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It is not uncommon to find fellow gear-heads that don’t share your opinion on certain cars, especially on cars that you will go to your grave devoted to. For this reason, it is rather refreshing to find people who share your interest in a specific make and model, and I found just that! Over at Pro-Touring.com, a fellow F-body fan has posted up his summer project complete with numerous photos. While his appreciation of the car may not wavier, it will definitely be tested with the project he has ahead of him.
The car is a ‘79 Camaro Z28. The build of it is being called Project “Chariot of Awesome II,” which is a bit corny but definitely conveys how excited the owner is about his car. The car was bought in March but hadn’t been worked on until the weekend of June 10th. This was due to the car having to be stored while the owner lived in an apartment. When the owner finally got to work on his Camaro, he found more rust than he initially thought was on the car. This, unfortunately, is fairly common on project cars that aren’t thoroughly inspected before they are purchased.
While the car is in decent shape, there are definitely some flaws. Obviously the rust is an issue for body integrity. The transmission doesn’t work and the engine, although in running condition, is thought to be considerably under powered by the owner. So what does this mean for the project? A complete build of course!
The owner plans to put an LS motor in the car with a T56 turbo. While he toyed with ideas of a concentration on excessive power, he expressed that he is leaning toward creating a “luxury touring” car in one of his forum posts. This idea stemmed from his like of what he said was comfort and understated performance of his Cadillac CTS-V. Even though the owner states in one of his posts that he won’t make it to many track events with the car, he is planning to completely redo the suspension to resemble one of an autocrossing car.
The forum dedicated to this project has a number of pictures of the car when the owner first bought it as well as of the car being pulled apart. It even has a couple of photos of the owner’s 2.5-year-old son helping him disassemble the car.
While it looks like this project is going to take awhile, especially with 60-hour work weeks and school that the owner has, it will be well worth it. While raw American muscle is more my style, it will be neat to see this Z28 transformed into a “luxury” pro-touring classic.
