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Pop the hood on this factory-black 1963 Plymouth Sport Fury and you’ll find the engine nobody brags about at car shows, and it might be the smarter choice. While everyone chases the 383 Golden Commando, this convertible went a quieter direction entirely. Read on to find out why the less famous engine might actually be the one to own.
When Kim Walker towed two decades-forgotten Corvettes into the 2017 Corvettes at Carlisle show, he figured they’d be an afterthought next to a building full of million-dollar L88s. Instead, these two overgrown Pennsylvania survivors — one still wearing the vegetation that had grown on it for years — became one of the show’s most talked-about attractions. Read on to find out how a barn find beats a restoration, and why Walker’s wife spent four days watering a car.
Only about 70 of the 503 Dodge Charger Daytonas built for 1969 left the factory with a 426 Hemi, and Tom Lembeck’s car pairs that rare engine with an even rarer factory color, F6 Spring Green Metallic. Built purely to win NASCAR’s aero wars, the Daytona’s 18-inch nosecone and towering wing still look radical decades later. Read on to find out why a paint code can matter almost as much as an engine code.
Plymouth built the 1970 Superbird specifically to win Richard Petty back from Ford, and only 135 of the 1,920 cars built that year got the 426 Hemi under that towering nosecone. This particular car belongs to Mike Fitzgerald, who bought it in 1972 and still gets emotional describing its restoration. Read on to find out what it took to bring one of the rarest aero cars back to factory-original condition.
This 1970 Dodge Challenger arrived at the shop rusted through, rotted out, and barely holding itself together, which is exactly the kind of car Detroit Muscle lives for. Nicknamed Project Ultra Violet, it would need a new roof, a new trunk pan, and an entirely different chassis before it could become anything resembling a driver. Nearly twelve million people have watched what happened next, and the comments reveal this build means something far more personal to longtime fans than horsepower alone.
A Montana family has owned this 1969 Pontiac GTO Judge since it rolled off the lot, and five decades of I-15 road trips and Carroll College tailgates later, it’s still driven rather than trailered. Pontiac built only 6,833 Judges for the model year, split between 6,725 hardtops and 108 rare convertibles, powered by either the 366-horsepower Ram Air III or the quicker 370-horsepower Ram Air IV. This is what real, documented one-owner provenance looks like on a genuine muscle car survivor.
Wearing factory Sandalwood paint and a 426 Max Wedge under the hood, this 1964 Plymouth Fury represents the final, sharpest version of Chrysler’s wedge-head big block before the 426 Hemi took over for good. With only a few hundred Max Wedge cars built across the whole B-body lineup that year, and a four-speed stick rarer still, every surviving example gets its paint code checked twice.
This Petty Blue 1970 Plymouth Superbird carries a documented history that few muscle cars can match — matching-numbers drivetrain, original broadcast sheets, and a rarity rating that puts it ahead of plenty of Hemi cars. Read on to see why paperwork, not just horsepower, makes this survivor special.
Chevrolet built just 201 examples of the 1965 Chevelle Z16, handing a tiny group of buyers a genuine big-block 396 a full year before the option became widely available. One convertible was reportedly built for a GM executive and is believed destroyed; only about 75 of the original run are accounted for today. Read on to find out what made this the rarest Chevelle Chevrolet ever built.
Carroll Shelby’s 1965 GT350 was a 306-horsepower race car with a license plate, and it earned three straight SCCA B-Production championships to prove it. Fifty years later Ford revived the name on a Mustang with a high-revving flat-plane V8, a manual transmission, and a suspension tuned for the track. Parked side by side, the two cars look nothing alike, but they share one uncompromising mission. Read on to find out whether the new car truly earns the badge.
A rotted-out 1970 Dodge Challenger becomes Project Ultra Violet in this POWERNATION Detroit Muscle build. The crew brings in chassis builder Jeff Schwartz for a full-frame conversion, grafts in a low-deck aluminum Hemi and a Tremec six-speed, and finishes it off with metallic purple paint and graphics from builder Chris Ryan. Watch to see how a shell most shops would have scrapped becomes a genuinely modern resto-mod.
Restoration shop owner Luciano ‘Lucky’ Lacerda built this 1961 Cadillac Series 62 Convertible specifically to showcase his own shop’s work at SEMA, finishing it in a deep green that stands out even at a packed Scottsdale cars-and-coffee. It’s a deliberate choice in a SEMA field dominated by trucks and muscle cars. Watch to see what a restoration shop owner picks when the whole point is to prove what he can do.
This 1951 Oldsmobile 98 still runs the original 303 cubic inch Rocket V8 that helped ignite Detroit’s horsepower war, and it still wears its factory interior after all these decades. Surviving this honest is rare for a car this old. Here’s why the Rocket name mattered, and why finding one still original is worth stopping for.
A factory mix-up put an SS badge on this 1969 Chevrolet Chevelle Malibu convertible — and when it was restored decades later, the family that had owned it since new put the mistake right back on, badge and all. The story was even verified and published in the Grand Rapids Press back in 1996. Watch to find out why a factory error became part of the car’s identity instead of something to correct.
Pitted, dented stainless trim is one of the first things restorers toss in favor of reproduction pieces, and one of the first things veterans wish they had saved when the repro molding refuses to follow a body line. Original stainless can be brought back to a mirror finish with hammers, dollies, files, a wet-sanding progression from coarse to ultra-fine grit, and careful buffing, but the process rewards patience and punishes shortcuts. This guide walks through each stage and the mistakes that ruin good trim. Read on to find out what saving the original actually takes.