Great, now that I have your attention, what you are about to witness is pure automotive hottness at its very best. There’s beautiful fabrication, a beautiful car, a beautiful engine, and an overall beautiful build thread. The whole event took place over on MotorGeek, and if you have a spare hour or so, you will definitely want to read through the entire build thread. It’s dang near incredible. Here is the short story.
A user known as “timmmy” got a great deal on a 2003 Audi RS6 that had a missing twin turbo engine. He decided that rather than replacing it with a very expensive factory replacement, a 2004 Pontiac GTO LS1 v8 would be the best candidate to go in its place. The best part? He also swapped in manual transmission and kept the all wheel drive. For-The-Win. Absolutely ideal daily driver in New England? Yessiree Bob… err… should I say “Judas”? I forgot to mention that, this project is named Project “Judas”.
Now it’s one thing to plop this GTO engine into a 70 Chevelle, but a totally different game to surgically slide it under the hood of an awd Audi RS6. Mechanically, this engine swap had a unique set of challenges that you might expect, like relocating the transmission further rearward, modifying axles, and just basically making space for 4 more inches of engine under the hood. There was plenty of awesomely fabricated parts to make this happen. Transmission cross-members, engine mounts, accessory brackets, the whole shebang. The majority of the parts were made of aluminum, and if you have been reading the 1A Blog for a while, you know that I’m a sucker for TIG welded aluminum.
Fuel Injection. For those of you that have done fuel injected engine swaps before, you know that it has its own variety of challenges that carbureted engines don’t have, like ohhh, about 4 million wires. Not only that, but this builder then had to connect the LS1 engine harness to the Audi harness and have them play merrily. That way he would have a dashboard, OBDII port, and engine accessories that actually worked like they were intended. That takes some serious noggin power, and is almost always the most frightening part of a car build.
Within the build thread, there are probably hundreds of pictures, many videos, and great automotive banter throughout. I grabbed a few to share with you today, but really you need to check out the complete thread. It’s everything you want and more.
Have you ever wondered what would have happened if Pontiac made a GTO truck in the 1960′s like Chevy did with their El Caminos ? Slide a 421 in it with tri-power, a Muncie, a posi, and you’ve got a winning combo. You could stick with your Pontiac roots, be competitive at the drag strip, and then fill it with mulch on the weekends! It might be the perfect match …..or not? » Continue reading more of this post…
Last weekend I went to the monthly car show / swap meet in Amherst NH and I saw this bench seat that had me quite intrigued. I am pretty sure that I have never seen one of these seats before. The owner of this seat thinks that it is from a 1968+ GTO, though he isn’t 100% sure.
So I ask you – What in the world did this seat originally come out of? Is it really a GTO seat? Some other A-Body? Drop some knowledge on me.
Let’s imagine for a moment that a genie popped out of your coffee this morning and said that he is magically acquiring you one of the three vehicles pictured above in the next 24 hours. You must take them as show, not knowing anything other than what you see in this picture. All are brand new, drivable cars, with zero miles.
Once in a while I get a call from a friend that says to me “I have XXX wrong with my car, should I fix it or cut my losses and just get something else?” This can be a really easy question or a really tough question depending on the car and the problem that is ailing it. When doing all of your own work, it is much easier to justify fixing a car because you don’t have to pay the labor. The downfall to this is that it also means you can justify fixing cars that normally should be junked. Well folks, now I have found myself in this position, and I’m asking the Nutts & Bolts Auto Blog readers for opinions.
I got a 1960 Pontiac Ventura in trade for some work on a 1964 GTO a couple years ago. It was a complete car when I got it, and I even got it running again, but it is in rough shape. It hasn’t been registered since the mid 1980′s, and it has been outside the entire time since, so finding solid portions of the body is not easy. That being said, I am more ambitious than most, so I pulled the body from the frame, rebuilt the frame and suspension, and set the body back on it temporarily.
Recently, I had a friend (homesteadblast.com) soda blast the entire body of the car for me. Ugh. What we found was disheartening. At the bare minimum, it needs all new floors and floor supports from front to rear, quarter panels, inner and outer rocker panels, a tailpan, lower fenders & doors. Yeap, basically a new body minus the roof. All of the glass is broken as well, which is a real financial drag. To restore this back to original, the replacement sheetmetal alone would be in the multiple thousands of dollars. Never mind the wiring, plumbing, trim, interior, and little odds and ends. By the time the car is nice, I bet I would have well over $7500 in materials and several hundred (thousand?) hours of my own labor. It’s value when done? Probably slightly less than what I have invested.
The 2nd option is throw originality to the wind, and basically “hot rod” the heck out of the car to suite my own bizarre tastes. This option would be cheaper and faster because I could make my own floor braces out of boxed steel, do some simple bead-rolled floor pans, a basic DIY-style wiring kit, and use junkyard parts for the rest…
The 3rd and final option is to find a more suitable home for the car and just buy something fully drivable instead.
My bad.
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