This build will eventually include some oldskool audio, but it would be such a waste to not include everything up to that point. Backstory:
Ever since I was a youngin I had a special love for the good ole American muscle cars; the ’69 Camaro in particular. High school turned into college and that love never faded. But the availability did. I didn’t want to (couldn’t) buy someone else’s years of hard labor, another enthusiast’s dream. I wanted to build one of my very own. If anyone else has done some searching for restorable 2nd-gen Camaros, well… let me know when you find one. Coming from the north, I was not in a mood to deal with rust, and I preferred a car with a manual transmission. That cut about 90% of all potential cars in the entire country. I expanded my search to include the Camaro’s less popular cousin, the Trans Am. I was living in Oklahoma at the time and preparing to have to do some heavy lifting to get one to me from another state where people actually live.
And then my husband attended a local meet in Oklahoma City one evening, where we found her sitting in the back of the shop. Beneath the coating of dust lay a virtually rust-free, 455 cubic inches of firebreathing Pontiac muscle with a 4-speed and a once-radiant red interior right before my eyes. I swear she smiled at me.
I asked the owner about her, and to make a long, 6-month story short, I finally bought her from one of our own in May 2015.
Day one on the lot and she's already making some young friends
When you see it...
Her tires wouldn’t hold air. Both doors were horribly misaligned and bounced open during one particularly exciting test drive. Her weatherstripping had long since disintegrated. The entire engine bay was covered in a ¼” blanket of decades-old mud and dirt. She ran rich and smelled like arse. But anyone who’s had their first dream project car finally in hand – you’ll understand the feeling.
I knew squat about rebuilding old, carbureted cars, but I bought her to learn. In the spirit of learnin’, one of the first tasks I took on was teaching myself to teardown and rebuild a quadrajet. These aren’t your run of the mill Holleys I had seen before, they are far more complex – some might say justifiably so, others not. We can’t all be right