Back Yard Rescue! BIG BLOCK Camaro (Abandoned Project) - Hot Rod Hoarders Ep. 5

This time on Hot Rod Hoarders we pick up a big block Camaro that's been neglected for years and we get it back on the road. The car is a 1967 Camaro. It was originally a six cylinder, automatic car with factory air conditioning. It was cream with gold interior but that is not what you're looking at right now. What you're seeing is a bright red big block Camaro with a Super Sport hood and a few other Super Sport details. And it's obvious that somebody somewhere along the way made this car a hot rod and got rid of all the original equipment but there's a lot to work with here and we're gonna get it running. The car was sitting about a couple miles from my dad's shop and you know, you really couldn't see it from the road, it was kinda blocked by some other stuff in the guy's yard and I believe that was intentional because he didn't want a bunch of people asking about the car. Because his original intention was to restore it and get it back on the road, get it looking good, get a fresh paint job on it. And he had actually brought it by for my dad to look at but the price was a little bit out of the guy's range. He actually mentioned to my dad right there that he may actually just sell the car. So, of course, my dad said if you decide to sell it I'd be interested in buying it. It has a ran-when-parked big block Chevy in it, backed by a Powerglide two-speed automatic transmission and finally the rear end is the stock 10-bolt. So, when you buy a car like this, you don't really have time to scrape around and find the casting numbers and the date codes and all that stuff. You're kinda taking a gamble on it when you buy a project like this. It's not like I was expecting any numbers to match because I assumed it wasn't a big block car in the first place. But once I get it home, that's always the first thing that I do is start looking for casting numbers and suffix codes on the engine. On the front pad on the engine block there are numbers stamped in there, and that's your serial numbers and your suffix codes and stuff like that. And that can very easily tell you what this engine came out of. What I found was the letters CE and then a series of numbers and what that means is that it's a GM replacement block, that this wasn't actually a factory engine in a car. So that didn't really tell me a whole lot and I'm just going by the previous owner's word that it's a 396. So that's really about all we know about the actual bottom end. I did take a valve cover off of it and checked the cylinder heads and it's got a set of 206 GM casting big block heads, which are '65 and '66 396 heads. So up top you see the Torker II intake manifold has kinda got the carburetor twisted around, I always thought those were kinda cool. It's got a Holley four barrel, an HEI distributor and some kinda modern plug wires and stuff like that. Inside the interior is complete, but it's not in really good shape. It obviously needs some carpet, it needs a headliner, the door panels are a little bit rough but the seats are surprisingly good and the dash is all pretty much complete aside from a cassette player that somebody put in there in the '80s. So the previous owner had removed the gas tank and started doing some stuff with the fuel lines and I'm assuming they were trying to diagnose a problem with the car because when we tried to crank it up, just even running the fuel hose over to the fuel jug, it would not crank up. We poured gas down the carburetor and it would only run on what gas we poured in. So we knew that there was an issue with the fuel pump. Normally when a car sits like this, the diaphragm in there gets rotten and goes bad and it keeps it from pumping. So we got a parts store fuel pump for about 20 bucks, bolted it on there, run our hose out to the fuel jug and this thing fired right up and sat there and ran. I fooled with a few adjustments on the carburetor, and other than that it ran pretty good. Next on the list is brakes, because if I'm gonna drive this thing around the block, I've gotta have at least a little bit of brakes. So I pushed on the pedal and it didn't go down to the floor so that was a good sign and I pumped them up just a little bit and I had plenty of pedal. I knew that if the transmission would pull I was gonna be taking this thing around the block. You can see my fuel system here that I rigged up. Since the car didn't have a fuel tank in it, I was just gonna run it off the jug. And I didn't have a long enough hose fuel hose to reach from the fuel pump to the passenger floor board, so I pieced together a few pieces of rubber hose with just some old fuel filters we had laying around. Obviously, this isn't ideal but it was enough to get me around the block. So I took off down the road and this thing...there was a really bad rattling noise which turned out to be the exhaust hanging down and banging against the ground and it's rusty anyway so it needs to go away. But the car ran great, there was no complaints. I mean it pulled a little when I got on the brakes and that's totally normal for anything with drum brakes that's been sitting a while. But as far as running and driving, the transmission shifted, all that stuff worked. Obviously the car needs some work, it didn't run all that great on my test drive and I noticed it was smoking quite a bit and out on the road it didn't run extremely well but it did run well enough to do a good burnout, and that's really all that mattered on my first test drive. So our plan is to continue tweaking on the car, get it running, driving and stopping a little better and then start concentrating on cosmetics. Get the interior cleaned out, get the exterior cleaned up and start driving it. See how much fun we can get into and see where the project leads us from there. If you like this sort of thing hit the subscribe button and you'll see all of our new videos with project updates, drag racing coverage and all sorts of other fun stuff. Thank you for watching.

Channel: Hot Rod Hoarder

Views: 228,014

Rating: 4.8972936 out of 5

Keywords: big block camaro, 1967 camaro, roadkill, hot rod hoarders, blown64vette, yard find rescue, classic car rescue, muscle cars, muscle car rescue, barn finds, barn find cars, barn find hunter, yard find, big block chevy, big block, big block camaro burnout, camaro, chevrolet, chevrolet camaro, 1967 chevy camaro, camaro barn find, burnout, camaro burnout, abandoned cars, vice grip garage, abandoned camaro, abandoned muscle cars, revival, rescue, muscle car, will it run

Id: pZ70wA3YjPs

Length: 7min 59sec (479 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 05 2019