Soooo... I've got this thing.
Back Story:
For a long time I've wanted an A/G El Camino...having the pickup bed but otherwise being an easy-driving Malibu, and nearly being some-type classic car, has appeal. 'Way back in the mid-1990s I was semi-seriously watching for a likely candidate for a mild build and noticed this '78 car sitting engine-less in a repair shop parking lot and asked about it, the owner was friendly but his orig. 350 SS car was not for sale. Later I found a nice dark-gray/black interior '79 305/automatic and got started on it but about three different events came along and wiped out that deal, just how it goes sometimes. A couple years later with the above car still sitting in a lot I asked about it again and got another "no", this time from an employee of the shop it was at...some months later I got to wondering if perhaps persistence would do the trick and was met with yet another "no", this time very firm. OK I figured, I'm not gonna get this one.
My daughter's boyfriend at the time was driving a '79 El Camino with the Buick V6 which was giving him a lot of trouble, he was interested in another car I owned at the time and with me still wanting an El Camino we did a swap. So, that then was my project, light blue w/ a light blue interior:
(The orange '64 in the background was actually meant for a different, wilder project but that's a different story.)
Out came the V6 and in went an '86 TPI 305 motor I got out of a Trans Am. I thought an NV3500 light truck-type five speed trans would make for a nice driver with it's low first gear for hauling a light trailer and also having overdrive. The downside with the trans; the shifter came out where it jammed into the dash. Still I started working on that, along with all the wiring stuff for the fuel injection small block.
Being as there wasn't much time and even less money available for this, it dragged on quite a while. I did a little work on it here and there, and remember we're talking a while back here.
Ten years ago: Along comes an old buddy of mine who also likes El Caminos. He asks me, "WTH are you doing fixing up that nothing-special piece of crap? I know of a SS V8 car in town you should be building. What, I wondered, there's another one besides the one I had asked about three times? No, it's the same car, magically for sale now. Figures. I told him that I wasn't going to go over asking about that thing again, if he wanted to buy it for himself go ahead and maybe somewhere down the road if he didn't want to build it then we'd talk.
A few weeks later part of the car is in my yard and part of it in his. He had just moved and I was being hit very hard by the '08 recession and there were no resources from either of us available to do anything. Now it was the black car's turn to sit. After a year or so I did make it mine by trading off a decent Blazer I had at the time, anyhow, and he went on to other projects.
Now for the next plot twist: At some point I ran into a guy at a neighborhood party who started telling me about this El Camino he knew of being sold and how the owner had either changed his mind or never wanted to sell it in the first place or maybe his ex-wife just sold it out of under him, and he wanted it back. I don't know if the person realized I was the one who had it. I pondered what to do since I hadn't done anything with it, but then along with this guy's story and about a half-a-dozen beers came this threat; whoever had the car now was in deep trouble with the local biker gang who the previous owner of the car was a member of. Hmm. I don't really "do" threats, and anyhow if the person really wanted his car back he'd have an easy enough time finding me. I waited, half-expecting him to then show in the yard one day but he never did. As for Mr. Third-Party-Threat guy, I haven't seen him since. Certainly he was part of an old-in-this-town group that I, a "newbie" from dirty Los Angeles, never got along with much.
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Funny...my last El Camino, the '70 SS I've had for many years, had a somewhat similar story at the outset. A guy had it, then I had it and paid for it, then the other guy comes back angry. Is it an El Camino thing where most people don't really care for them but then some people are nuts about them to the point where they're, well, nuts? Like these other previous car-owners, I've been approached time-after-time to sell my car to somebody. The critical difference has been, however, that I never agreed I would.
Meanwhile, as I say, neither time nor money was available to do anything on the car and the years dragged by.
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Now cut to a few months ago.
This thing's been sitting here for a decade, after it sat in the previous owner's yard for longer than that, and I'm trying to clear this place out a bit just in case my plan of living long enough to actually finish all the projects around here (est. 900 years) doesn't quite pan out. It's time to either build it or get rid of it. The title...where is the friggin' title. I didn't have it, and my buddy across town who originally picked up the car didn't have it. So the next job is to find the previous owner and I-guess see if he still wants his car back, or would instead be willing to sign some DMV forms (essentially application for lost title and transfer of ownership) and clear this up. I go to the local private DMV service to find out status, then to the nearby Sheriff's to make sure after all that it's not stolen or something (!), and from there back to the shop where the car had sat for so long. The next plot twist: That owner had passed away a couple of years ago, heart attack. His ex-wife who now owns the shop says that all paperwork they had on anything burned along with their home in the last local wildfires a few years ago. Still she is friendly and helpful, and fills out any new paperwork asked for along with providing whatever documentation. Whatever beef there'd have been with the previous owner, if there was one, will now have to get solved some other way.
So it seems anyhow that whether we are building this car or something comes up making it impossible and we go back to the blue one which I still have, I need a transportation car besides my full-size truck and the Cherokee, so we are on our way.
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Back Story:
For a long time I've wanted an A/G El Camino...having the pickup bed but otherwise being an easy-driving Malibu, and nearly being some-type classic car, has appeal. 'Way back in the mid-1990s I was semi-seriously watching for a likely candidate for a mild build and noticed this '78 car sitting engine-less in a repair shop parking lot and asked about it, the owner was friendly but his orig. 350 SS car was not for sale. Later I found a nice dark-gray/black interior '79 305/automatic and got started on it but about three different events came along and wiped out that deal, just how it goes sometimes. A couple years later with the above car still sitting in a lot I asked about it again and got another "no", this time from an employee of the shop it was at...some months later I got to wondering if perhaps persistence would do the trick and was met with yet another "no", this time very firm. OK I figured, I'm not gonna get this one.
My daughter's boyfriend at the time was driving a '79 El Camino with the Buick V6 which was giving him a lot of trouble, he was interested in another car I owned at the time and with me still wanting an El Camino we did a swap. So, that then was my project, light blue w/ a light blue interior:
(The orange '64 in the background was actually meant for a different, wilder project but that's a different story.)
Out came the V6 and in went an '86 TPI 305 motor I got out of a Trans Am. I thought an NV3500 light truck-type five speed trans would make for a nice driver with it's low first gear for hauling a light trailer and also having overdrive. The downside with the trans; the shifter came out where it jammed into the dash. Still I started working on that, along with all the wiring stuff for the fuel injection small block.
Being as there wasn't much time and even less money available for this, it dragged on quite a while. I did a little work on it here and there, and remember we're talking a while back here.
Ten years ago: Along comes an old buddy of mine who also likes El Caminos. He asks me, "WTH are you doing fixing up that nothing-special piece of crap? I know of a SS V8 car in town you should be building. What, I wondered, there's another one besides the one I had asked about three times? No, it's the same car, magically for sale now. Figures. I told him that I wasn't going to go over asking about that thing again, if he wanted to buy it for himself go ahead and maybe somewhere down the road if he didn't want to build it then we'd talk.
A few weeks later part of the car is in my yard and part of it in his. He had just moved and I was being hit very hard by the '08 recession and there were no resources from either of us available to do anything. Now it was the black car's turn to sit. After a year or so I did make it mine by trading off a decent Blazer I had at the time, anyhow, and he went on to other projects.
Now for the next plot twist: At some point I ran into a guy at a neighborhood party who started telling me about this El Camino he knew of being sold and how the owner had either changed his mind or never wanted to sell it in the first place or maybe his ex-wife just sold it out of under him, and he wanted it back. I don't know if the person realized I was the one who had it. I pondered what to do since I hadn't done anything with it, but then along with this guy's story and about a half-a-dozen beers came this threat; whoever had the car now was in deep trouble with the local biker gang who the previous owner of the car was a member of. Hmm. I don't really "do" threats, and anyhow if the person really wanted his car back he'd have an easy enough time finding me. I waited, half-expecting him to then show in the yard one day but he never did. As for Mr. Third-Party-Threat guy, I haven't seen him since. Certainly he was part of an old-in-this-town group that I, a "newbie" from dirty Los Angeles, never got along with much.
----------------
Funny...my last El Camino, the '70 SS I've had for many years, had a somewhat similar story at the outset. A guy had it, then I had it and paid for it, then the other guy comes back angry. Is it an El Camino thing where most people don't really care for them but then some people are nuts about them to the point where they're, well, nuts? Like these other previous car-owners, I've been approached time-after-time to sell my car to somebody. The critical difference has been, however, that I never agreed I would.
Meanwhile, as I say, neither time nor money was available to do anything on the car and the years dragged by.
-----------------
Now cut to a few months ago.
This thing's been sitting here for a decade, after it sat in the previous owner's yard for longer than that, and I'm trying to clear this place out a bit just in case my plan of living long enough to actually finish all the projects around here (est. 900 years) doesn't quite pan out. It's time to either build it or get rid of it. The title...where is the friggin' title. I didn't have it, and my buddy across town who originally picked up the car didn't have it. So the next job is to find the previous owner and I-guess see if he still wants his car back, or would instead be willing to sign some DMV forms (essentially application for lost title and transfer of ownership) and clear this up. I go to the local private DMV service to find out status, then to the nearby Sheriff's to make sure after all that it's not stolen or something (!), and from there back to the shop where the car had sat for so long. The next plot twist: That owner had passed away a couple of years ago, heart attack. His ex-wife who now owns the shop says that all paperwork they had on anything burned along with their home in the last local wildfires a few years ago. Still she is friendly and helpful, and fills out any new paperwork asked for along with providing whatever documentation. Whatever beef there'd have been with the previous owner, if there was one, will now have to get solved some other way.
So it seems anyhow that whether we are building this car or something comes up making it impossible and we go back to the blue one which I still have, I need a transportation car besides my full-size truck and the Cherokee, so we are on our way.
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