Plymouth sold the 1969 GTX as the muscle car for buyers who wanted power without giving up polish – a blacked-out grille, an upscale cabin, and a 375-horsepower 440 standard with no options required. Only 208 of that year’s 15,602 GTXs left the factory with the legendary 426 Hemi instead. Here’s what it takes to get one of the more common 440 survivors running exactly the way Plymouth intended.
Posts Tagged: Muscle Car Restoration
A bone-stock 1970 Camaro RS with no Super Sport history got a full nine-episode transformation into an L78 396 tribute called ‘Project Limelight’ on MuscleCar — and the compiled build video has now been watched more than 12 million times. Here’s the real story behind the car, the engine it borrowed its identity from, and how to tell a genuine SS from a well-built clone.
Richard Boehl has owned his 1971 Dodge Charger R/T 440 Six Pack — part of a production run of just 178 cars — since 1986, and he’s collected plenty of speeding tickets along the way. Filmed at Carlisle Events for My Car Story with Lou Costabile, this Concours-caliber Charger runs a triple-carburetor big block that sounds nothing like a standard four-barrel setup. Watch to hear it, and hear Boehl’s stories, for yourself.
A rare 1970 Buick GSX Stage 1 — one of only about 400 ever built — just resurfaced after years hidden away, its wheels rusted solid and its Saturn Yellow paint buried under dust. The Stage 1’s 455 V8 once held a 33-year American torque record, and the man who rescued it is now working to prove this is the real thing, part number by part number. Here’s the story behind one of Buick’s rarest muscle cars finally seeing daylight again.
A 1972 Dodge Challenger arrived during the weakest years Detroit’s muscle cars ever saw, topping out at 240 factory horsepower with no Hemi in sight. Car Craft’s revived build series just swapped in Mopar’s 807-horsepower Hellcrate Redeye, the same crate engine Dodge sells over the counter. The bigger challenge wasn’t the engine itself, but getting a car never designed for fuel injection to survive it.
A $900 wreck of a 2008 Mustang GT got turned into a head-turner for under $2,500 total, and viewers say the real story isn’t the build — it’s the car underneath it. The S197-generation GT’s 300-horsepower V8 and retro styling are still cheap today, but longtime owners and collector-car analysts both say that won’t last much longer.
A three-way design vote on a 1970 Plymouth ‘Cuda restomod just took a hard left turn: instead of a classic orange or period-correct blue scheme, the build team picked a modern quad-headlight front end nobody expected. Here’s why that call matters on a car with only 14 factory Hemi convertibles ever built, and where Project CudaCat heads next.
A 1986 Pontiac Firebird sat buried under decades of grime and mildew until one owner’s daughter quietly arranged to have it fully detailed as a surprise. The crew fought mold, oxidized paint, and years of decay to bring it back to life. What happened when her father finally saw it explains why this reveal has become one of the channel’s most-watched episodes.
A 1968 Pontiac GTO that had sat gutted since its rescue a year earlier got one shot at redemption: a fresh engine, brakes, wheels, cooling and fuel systems, or nothing. The Build Season crew gave themselves three days and a drive home to prove it could still run. Here’s how close the goat came to missing its own deadline.
A 1964 Pontiac LeMans got its final bodywork and a coat of Firemist Aquamarine — a color Cadillac kept to itself — inside a pole barn with no booth and no crew. Body shop veterans with 25 and 30 years in the trade turned up in the comments to say the DIY result was genuinely good enough. Here is the part of a restoration nobody films, and the one step that decides how the whole car ends up looking.
Mike’s dad drove this Pontiac GTO home from a dealership lot back in 1969, mid-way through a stint in the Navy. Decades later, Mike taught himself to restore the car alone — engine to upholstery — and renamed its paint color after his own late-night garage sessions. Here’s how one family kept a GTO’s story running for two generations.
This 1969 Pontiac Firebird sat forgotten for years, its factory 400 engine buried under rat nests and grime, until the Turnin Rust crew finally got it running — and the exhaust blew out a literal dust storm in the process. Built originally for strip use, the car earned its Dirty Bird nickname on the spot. Watch to see what years of neglect actually did to a genuine factory 400-powered Firebird, and how much of it is still worth saving.
When Dodge redesigned the Charger for 1968, the gamble paid off far bigger than the sales team expected — the new coke-bottle-bodied car outsold its struggling first-generation predecessor by a wide margin. On this episode of Counting Cars, Danny and his crew build a fully customized tribute to that redesign, while Ryan and Shannon separately restore a father-and-son’s 1959 Harley-Davidson Panhead Chopper. Watch to see both builds come together in the same shop.
