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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! Not very surprisingly, the Bristol 408 walloped the Beetle Limo last time, so it seems only right to give another Beetle a shot at PCH glory. Since we're coming up on Halloween, let's have a couple of scary cars; scary for different reasons, yet both with the Grim Reaper riding shotgun. Everyone knows that the Subaru boxer is pretty close to the same proportions as the air-cooled VW engine, and it can put out well over 200 horsepower without those troublesome shards of metal flying out of the crankcase- you know, the kind you get with a hopped-up VW engine. Mostly you see Porsche 914s, VW Transporters, and maybe the occasional Baja Bug with the Subie treatment, but how about a daily-driver Beetle with the 220+ horsepower engine out of a WRX? Let's see, that's a power-to-weight ratio similar to that of a Saturn V rocket, only without the lame...
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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, we saw the beat-to-hell Dodge Colt Turbo take the win over the totally trashed Chevy Sprint Turbo in the Choose Your Eternity poll. That's great, but what if you want a cheap Japanese car that doesn't rely on turbocharging to give you the power needed to set your town's all-time record for Exhibition Of Speed tickets issued in a single week? You'll need to go the engine swap route, of course, and everyone knows the best way to do an engine swap is to take on someone else's partly-finished project! See, that way someone else screws up performs the dirty, sweaty part of obtaining the engine and getting it into the recipient car's engine compartment, leaving only thousands of a few maddeningly difficult easy tasks remaining to complete the job. Putting a Detroit pushrod V8 into a Mazda RX-7 is a pretty common swap, and...
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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 combo of rotary weirdness and potential performance of the RX-7 scored a win over the Caprice's monster torque and bullying physique, according to the Choose Your Eternity poll . Today we're returning to a theme we saw in the very first Project Car Hell : British cars with engine swaps! How much does a project MGA go for these days? For that matter, what does a maybe-running Chevy 350 sell for? Consider your answers to those questions while you contemplate this 1956 MGA with Chevy 350 , which has a price tag of $500... or "BEST OFFER BY THIS WEEKEND." Maybe the seller will take a hundred bucks! Fifty! You get a '56 MGA body on a Nissan pickup frame, with a Chevy 350 under the hood (and maybe even connected to the frame and/or drivetrain). This "WAS A PROJECT MANY YEARS AGO," so we're not sure what that makes...
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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! In our last matchup , the big-block '72 Ford Torino took advantage of Graverobber's Mad Max-themed PCH Tirade™ to unleash the Lord Humungus' dogs of war upon the '70 Mercury Cougar. Today, we return to a couple of familiar themes rolled into one: the perennial Britain-versus-France PCH Superpower battle and good ol' Fun With Engine Swaps! I admit it- after finding the '60 Peugeot 403 near my house, I've been searching for a French car project to call my own (this in spite of having been the owner of a sadistically unreliable Peugeot 504 in the past). Thing is, the old Peugeots have something of a power deficit, and it just seems wrong to take the easy way out by doing a Japanese drivetrain transplant. Then Vintage Racer found this genuine Offenhauser turbo engine . Now we're talking! The Offy is a torque monster of a four-banger...
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The Lamborghini Jarama sprinkled a little olive oil on the Maserati Quattroporte and ate it like a little gnocchi (in spite of the Maser's vast bulk) in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll , triumphing in a near-unprecedented 80-20 ass-whupping. Apparently the Maserati was just too easy for our voters, and we totally understand. That's the reason we're going with a couple of projects featuring crazy international engine swaps today, because there's nothing as cool as a car that will be a tire-roasting deathtrap, yet never worth even a quarter half of the money you squander invest in it! The early 3 series cars are fun, no doubt, but what if your driving style mandates a pushrod V8 and associated sliding-backwards-out-of-a-cloud-of-smoke glory? You could work all manner of complicated turbocharging voodoo by simply opening your wallet and pouring its contents over the BMW four or six... or you could do what this crazy individual has done: Yes, folks, it's a 1983...
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The low-miles AMC beat the NASA-built Fairmont in the Electrocutioner Edition Choose Your Eternity poll , though the Fairmont did make a respectable showing. Today we're jumping back into a pool of flaming gasoline, because there's no telling how much longer the smell of incompletely burned hydrocarbons will hover around our garages. After seeing a Datsun 610 in the junkyard and then the '78 Toyota brochures over at Japanese Nostalgic Car (thanks, SOS10 ), we decided to find a couple of Japanese cars built before they'd discovered focus groups (and airtight quality control) over there. Datsun 280Zs are a dime a (rusty) dozen, but you don't see many mid-70s Fairladies in North America; it seems that those willing to go through the hassle of importing a classic JDM Nissan tend to go for the earlier models. Right-hand-drive, weird badges, and the utter impossibility of passing any sort of emissions test- sign us up! They're tough to find over here, but if you've...
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Fiero-based Fierraris and Fieroborghinis are great (though the vast majority of you went with the Zimmer Quicksilver over the Fierrari in the poll), but a realistic-looking, V8-equipped Fieroborghini can run you over 20 grand. If only you could get a real Lamborghini for that kind of money... ah, but that's just impossible, right? Hell no! This is Project Car Hell , where you can put a finicky Italian supercar in your garage for the price of a new 4-cylinder Camry... or less! Better brush up on your Italian, Giuseppe, because you're gonna be a Lamborghini owner! How many carburetors does your current Hell Project have? If your answer is less than six , then you're not trying hard enough. What if you could step into your garage and feel the warm glow of a hexacarb Italian V12 raising the temperature? Never mind that the "warm glow" is actually the sensation of a Chlorine Triflouride fire - every time you look at your '71 Lamborghini Espada S2 (go here if the ad...
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The '58 Lincoln put up a good showing, but in the end the Porsche 928 takes the prize, with 56% of you choosing Polyester-Clad White Powder Distributor over Chain-Smoking Rat Pack Player in Monday's Choose Your Eternity poll . But with a Datsun nearly beating a Peugeot last week, not to mention an Acura winning the 24 Hours of LeMons , we felt the need to turn Japanese for today's challenge. As always, the challenge with finding good candidates for Japanese Project Hell is that damned Japanese build quality and reliability, not to mention the ease of finding parts... but we've managed to find a couple of potentially-fast-yet-nightmarish Hondas to make your tools burn right through your flesh! We'd sure love to have an NSX, but it's pretty tough to find an example that's really a low-cost-of-admission project , for the same reason it's tough to find cheap project Ferraris. But how about that sweet DOHC NSX V6 engine in a more affordable car? Like, say, this...
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Perhaps you breathed a sigh of relief after Chevy-Powered Porsche Hell was over with, figuring that (with the small-block-motivated 911 winning so decisively) you would be spared the temptation of a hacked-up Porsche sporting a non-Stuttgart engine for quite a while. However Project Car Hell doesn't work that way; just because you were able to walk past the fiery gates once doesn't mean you won't be lured right back in by the same king of bait! That's why we're returning to Porsche Engine Swap Hell today, this time going for six cylinders instead of eight. 914 owners often talk about the 914-6 when that starts-with-a-V car manufacturer is brought up. Yes, if it has a Porsche emblem on the hood and a six-cylinder engine in back, it's got to be a real Porsche, right? Not so fast, though- what if you were to put a Volkswagen six-cylinder in your 914? What would you have then? We're not sure, but you'll be sure to come up with an answer to that question soon...
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After all the excitement over the Gay Deep Throated Angry Demon 914rrari this morning, the chorus of demons here in the Hell Garage has begun chanting "Small-Block Porsche! Small-Block Porsche!" It's always best to obey the Hell Garage Demons, lest you find yourself driving a silver 4-year-old Camry or some other reliable boring transporation appliance. You go with one of today's choices and you'll be able to laugh smugly at those sellouts who took the easy road... the days will drag by for them, each a gray replica of the one that preceded it, while you roar around town in your V8-ized Porsche! Swapping a Chevy V8 into a 914 is pretty commonplace, but you have to be serious to tear out a 911's highly sophisticated boxer six in order to drop in a crude-yet-potent pushrod V8 in its stead. Sure, the Porsche engine makes more power per cubic inch, but nothing on the planet can beat the ol' small-block Chevrolet when it comes to power per cubic dollar . So coming...
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Since yesterday's Packard Straight Eight Swap Edition (which was won by the '37 Pontiac) was so much fun, we're going to stick with Alternative Powerplant Hell for another day. All engine swaps are fun, of course, but the best ones involve stuffing an engine much, much larger than anything the car's designers ever considered. When you accomplish such a swap, you get respect ; when you start with the knuckle-shredding, sanity-destroyingly tight engine compartment of a small mid-engined car (say, a Fiero or MR2)... well, that's when folks start treating you with the deference reserved for the truly mad! We're going to pull our punches here and choose a V8 that's not only fairly small for a DOHC unit but already set up for a front-wheel-drive application. That means the engine and associated transaxles are already lined up in correct orientation in the recipient cars' chassis. So whip out $1,600 and drop a Buy It Now bomb on this 300-horse late-90s Northstar...
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Well, whaddya know- an American Hell Project beat a French one in our most recent Choose Your Eternity poll , with the Malaise Corvette Limo winning by a small- yet significant- margin over the V8-ready Peugeot 404. Unprecedented! We need to honor this tremendous underdog victory by going with an all-American matchup, with a 71-year-old car taking on a 79-year-old truck. Not only that, to honor the amazing Packard Straight Eight we saw in today's Engine of the Day post, each of these projects must be viewed as the potential recipient of a supercharged Packard inline eight engine. So forget those small-block Chevy engines that come with 'em, because the Chevy is just too easy. Today we're going with a somewhat different format, because today's tipster (and Project Car Hell Tipster T-shirt winner), UDMan found both cars sitting on trailers in upstate New York and photographed them himself: I took these pictures at a Fabrication Shop called Tom's Hot Rod & Fab Shop...
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The Detroit (well, actually South Bend) machine put up a good fight against the Detroit-powered British Leyland product yesterday, but it's tough to beat a PCH Superpower and thus the voters gave the victory to the V8/IRS MGB-GT in yesterday's poll. But are we giving up on America as a credible PCH contender? Hell no! That's the thinking behind today's Detroit-versus-Paris matchup, and we'll see how things sort out. Big American pushrod V8s are always cool when installed in a European car- just look at the Jensen Interceptor or Facel Vega to see what we mean. However, the nature of Project Car hell is such that you need to drop your crude-yet-potent cast-iron powerplant into a car whose designers never imagined such a combination in all their wildest opium dreams. You could just pick out the car and do the entire swap from scratch, but it's far more insane fun to start with someone else's half-finished project! Say, this 1967 Peugeot 404 (go here if the ad disappears...
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The majority of voters felt that an eternity spent wrenching on a pair of Willys Station Wagons would be preferable to eternity spent with a '58 Pontiac/'62 Mercedes-Benz combo, according to last Friday's Choose Your Eternity poll . That's fine, but what if you'd prefer endless toil on a hopeless challenging fast car? Something with light weight, V8 power, and primitive 60s suspension and brake design, perhaps? The red-hot iron gates are opening- come on in! The Pininfarina-designed fastback body on the MGB-GT looks great, most of us would agree, but that old BMC B engine left something to be desired in the power department. From personal experience, I can say that an MGB can barely get into triple-digit speeds with a stock B, and the six-cylinder and Rover V8 versions aren't enough better to justify the funky handling. That's why what you need is an MGB-GT whose funky handling is justified... by the presence of a good ol' small-block Chevy . In fact, you...
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We took a break from the PCH Superpowers and watched the Rotary Honda 600 pound on the Rotary Starlet in yesterday's all-Japanese Choose Your Eternity poll . However, Britain's defeat of Italy last week can mean only one thing: Britain must now take on PCH SuperGigaPower France in an attempt to claim the rusty, oil-leaking PCH Intergalactic Superchampion crown! Why the heck didn't Jaguar put truck beds on their cars straight from the factory? Take the XJ-S, for instance: V12 torque, comfy leather interior, beautiful lines- in short, everything you want in a cartruck! Obviously, it falls to the Jaguar owner to deal with this shortcoming. Those of you who have been planning to build your own XJ-Schero can save many months of hard work by starting with this Rancheroized 1990 Jaguar XJ-S as the basis of your project. For some inexplicable reason, this car failed to sell for the chump-change price of two grand, and that means the seller is likely ready to deal! The seller, clearly...
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