one in our last Choose Your Eternity matchup , which means we need to give France's cross-Channel rival an opportunity to snatch the PCH Trophy (which features several rods hanging out the side and a spreading pool of oil below) today. We're going with something a bit different this time, however; ever since the What Should Mad_Science Drive To Work QOTD, we've been thinking about non-petroleum-fueled car projects. Not boring ol' electric cars that can barely buzz up to highway speed, or seen-one-ya-seen-em-all veggie-oil-powered Mercedes-Benzes, though. Something fun! Something... HELL! There's no law that says you have to run dinosaur juice in your diesel; vegetable oil or animal fat works just fine! Oh sure, some worrywarts will tell you that you need to use some kind of witches' brew of methanol, lye, and who-knows-what-all and make actual biodiesel, but that's only if you want to run the stuff in an unmodified diesel engine...
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With today's Engine of the Day being the AMC inline six, it seemed only good and proper that we have a Choose Your Eternity dilemma featuring a pair of vehicles powered by that fine powerplant. It's also good to have a couple of American cars, which I really can't use very often in this series because the stuff out of Detroit is too simple and parts obtainment is too easy to make for true hell. Not so with Kenosha products, though- even though the drivetrain parts are easy to find (thanks to the Jeep connection), the body and interior components are another story entirely. And today's trip into Hell isn't just about restoring an old AMC- it's about hot-rodding the six-cylinder engine so you get at least 300 reliable horsepower out of it. The road out of Hell is steep, you see, and you'll need plenty of power to climb out of the boiling sulfur! When you see an American rear-drive car with a big fiberglass hood scoop, brightly-colored racing stripes, and rear tires...
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The completely indecipherable photograph and PCH Superpower heritage of the '48 Morris Minor truck were the winning combination when it came to beating the 89-year-old Dodge in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll . Today we're going with a regional theme, because the last time we had two vehicles from the same American region was when we had the PCH Philadelphia Edition , and that's just too long. Today we're looking at some high-quality project material from the state where the Civil War began: South Carolina! Thanks (and a PCH Tipster T-shirt ) go to Ktek01 for these tips! The Triumph Spitfire has good Hell Potential, of course, but it's just too slow to be cool enough. But when you go for the GT6... now you're talking! So head on down to Columbia and pick up this 1971 Triumph GT6 (go here if the ad disappears) for just one thousand dollars. That seems pretty cheap, doesn't it? Well, some negative-minded folks might read the part of the car's description...
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Because not even a burned and wrecked 80s Ferrari can compete with a burned 70-year-old car mentioned by name in a Robert Johnson song, the '38 Hudson Terraplane ran away with the victory in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity Poll . Today we're going to skip the common theme tying the two PCH contestants together and return to that perennial battle between two of the globe's contenders for the Hell Machine Crown: Italy and Great Britain. Here we have two mighty PCH superpowers, each vying to put one of its products in your garage... and France is waiting to take on the winner tomorrow! How did it come to this? We've gone over a month since our last Alfa Romeo in this series. That's like having a hockey team with no Canadians! That's why we're going to skip the frivolous sporty convertible Alfas and go right for the no-nonsense four-door sedan, with this 1974 Alfa Romeo 2000 Berlina . It's got a Buy It Now of just $2,000, it runs and drives, and it's...
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It goes without saying- well, hell, maybe it doesn't, but that won't stop us- that, after the first installment of What To Drive In '75 , we'd want to do a Choose Your Eternity matchup featuring the two selected cars. Unfortunately, we couldn't find an Oleg Cassini Matador at any price, and the cheap Grabber we found was a '74, but we've attempted to capture the spirit of the thing here. Now, the Matador won the WTDI75 poll by a pretty solid 2/3 majority, but that was make-believe... and this is Hell! The great thing about the Maverick is that every hopped-up hardware hooliganism you can perpetrate on a Mustang can also be applied to the cheaper horse (unfortunately, it also means all the early Mustang's many suspension drawbacks apply to the Maverick as well, but anyone who's watched "Bullitt"- which was a documentary, right?- can tell you that leaf springs and funky front control-arm geometry are actually the way to go in a handlin' machine...
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We now find that nearly seven out of ten Jalopnik readers surveyed prefer a '66 Datsun pickup to a '62 Toyota Stout . And that's great, though we can't fathom why the Stout's name- which could be the Best Pickup Truck Name Ever- didn't garner it more votes. Still, there's something inherently un-hellish about a pickup truck project, no matter how difficult. You see, if you ever manage to finish a Japanese pickup truck project, you'll be able to, like, do useful stuff with it. Not only that, it will probably run for a long time once fixed up, and that means you might actually be able to take the highway out of Hell in it. That's why we need to balance the situation out, by providing you with a choice between two incredibly fun, tantamount-to-suicide dangerous, badly-built, classic Detroit econo-clanker-with-V8 projects. Naturally, both need some work... Most of us of a certain age- let's say, at least 35- have driven or ridden in a few V8 Vegas in our time, and damn are they crazy! You stomp...
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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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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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