In the years between when I started playing with cars and when I got a wife, I spent a significant number of hours scouring wrecking yards and cruising back lanes. This would be in the late 70s - early 80s, when muscle cars were commonly viewed as old junk with terrible mileage. I picked up a number of deals, but a few still stand out in my memory. A friend and I walked into a junkyard and spotted a '67 Plymouth Barracuda fastback that hadn't yet been hauled back to the stacks. At a quick glance it was straight and rust-free, though the light blue metallic paint was dull, and seemed pretty complete. Even though at the time I was heavily into Pontiacs, it was one of those cars I had always wanted. I walked into the office and started dickering with owner while my buddy was fiddling under the hood. The junkyard guy told me that the owner, the proverbial little old lady, had had it towed in just a few hours before and he hadn't had a chance to look it over yet. He asked for $150, I countered with $125. He agreed and as he was filling out the bill of sale my buddy started it up and drove it up to the office. Apparently, the only thing wrong with it was a loose battery cable. I had to fix one of the rear window regulators and reinstall the original radio, which I found under the seat, but otherwise it gave me faithful service for several years until some dolt ran a stop sign and T-boned it, crushing the passenger side almost completely from the leading edge of the door to the back bumper. Another junkyard find was a '65 Buick Skylark Gran Sport. The 401 nailhead was frozen and it had the usual GM A-body rust through at the bottom of both quarter panels, but it was a 4-speed car with power windows, driver's seat, and antenna, as well as air conditioning! The red exterior was heavily oxidized, but the white and black interior looked perfect. After some haggling, I paid $250 (cash only!) and towed it home. I pulled the motor and took it into my favorite speed & machine shop and the owner offered instead to sell me a freshly machined, but unassembled, '65 425 nailhead, along with new bearings, gasket kit, oil pump, timing set, and an Isky cam/lifters/springs set. Oh, and he'd throw in a rebuilt TH-400 transmission with a shift kit. Seems his son had been racing a '65 Riviera on the local dirt tracks and had planned a rebuild during the off season, but it took so long to get the cam kit from Iskenderian that he moved to a '66 Chevelle and left all the parts in the back of the shop. I got it all for another $250 - again, cash in hand. The capper in this project was when I was doing another junkyard dive and spotted a '66 Buick Electra 225 and popped the hood to find it had the 425 with the dress-up kit. Cast aluminum finned valve covers with the BUICK script on the sides, chromed dual-inlet air cleaner, and multiple chromed brackets and bolts. Being a '66, it had the spread bore manifold to fit Rochester's newly-introduced Quadrajet carburetor, which, unfortunately, had been removed. I got the intake and dress-up kit for $25. I thought about it afterwards and went back the next week to pull the motor and transmission, just for spare parts, but the car had gone to the crusher. Oh well. I fixed the rust and repainted the Gran Sport and put it all back together with the dressed up 425 with an 850 cfm Carter Thermo-Quad, and it was one of the torquiest muscle cars I ever owned. In first gear (BW cast iron T-10 with 2:54 low and 3:42 gears in the rear) at idle(!) you could let out the clutch gently from a dead stop and it would just trundle on down the road. With a little bit of practice with the throttle and clutch, you could also start off in 4th. I taught my future wife to drive a stick shift in that car and she loved it. I eventually sold it to some kid who had more of his daddy's money than he did good sense, and he promptly wrapped in around a telephone pole. Lastly: while cruising through farm country, I spotted a '64 Pontiac Le Mans Sport Coupe (post) with 4 flat tires sitting at the back of a long driveway. It was brown with thoroughly dead paint but no rust through, and the brown interior was in excellent condition with bucket seats, automatic shifter in the console, uncracked "wood grain" rallye steering wheel, 90-degree tach in the dash, and vacuum gauge in a pod on the console - all pretty rare options. The current owner, son of the original, was more than happy to let me haul it off for $50, but he wanted to pull the radio (original AM) to put on his tractor(!). I offered $25 cash and a brand new, in the box, AM/FM cassette stereo with a couple of marine speakers. He and I shook hands, each thinking he'd gotten a killer deal, which is the platonic ideal of a good transaction. After I got it home and got it running, I noticed the block code (XB) was for a '65 regular fuel 2-bbl 389. It hadn't even dawned on me that the intake was the 65-&-later bolt pattern, rather than the '61-'64 style. I went back to visit with the former owner and he told me the original 326 had thrown a rod out the side of the block in the first year of ownership and his father persuaded the dealership to upgrade the warranty replacement with a 389, since he was using the Le Mans to tow their camp trailer and(!) a small boat. Crazy people. I swapped on an old aluminum Edelbrock P4B manifold with a '65 Carter AFB and a pair of long tube headers capped off by by a pair of straight-thru glass packs, and changed the 2-speed TH300 for a TH350 with a 6-cylinder torque converter - all spare parts I had lying around. It ran like a scalded cat. If I recall correctly, it went away in a massive 3-way swap (that included a '65 GTO with a '63 Tempest four cylinder mated to its original Muncie 4-speed, a warehouse full of odd parts, a pair of '68 GTO projects, and a couple of promised body & paint jobs) when I married and went back to college to finish up my degree. Priorities, man.
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