As much as I try to stay out of Rust Belt areas doing the Rough Start searches, I couldn’t help this one. Kenosha, Wisconsin is the former home of American Motors, the central location for just about every AMC product that came and went. Surely to goodness, I could locate a clean American Motors product here, right? Someone has had to have squirreled one away and kept it from the road salt that eats Buicks for lunch each and every year. So, with our imaginary five thousand dollars in hand, it was off to the magical land of Craigslist to see what we could cough up.
Hunting AMCs breaks down into four categories: Javelin and AMX, pre-1970, post-1970, and Jeep. We didn’t care what we found, so long as it met the budget and didn’t look like it got dredged up from the bottom of a lake. We also didn’t want to put up an Eagle wagon, since to most people Eagles are right up there with peanut butter…sure, it’ll work, but are you sure you don’t have anything else to eat in the house?
Then this 1972 American Motors Hornet SST crossed the view. Very clean paint, stock wheels, and a seller that isn’t shy about what’s going on here leaves me more intrigued than anything. Some holes and some Bondo is straightforward for Wisconsin…we’d almost expect it on any car over ten years old. What gets us is how few things you actually see. There’s some bubbling down low, but given where you are shopping, could you do worse? Oh, yeah you could.
Our vision: 232ci six is out, snotty AMC 360 is in, and we don’t change the overall visual look. Clean up some bodywork by any means necessary and keep the paint decent, and roll it until you can find a nice shell to transfer the good parts into. Or maybe you get lucky and the rust is easier to repair than we suspect it will be.
Old Hornets are cool in my book. Patch panels are cheap on these. As long as the cancer isn’t completely out of control, I’d rock this ride for sure. As mentioned, this one is begging for a 360!