For you younger types, thinking of a taxi cab probably invokes the image of some kind of Ford Panther platform car that has been beat beyond reproach rolling up with a slapped-on paint job. Some of you might picture Caprices, or minivans, or if you’re in a smaller town, whatever the vehicle of choice happens to be at the moment. But for the older readers, one car stands out as the taxi: the Checker Marathon. Designed in the later 1950s, built like a tank and more or less unchanged through the end in 1982, Marathons were unabashedly simple: take someone else’s powertrain (usually a GM unit), stick it in a body that looked like the Grand Theft Auto version of a 1954 Chevrolet sedan, and cut it loose on the American public. Drive it until there was no way it could be patched up and rebuild one more time, then send it off to the scrappers. It seemed like they were everywhere, but it really wasn’t the case: on the average, Checker turned out about 5,000 or so Marathons a year for service and only a little more for civilian consumption. Seeing one today is akin to going for a walk in the woods of New Hampshire and being greeted four miles into your hike by a real-life living, breathing dodo bird.

The car that Fuel Injection Sucks is working on is a 1967 civilian example that originally was sold with a 283ci Chevy mill and an automatic. And that program is going to go out of the window in favor of a V0rtec 4200, the 254ci inline-six that you would find in a Chevrolet TrailBlazer. Good for at least 270 horsepower, the inline-six will be at least on-par with the small-block Chevrolet performance wise and should be perfectly suited to hauling around the prototypical Yank Tank, once it’s installed and running. That might take a while, though, so sit back and catch up on what it takes to re-power an American icon!