1977 El Camino Project Car

Brent, you have found us another project car here. What's the story morning glory? What do you got? What a project it is. It's a 1977 Chevy El Camino. And apparently this fourth generation El Camino is not a very popular model. Very hard to find parts for. But we're gonna talk about what you can do. We got solutions for that. It kind of came in to being... I wasn't really looking for a '77 Chevy El Camino. A guy about a mile and half down the road was at the parts store with it. And I said, "Hey, that's kind of cool, what are you gonna do with that?" And he said, "Nothing, I'm gonna sell it to you". There you go. So, I wound up with a 1977 Chevy El Camino. After that, we started looking for parts for it because mechanically it's in very good shape. Runs and drives really good. But the body is in really bad shape. So I think there's a great lesson out of this. We've talked previously about finding a car for which you can readily find parts. Yes. In this case, you're diverging a little bit from that. We backed in to it. Yeah. But it's because of the heritage of the car for this particular fellow you got it from. You wanna do the upgrades on it. Right. So, we're gonna provide the lessons on how to work around the fact that you can't readily find... And body parts to be clear. Body parts. Mechanically you can find them. I mean it's a Chevy 350. You can find anything you need for the engine. The running gears pretty common for all these late 70s Chevys. Mechanically you can find just about anything you need. But body wise- It's gonna take little creativeness. You have to do some digging. Now speaking of engine work, what's that shiny thing in your hands, man? Well, like I said, mechanically it was in good shape. But it needed valve cover gaskets. Okay, the valve cover gasket. The oil's leaking out of the valve cover gasket. Is that a problem? Well, it smells a little bit funny. But the best way to make an engine look like it runs better and to look like it has more horsepower. Is to put a little chrome on it. So, since we're gonna take the valve covers off to put new valve cover gaskets on. We're gonna dress it up a little bit. We're gonna put the chrome valve covers and the chrome air cleaner on it. And then we'll talk about pressure washing the engine compartment and stuff. Clean it up. So, we're gonna have the opportunity on this El Camino. Little bit of engine work but realistically not much. But some great creative work on the body now. In addition to the El Camino for this we've got a '56 Chevy we're gonna work on. The '56 Chevy 150 is back. We're gonna do some upgrades to that. Here again, that's a driver. It's a restomod. By definition, it's basically taking the silhouette, the classic silhouette of the 1956 Chevy and putting modern technology in to it. So we can make it just a better driver. Yeah. Yeah, some cool upgrades to that. All right. Should we get to work and quit jabbering? I think we should. Let's make it happen.