MuscleCar Builds
Want more content like this?
Join the PowerNation Email NewsletterParts Used In This Episode
Air-Ride Technologies
Front and Rear air ride set up which includes tubular upper control arms and shock wave 3.0 air bags.
Chevrolet Performance
ZZ4 350 Crate Motor with 355HP/400lbs torque.
Dake
Cold saw and welding glasses.
Dake
Hydraulic press.
Evercoat
Metal 2 Metal-Metal reinforced body filler for metal surfaces.
Keisler Engineering, Inc.
"Perfect Fit" transmission 5 speed with 1:1 overdrive.
Keisler Engineering, Inc.
Bell housing and clutch.
Matco Tools
Rollaway and tool cart.
Mopar Performance
528 cid Mopar crate engine.
Red Top Speed Shop
K member.
YearOne
1969 Camaro Body.
YearOne
1969 Camaro SS.
Video Transcript
Today on Muscle car, Jared and Lou will fill you in on the merits of filler. Plus the GTO is the epitome of Classic muscle. We'll go for a spin in an ultra rare gold plated goat.
Welcome to Muscle car. The difference between a good restoration and a great one is all in the details and that's what we're doing today on our rate, Camaro, but we're not restoring this classic muscle car because all of our parts are completely new.
This is year one's all new. 69 Camaro convertible.
It started with an at the market, dyno
corn body and parts added a catalog since these old classics are becoming rarer and rarer by the day, completely assembling this bow tie from scratch with all new parts is not that far fetched.
We've been on our Camaro for a couple of weeks now and so far, we've dropped our Z Zour crate motor from GM performance parts into our new front clip. Then we went ahead and lined all the body panels up and got our gap straight
and you can go ahead and paint this thing as it sits, but we're gonna go way over the top of the sucker and I'm talking perfect.
True. Muscle car guys know what we're talking about here. Little dings in the, in the steel stuff that new cars would have little waves in the primer here. We're gonna fix all of this because what we want is zero imperfections and we want 100 point car. So it's gonna be really sharp when we get done.
Perfect. Body lines are gonna start with this stuff right here and I want to clear up some misconceptions that go along with it.
As long as you're not using plastic filler to fill holes or fix structural damage, it's gonna be your friend. Now, when I used to work at ride rides, we work on these
ultra high end cars and we get them looking perfect in bare metal and then people would see him and they'd see him down at the body
up and be like, oh why are you putting filler on that car? And the reason is you're not gonna get that perfect paint job without using this stuff. You're gonna be able to use it to, to quickly dial in body lines because it just doesn't benefit you to try and get it perfect and bare metal. So you get your shapes established in metal and then you refine them with this stuff and we're gonna show you the right way to use plastic filler.
The first step for our Craig Camaro is for us to sand down the Steeler using D A Sanders and 100 and 80 grit sandpaper on the whole car.
The reason for sanding the car is so that the primer
and the filler that are gonna go on after this step have something to grab onto, just scratching that panel up. So that's something to attach to.
Here's a high and a low spot. You can see where this is still a little bit shiny and this is obviously cut down to bare metal. It's because the, the panel's lower here. So the sander isn't quite getting to it yet.
So these are things that you don't really see until you sand, but they are things that would show up had we just put paint on the car.
Dent
dents are bad.
Is there a bonus for that?
Yeah. Yeah, that's perfect.
I'm excited to get the good looking wheels off this thing so we can trash these wheels, we can get mud on them or whatever we want paint.
Then it won't matter.
Now, that's a call.
Once the car is completely sanded down, we'll go back to the areas that need fill
and sand them down further with a rougher 80 grid sandpaper
grind this area.
Well, I didn't want to grind it.
Ok. I'm just messing with it.
This is a straight edge. You know, this is what we're looking for. We want these two panels to be in a straight line
and here you can see that the fender kind of trails off a little bit.
This is where you're gonna use filler to build that point out. So, these two match perfectly,
we're gonna put some stuff in there called All Metal and that's what all metal does. It's tougher than mud and it resists shrinking. But all metal is by no stretch of the imagination of final skim coat. We're gonna go back, put mud on it and then it'll be finished
plastic filler and all metal mix. The same way they both require a catalyst to harden. So you put it on the mixing sheets, add the hardener and mix it all together
and make sure you do this thoroughly. You want it all and even color.
Oh man. All this saying it ain't easy
but it's necessary.
This here is referred to as a long board. You always want to use the largest tool that you can for each job because you're contacting more surface area and you're less likely to see a groove. And then that's why I'm changing directions too because I don't want to just go in the same direction all the time,
but don't change directions while you're sanding, stop and then change directions.
Let's switch to a round block for the radiuses. The reason for that is pretty obvious you got a round shape. You wanna use a round block, you got a flat shape, you wanna use a flat block
and taking my time and really paying attention my main focus with this whole part is that these two body lines come perfect together.
The thing that I really want to focus on
is sanding one side at a time
and keep coming back and this side and then that side and it's going to create a really nice point across here.
Oh Yeah, that stuff is coming in nice.
What did you do?
You blew it? You're trying to be a body, man. Looks good, man. Get this out of your way.
I
love doing that too, man. It looks really good. Ready to move into some filler on that and
call it a day.
All right. Lou
It don't get much better than that dude.
When you put your eye down on this thing, it's gonna look like glass. Yeah. See I Yeah, this is nice. Yeah. A little bit of body work, man. I'm telling you. It just gets dialed in after that and see now. Yeah. And see now I know what you're talking about. The line is just nice and crisp, you know,
so what's next
primer? But first, let's stab the engine in that Challenger and you'll see that after the break.
Plus later on a GTO. That's the rarest tiger of them all when muscle car continues.
Welcome back. You know, a lot of people ask why we're not restoring our challenger to original condition. The answer to that is pretty simple. This car is not a numbers matching car. It's 36 years old, but with all the modern race parts we're throwing on this thing, it's gonna have the sex appeal of the original and it's gonna handle like a race car.
And to do that,
we started with this K member from Red Top speed shop and added some trick air ride suspension parts.
And here it is, race car handling deserves race car power and it starts right here with this killer hemi
from mo part performance 528 cubic inches and 610 horsepower.
This thing is gonna be bad but it's gonna need a bad tranny to back it up.
And with that in mind, we're going to put in this
Kesler engineering. Perfect fit overdrive five speed transmission.
It's a direct replacement for Chrysler's a 8 33 4 speed featuring a custom engineered tail housing with the world's only true internal shifter
offset to fit the original shifter location.
This tranny will let us be
through the gears to take full advantage of those 370 threes in our Dana 60
we'll be able to hit the highway and roll at 1500 RPM. S but first we got a couple of issues, we got to take care of the ground clearance on our challenger is five inches. So we're going to have to raise up that big
hemi to make some room.
Yeah,
the first thing we're gonna do. All right,
coming up is put the engine and trans into our challenger
so we can see what kind of modification we'll have to make.
Here you go. The mao
five speed stool.
Yeah,
it goes without saying, putting a hammy
in this thing is cool enough, but bowling a five speed to, it just takes it to a whole new level.
The
Hemingway is nearly double what most small block V eights weigh. So we'll use a forklift to make this job a little easier.
All right. Hang on. I'm gonna take the oil filter off.
Book
here we go.
How's that more? 10 inches
go under.
Start using that two by four.
We'll have to cut an opening for the shift.
But before we do that, we need something to protect our transmission cases
ready. Let's venture into the unknown.
100 ft away is our sister show Xtreme 4x4.
He had some kind of a fire blanket,
some leathers or something.
Anything.
That's what I'm talking about.
Way to step up. Jessi Combs from Xtreme 4x4.
All right, let's go.
After some discussion. We decided to save to challenge his original shifter racket.
Then cut a small section of the floor big enough to get our shifter up inside the cab.
Yeah, and just go up.
Oh
yeah,
it's like
she totally burned her leathers up.
Ok.
No, they're not. They like molded to the shape of the shifter. Ok. That's my favorite.
Alright. Go straight up.
Wow,
let's check this baby out.
I got about four inches over here. Everything's bolt in the stock location. What do you got? I can't even fit my finger in this side.
And that's how Chrysler used to get the U joints to work. They would actually move the whole engine over towards the passenger side
and for us crooked just isn't gonna cut it.
Ok. Both our front end from Red Top Speed shop and our parts from Kesler
were great in the stock locations, but since we're gonna center this engine up, we got a lot more fabrication ahead of us.
You think uh Jessi might be upset about it and I think we're gonna sync these back over to extreme.
It's funny now. But how will Jessi react when the guys give him back? Find out later on when muscle car continues, I
get
you. You're buying me
without a doubt. You could spell the beginning of the muscle car era with three letters GTO
and we've got a look at the rarest of the rare
muscle car flashback this week, the 65 GTO Tiger.
The muscle car phenomenon really got traction in 1964 when Pontiac wedged up big V8 in an intermediate.
The hot 389 option package turned a Wimpy tempest into the legendary GTO.
A year later, Pontiac built over 75,000 GT Os,
but they only made one of these.
This GTO Tiger is a fully optioned unrestored goat that was a
HS to quit promotional car in 1965.
It was based on a new mid size two door body by Fisher sport coupe with a cor
dura top dummy scoop hood, vertical stacked headlights and a blacked out recess grill tiger rolls on double forge gold plated her dazzler wheels wrapped appropriately in us. Royal tiger four red line boots, GTO badges and unique gold side exhaust splitters complete the profile.
The back end features an integrated rear inset and tail lights with six chrome ribs.
The tiger looked the part and it played the part. The optional tri power 389 featured a new cam intake and new cylinder heads fed by three deuces tied together with mechanical linking
the bottom line
about 360 horses and a stump, only 425 pounds of torque.
The package was good for 0 to 66.6 and ripped through the quarter at 14.5 seconds at 100 miles an hour
with plenty of burning rubber and induction noise
to this day is the ultimate 65 GTO. I don't think there's anybody that can compete with a
Pontiac Engineering built
promotional car in a special paint color that was
gold,
golden touch also included anti
theft gold plated hearst wheels and a gold plated HST stick to control the close ratio Mun
four speed. A plush rolled interior four way buckets. Detroit's first padded dash with a much needed grab bar and the industry's first AM FM radio with reverb
rounds out the ultimate upscale muscle car.
The GTO option, put Pontiac on the map and the Tiger put GTO on the map
today.
Colin Comer's rare GTO Tiger is a priceless piece of muscle car history with a value in the six figure range, but it can still do today what it was built to do 40 years ago.
We're back at muscle car
and we're in the process of muscling our huge heavy crate motor into our 70 challenge.
All right, in lieu of the fact that we're gonna center everything up and move it up the engine and tranny anyway.
And this floor is rotten to begin with. We're just gonna cut it all out. Luckily I got my boy the human torch over here
to run the plasma cutter.
Once he gets done, we're gonna get on the phone call. A couple of guys who know how to do sheet metal work and get this sucker replaced
play on.
Oh,
we
were the color
uh
still on fire up.
All right,
with our measurements taken,
we can start making our new motor mount which will be a lot easier with the drive train added there
up.
Now's the time to consider things like steering linkage clearance, oil pump clearance, firewall clearance. We take care of all those issues before we finish our mount. Tell me when you're happy
right there,
attack these temporary stanches that'll hold the motor in place until we double check all of our clearances.
Well, oh hemi
sitting in the middle of the engine bay like it should.
Yeah, there was a lot of extra fabrication but man, it looks so much better.
And os later.
Hello, Miss Combs.
Hi guys.
Hey, just before you go home, we're gonna give you back your letter. Thanks for letting us borrow. Oh
my God.
Oh,
smack them. Y them
here. We don't want,
we don't want you to think that we've kept,
I'm
gonna get you. You're buying a
new
letter.
I'm
a
muscle
car.
Getting away
with this.
I
believe
you.
I know they are. I can't believe you. That's like
that's just me.
Show Full Transcript
Welcome to Muscle car. The difference between a good restoration and a great one is all in the details and that's what we're doing today on our rate, Camaro, but we're not restoring this classic muscle car because all of our parts are completely new.
This is year one's all new. 69 Camaro convertible.
It started with an at the market, dyno
corn body and parts added a catalog since these old classics are becoming rarer and rarer by the day, completely assembling this bow tie from scratch with all new parts is not that far fetched.
We've been on our Camaro for a couple of weeks now and so far, we've dropped our Z Zour crate motor from GM performance parts into our new front clip. Then we went ahead and lined all the body panels up and got our gap straight
and you can go ahead and paint this thing as it sits, but we're gonna go way over the top of the sucker and I'm talking perfect.
True. Muscle car guys know what we're talking about here. Little dings in the, in the steel stuff that new cars would have little waves in the primer here. We're gonna fix all of this because what we want is zero imperfections and we want 100 point car. So it's gonna be really sharp when we get done.
Perfect. Body lines are gonna start with this stuff right here and I want to clear up some misconceptions that go along with it.
As long as you're not using plastic filler to fill holes or fix structural damage, it's gonna be your friend. Now, when I used to work at ride rides, we work on these
ultra high end cars and we get them looking perfect in bare metal and then people would see him and they'd see him down at the body
up and be like, oh why are you putting filler on that car? And the reason is you're not gonna get that perfect paint job without using this stuff. You're gonna be able to use it to, to quickly dial in body lines because it just doesn't benefit you to try and get it perfect and bare metal. So you get your shapes established in metal and then you refine them with this stuff and we're gonna show you the right way to use plastic filler.
The first step for our Craig Camaro is for us to sand down the Steeler using D A Sanders and 100 and 80 grit sandpaper on the whole car.
The reason for sanding the car is so that the primer
and the filler that are gonna go on after this step have something to grab onto, just scratching that panel up. So that's something to attach to.
Here's a high and a low spot. You can see where this is still a little bit shiny and this is obviously cut down to bare metal. It's because the, the panel's lower here. So the sander isn't quite getting to it yet.
So these are things that you don't really see until you sand, but they are things that would show up had we just put paint on the car.
Dent
dents are bad.
Is there a bonus for that?
Yeah. Yeah, that's perfect.
I'm excited to get the good looking wheels off this thing so we can trash these wheels, we can get mud on them or whatever we want paint.
Then it won't matter.
Now, that's a call.
Once the car is completely sanded down, we'll go back to the areas that need fill
and sand them down further with a rougher 80 grid sandpaper
grind this area.
Well, I didn't want to grind it.
Ok. I'm just messing with it.
This is a straight edge. You know, this is what we're looking for. We want these two panels to be in a straight line
and here you can see that the fender kind of trails off a little bit.
This is where you're gonna use filler to build that point out. So, these two match perfectly,
we're gonna put some stuff in there called All Metal and that's what all metal does. It's tougher than mud and it resists shrinking. But all metal is by no stretch of the imagination of final skim coat. We're gonna go back, put mud on it and then it'll be finished
plastic filler and all metal mix. The same way they both require a catalyst to harden. So you put it on the mixing sheets, add the hardener and mix it all together
and make sure you do this thoroughly. You want it all and even color.
Oh man. All this saying it ain't easy
but it's necessary.
This here is referred to as a long board. You always want to use the largest tool that you can for each job because you're contacting more surface area and you're less likely to see a groove. And then that's why I'm changing directions too because I don't want to just go in the same direction all the time,
but don't change directions while you're sanding, stop and then change directions.
Let's switch to a round block for the radiuses. The reason for that is pretty obvious you got a round shape. You wanna use a round block, you got a flat shape, you wanna use a flat block
and taking my time and really paying attention my main focus with this whole part is that these two body lines come perfect together.
The thing that I really want to focus on
is sanding one side at a time
and keep coming back and this side and then that side and it's going to create a really nice point across here.
Oh Yeah, that stuff is coming in nice.
What did you do?
You blew it? You're trying to be a body, man. Looks good, man. Get this out of your way.
I
love doing that too, man. It looks really good. Ready to move into some filler on that and
call it a day.
All right. Lou
It don't get much better than that dude.
When you put your eye down on this thing, it's gonna look like glass. Yeah. See I Yeah, this is nice. Yeah. A little bit of body work, man. I'm telling you. It just gets dialed in after that and see now. Yeah. And see now I know what you're talking about. The line is just nice and crisp, you know,
so what's next
primer? But first, let's stab the engine in that Challenger and you'll see that after the break.
Plus later on a GTO. That's the rarest tiger of them all when muscle car continues.
Welcome back. You know, a lot of people ask why we're not restoring our challenger to original condition. The answer to that is pretty simple. This car is not a numbers matching car. It's 36 years old, but with all the modern race parts we're throwing on this thing, it's gonna have the sex appeal of the original and it's gonna handle like a race car.
And to do that,
we started with this K member from Red Top speed shop and added some trick air ride suspension parts.
And here it is, race car handling deserves race car power and it starts right here with this killer hemi
from mo part performance 528 cubic inches and 610 horsepower.
This thing is gonna be bad but it's gonna need a bad tranny to back it up.
And with that in mind, we're going to put in this
Kesler engineering. Perfect fit overdrive five speed transmission.
It's a direct replacement for Chrysler's a 8 33 4 speed featuring a custom engineered tail housing with the world's only true internal shifter
offset to fit the original shifter location.
This tranny will let us be
through the gears to take full advantage of those 370 threes in our Dana 60
we'll be able to hit the highway and roll at 1500 RPM. S but first we got a couple of issues, we got to take care of the ground clearance on our challenger is five inches. So we're going to have to raise up that big
hemi to make some room.
Yeah,
the first thing we're gonna do. All right,
coming up is put the engine and trans into our challenger
so we can see what kind of modification we'll have to make.
Here you go. The mao
five speed stool.
Yeah,
it goes without saying, putting a hammy
in this thing is cool enough, but bowling a five speed to, it just takes it to a whole new level.
The
Hemingway is nearly double what most small block V eights weigh. So we'll use a forklift to make this job a little easier.
All right. Hang on. I'm gonna take the oil filter off.
Book
here we go.
How's that more? 10 inches
go under.
Start using that two by four.
We'll have to cut an opening for the shift.
But before we do that, we need something to protect our transmission cases
ready. Let's venture into the unknown.
100 ft away is our sister show Xtreme 4x4.
He had some kind of a fire blanket,
some leathers or something.
Anything.
That's what I'm talking about.
Way to step up. Jessi Combs from Xtreme 4x4.
All right, let's go.
After some discussion. We decided to save to challenge his original shifter racket.
Then cut a small section of the floor big enough to get our shifter up inside the cab.
Yeah, and just go up.
Oh
yeah,
it's like
she totally burned her leathers up.
Ok.
No, they're not. They like molded to the shape of the shifter. Ok. That's my favorite.
Alright. Go straight up.
Wow,
let's check this baby out.
I got about four inches over here. Everything's bolt in the stock location. What do you got? I can't even fit my finger in this side.
And that's how Chrysler used to get the U joints to work. They would actually move the whole engine over towards the passenger side
and for us crooked just isn't gonna cut it.
Ok. Both our front end from Red Top Speed shop and our parts from Kesler
were great in the stock locations, but since we're gonna center this engine up, we got a lot more fabrication ahead of us.
You think uh Jessi might be upset about it and I think we're gonna sync these back over to extreme.
It's funny now. But how will Jessi react when the guys give him back? Find out later on when muscle car continues, I
get
you. You're buying me
without a doubt. You could spell the beginning of the muscle car era with three letters GTO
and we've got a look at the rarest of the rare
muscle car flashback this week, the 65 GTO Tiger.
The muscle car phenomenon really got traction in 1964 when Pontiac wedged up big V8 in an intermediate.
The hot 389 option package turned a Wimpy tempest into the legendary GTO.
A year later, Pontiac built over 75,000 GT Os,
but they only made one of these.
This GTO Tiger is a fully optioned unrestored goat that was a
HS to quit promotional car in 1965.
It was based on a new mid size two door body by Fisher sport coupe with a cor
dura top dummy scoop hood, vertical stacked headlights and a blacked out recess grill tiger rolls on double forge gold plated her dazzler wheels wrapped appropriately in us. Royal tiger four red line boots, GTO badges and unique gold side exhaust splitters complete the profile.
The back end features an integrated rear inset and tail lights with six chrome ribs.
The tiger looked the part and it played the part. The optional tri power 389 featured a new cam intake and new cylinder heads fed by three deuces tied together with mechanical linking
the bottom line
about 360 horses and a stump, only 425 pounds of torque.
The package was good for 0 to 66.6 and ripped through the quarter at 14.5 seconds at 100 miles an hour
with plenty of burning rubber and induction noise
to this day is the ultimate 65 GTO. I don't think there's anybody that can compete with a
Pontiac Engineering built
promotional car in a special paint color that was
gold,
golden touch also included anti
theft gold plated hearst wheels and a gold plated HST stick to control the close ratio Mun
four speed. A plush rolled interior four way buckets. Detroit's first padded dash with a much needed grab bar and the industry's first AM FM radio with reverb
rounds out the ultimate upscale muscle car.
The GTO option, put Pontiac on the map and the Tiger put GTO on the map
today.
Colin Comer's rare GTO Tiger is a priceless piece of muscle car history with a value in the six figure range, but it can still do today what it was built to do 40 years ago.
We're back at muscle car
and we're in the process of muscling our huge heavy crate motor into our 70 challenge.
All right, in lieu of the fact that we're gonna center everything up and move it up the engine and tranny anyway.
And this floor is rotten to begin with. We're just gonna cut it all out. Luckily I got my boy the human torch over here
to run the plasma cutter.
Once he gets done, we're gonna get on the phone call. A couple of guys who know how to do sheet metal work and get this sucker replaced
play on.
Oh,
we
were the color
uh
still on fire up.
All right,
with our measurements taken,
we can start making our new motor mount which will be a lot easier with the drive train added there
up.
Now's the time to consider things like steering linkage clearance, oil pump clearance, firewall clearance. We take care of all those issues before we finish our mount. Tell me when you're happy
right there,
attack these temporary stanches that'll hold the motor in place until we double check all of our clearances.
Well, oh hemi
sitting in the middle of the engine bay like it should.
Yeah, there was a lot of extra fabrication but man, it looks so much better.
And os later.
Hello, Miss Combs.
Hi guys.
Hey, just before you go home, we're gonna give you back your letter. Thanks for letting us borrow. Oh
my God.
Oh,
smack them. Y them
here. We don't want,
we don't want you to think that we've kept,
I'm
gonna get you. You're buying a
new
letter.
I'm
a
muscle
car.
Getting away
with this.
I
believe
you.
I know they are. I can't believe you. That's like
that's just me.