[north]

Given things being slow here lately thanks to the gift from Wuhan I did some digging in my old posts and found this from back in 2006 when I first started on PY.

It documents my first 69 GTO acquisition rather well I must say! Please forgive the lack of capitalization and poor grammar. Part of the poor penmanship was the fault of my poor education but also because these old posts are corrupted somewhat (all of the emoticons I overused back then have disappeared. Here goes::



It's a wonder i ever bought another Pontiac!!This is the story of a dumb a** teenager (me 25 years ago).

After racing around in a 73 GTO the previous summer (1981) that i had co-purchased with my cousin. i started reading up on GTO's and realized that our model year was the runt of the litter. no longer happy i started looking for a nice 60's real GTO.

at that time the pricing on GTO type cars was simple: crappy looking beaters were $500-1000, freshly bright painted, good running cars with clean interiors and good rubber were $3,000-4,000. i did not matter if it was a rust free ram air IV judge convertible or a bondo by the barrel lemans with gto decals and cherry bombs, if it looked good: $3 or 4k, if not $500 to 1,000. being a dumb a** i, of course, was looking for a good looking car at the beater price.

fate brought me to just such a car, 69 quote-unquote "judge" about 10 miles from home that was listed in the local auto trader, i remember the ad well: 69 judge, new judge orange paint, great shape, cheep (actual spelling). the car was $1,500 and other than a light side swipe on the right quarter it looked good: glowing new carousel red paint, judge wing and stickers (no stripes) nice clean white interior. under the hood was the standard bevy of cheap aftermarket chrome goodies, air cleaner, valve covers etc. but not grubby. the owner (who was the son of the original owner) tells me to take it for a ride. it fired right up and was nice and loud, $10 glasspacks and no tail pipes will tend to do that.

it drove much worse than my 73 which was a nice low mileage rust free car but who wanted a butt ugly 73 when you could have a shiny orange judge.

bought it on the spot and headed home prouder than a peacock and started noticing a few pimples on my new aquisition: drive into rain and no wipers, stop in the rain and car rotates more than it stops, but hey it's orange!! next i notice that my seat is sorta "loose", pull up beside a cop and i notice no seatbelts. the list starts growing: floor it getting on the highway and blow a muffler, also lots of noise but not as quick as my smogger 73!?!? how can it be? meanwhile the rain has soaked the carpets and the package shelf, i turn on the radio to see if the speakers are ok, naturally it does not work. the water that has leaked into the car is now fogging up the windows; no problem just fire up the trusty circ-l-air heater! humm, doesn't work. pull away from the lights near home and now the turbo 400 decides to stay in first.

the great thing about being young is that you're too stupid to know how stupid you are, i was still happy with the car!! i can fix all this stuff easy i thought to my self. my neighbours were out to greet me (probably heard me coming a few block away) as i swung into my parents driveway, my first repair expense was quick in coming when my father informed me that i was not to return without fixing the cause of the puddles of oil already forming under the car. so off i went, in first gear, to the local texaco for my first rude awakening.

my big proud smile vanished when the mechanic, rather than coming over to say what a lucky guy i was for having such a "rad" car, instead tells me he doesn't want to hoist the car since the frame is so rotten he's afraid to go under it , how can this be with such shiny orange paint !! a few embarassing hours later my Judge (with the help of some steel plates on the lifting points to spread the load out) has a welded up oil pan, a new gasket set on the turbo 400, a transmission modulator, a fresh layer of muffler tape and some 10w30. so i head for my freinds place to show off, a little disapointed by my cars new quieter demeanor.

this of course did not happen since i never made it there, rad blows so i limp home and "fix" it with a little yellow can of rad blocker (some people refer to it as rad sealer). in the garage that night i make a few more unpleasant discoveries: shame of shame, my car is a 2 barrel car!! i still remember the xx code like it was yesterday, then i open the trunk lid and it almost decapitates me due to a combo of added spoiler and a lip of the trunk lid that is close to an inch thick (problably more bondo in the lid then there was fiberglass in the wing). decapitation might have been better than seeing the trunk itself: grim! very grim!! more fiberglass and bondo than the trunklid and spoiler combined. next was my attempt to fix the loose seats! the good news: there was some metal left over the transmission hump, the bad news: that was just about the only original metal between the left and right doors. a smorgasbord of what today would be called "composites" fiberglass, bondo, illegally procured road sign pieces, hockey sticks, window screening even part of a shovel!! all topped with lightweight sound absorbtion material (otherwise known as newspapers)

by the morning i had reached a startling conclusion: not only was my dream machine the most rotten chunk of s**t imaginable (wrapping your knuckles on any of the body panels made gyprock sound tinny by comparison) it was not an orange judge but originally a 2 barrel, old man blue, bench seat stripper of a gto, a lowly tempest by any measure other than the VIN . the morning also brought a car that had filled the house with the lovely aroma of raw gasoline .

about half a tank of fuel was on the garage floor, suprisingly, it wasn't a rust issue (for once) since the original brake lines probably rusted out in Nixon's first term, instead it was due to one of the 12 or so connections between scraps of old vacuum hose that comprised my fuel delivery system that had let go. as a safety feature the cars fire prevention system kicked in by refusing to turn over (caused by the battery having turned over when it's rotten wooden (not only steel can rot!) tray collapsed and shorted out the battery against the crusty rad support. so with a quick trip to the auto parts store for a starter, cables, battery, some new wood and a few little hose clamps to patch my fuel line the car was back on the prowl to the scrap yard in search of a Q-jet and intake.

i think it hit me as i was pulling the intake of an old GP that most of these cars that had trees growing through them were in better shape then the car that i had driven to the bone yard in. i decided all of 30 hours into the "ownership experience" that i was going to sell it. as i approached the car with the heavy Q-jet topped intake i looked at the lethal trunklid and thought about what the trunk floor looked like and decide that if i don't want to have my new intake bouncing on the highway behind me i better forget the trunk, so i drop it onto the not much better floor in front of the passenger bucket, the sound track for this event was a rather large cracking noise. furthermore when i hopped into the car i notice that the still loose seat is now looser and leaning inwards in a slightly disconcerting way. on the way home that evening i am travelling on a 30mph boulevard at about 100 or so and notice that the lights at the quickly approaching intersection have turned red: my 4 measly rust encrusted manual drums succesfully slow me right down to about 95 before overheating and sending the brake pedal effortlessly intoto the newsprint padded carpeting , i fly through 6 lanes of busy perpendicular horn blazing traffic, miraculously without hitting or being hit by anyone.

even more amazingly i make it home without further incident and the next morning i install the four barrel setup and bask in the fact that the car now runs even worse, leaks fuel out of about 20 different locations on the Q-jet and worst of all is making even less power than before ! i finish my third day in hell doing the first smart thing in quite a while: placing an add at the auto trader office (fortunetely they were able to use the picture from the previous ad by the previous owner!). a week or two later, with the car judisiously not moving an inch except for test drives i find my mark, i mean prospective buyer. he is smart enough to bring it to a garage for inspection but stupid enough to buy it anyway despite the desperate pleadings of the incredulous mechanic. he drives me home, in first gear since the tranny decided to act up again, and proudly drives off as i happily pocket my $1,000 .

the next day i hear about his adventure: when he left my house he went straight to a muffler shop for a full exhaust system, it would have been of great use to the muffler guy to know that when you sat in the car the floors would sag down an inch or two. but the muffler guy didn't so the buyer, not knowing the danger, headed for his girlfriends house,to take her out for a night on the town in his shiny new orange steed, a bit later, while sitting at a red light directly in front of the Montreal Forum (Shrine of the legendary Montreal Canadians) his girlfriend lets out a shriek to verbalize her concern about the fact that the carpets were on fire (due to the sagging combustible floors contacting the new exhaust pipes. fortunately they evacuated the car unhurt, unfortunately someone near by had a fire extinguisher and put out the fire before it could do too much damage, thereby prolonging his misery.

the police arrive and give him several tickets for a variety of reasons mostly to do with the various safety laws the car did not comply with and then call a tow truck. the truck hooked up to the rear (to protect the, despite gm propoganda circa 68 to the contrary, rather fragile endura bumper) and, it must have been a quite a sight, succeeded in ripping out not only the rear bumper but also the entire frame rear of the axle thus permitting the poor goat to roll into a parked car (did i mention that the car had no parking brake-obviously- and a sheared or missing parking pin in the tranny) with its aformentioned fragile rubber bumper.

now for the weird part of the story!! not only did this guy not kill, maim, sue or pummel me, he never even complained . on top of that within a month or so he had that piece of *x%$&@ on the road again, spent the next 10 years pouring untold buckets of money into it, he is amazingly still alive and worse he still owns it today!!

go figure

i still have an old mason jar, in plain sight on my bookshelf, full of chunks of bondo encrusted rotten metal that fell from that car every time you closed a door. just so i will never, ever forget just what does to cars

[north]

Of course the 25 years ago is now 40! Gulp, I’m getting old!

[4zpeed]

Obviously some West Virginians preowned vehicle.

Lots of free materials included with purchase.



Frank

[north]

Btw, my Pontiac story may be a perfect example of why no one can really predict the future. After reading the above can you think of how anybody could image that that teenager would spend the next 40 years collecting and restoring more pontiacs after his horrific first experience with them?

Btw2. I still have that mason jar full of rotten bondo encrusted scraps of oxidized metal.

[4zpeed]

Originally Posted by north

After reading the above can you think of how anybody could image that that teenager would spend the next 40 years collecting and restoring more pontiacs

Btw2. I still have that mason jar full of rotten bondo encrusted scraps of oxidized metal.

Either a glutton for punishment, or you learned and remembered that traumatic experience.

BTW, you need to give that mason jar to the new owner, he paid for it...



Frank

[will slow gto]

This is the best thing I’ve read in a while! Glad you survived those 72 hours back in 1981.

[north]

I lost touch with the guy who bought it in the early 2000’s and I haven't see it around since. It would have been a pretty GTO new in its own grandpa kind of way. If you can visualize it... Warwick blue, parchment bench (when I bought it it had the buckets and console out of a 72 LeMans sport) 2bbl engine, TH400, power steering, deluxe wheelcovers, AM. Five option car ( one of which was no charge)