Matt Clarke's 68 Firebird 400 HO
It starts with a car crazy kid that wasn't allowed to own a car since his folks were paying for most of college. I lived through my friends who all had cool cars. Fast forward to 1989 living in Dallas Texas, and a brief "acceleration contest" in my 85 305 4bbl 5spd firebird that almost got beat by an Old Quad-4 Calais. A 4 cylinder? Sold that bird the next weekend and went searching for anything over 300hp and a 4spd. After looking at probably 100 cars, I ended up back at Pontiac. I had to hound the original owner of the 68 for 3 months that had been parked for 10 years in his driveway, it still ran, but poorly. The selling point was however ugly it was, it was original, no bondo in yet with 78,000 miles. A slighlty wrinkled fender (got a new one from GM in Fort Worth), paint completely gone from being in the sun, carpets shot, headliner hanging, carpet on the door panels useless, every every every piece of rubber was dry rotted. The front seats were rough but the rear pretty good, 44 years later that is still the original back seat with just one 4 inch piece of stitching redone.
I'd put the twins to bed and work till midnight for what seemed forever. I'm not much of a mechanic but I can unbolt stuff, clean and paint it and put it back on. Yes, I told the wife I only needed the garage for a few months, um, guess I'm bad at estimating. Since it ran, I just took the motor out, cleaned the engine and bay, painted it all, and did a tune-up.. "if it ain't broke, don't fix it". I sent it out for paint in late 1990.
Various projects since; front disk brakes, the front seats finally in 2008, had Gary H rebuild the motor in 2008, and put a 5spd Tremec in it in 2011 with Ron's help (sorry about your hand Ron).
It is probably due for a full body overhaul, but heck, then I'd have to park it for more than a month, and I'm not sure I could go that long without being able to blow the tires off of something.
