Muscle Car Of The Week 1967 Pontiac GTO Restoration and Unveiling V8TV

when this

1967

Pontiac GTO arrived at V8 speed and at the Resto shop it really looked like it had been pulled out of a swamp, I mean it was rusty and creaky, it had patina and it wasn't the good kind, it was in various colors, the interior was destroyed. The vinyl top was smoked, it didn't work, it was a mess, but it's a great car and the owner has had it for a long time, so this car has a lot of sentimental value, so we're very happy. the opportunity and challenge to bring this cool 67 GTO back on the road overseas, this car was Tyro Blue, a beautiful blue color with a black vinyl top bucket seat interior, the Pontiac 400 V8 is still under the hood, along with a turbo 400 automatic transmission.

It's the first year of the turbo 400 and it's a factory-installed air-conditioned car, so we were going to bring it back to its day one look with some performance mods added for better capability. of conduction. The customer had the engine rebuilt in the late 80's. I don't think I really drove it since then, the engine looked horrible and we spent a little time and were actually able to get it running which was great, it didn't run very well, but at least we did it. I'm pretty convinced we had a solid engine to start with in all of our complete

restoration

s.

The first thing we do is document everything with photographs, try to record what the car looked like when it arrived, and then we take a bunch of measurements to see how things fit together. how the doors fit together and the bumpers and the gaps and all that kind of stuff and then we take it apart and as we take it apart we catalog all the parts and start making decisions about what's going to be replaced, what's going to be restored, we take the bodywork and We blew it up in the media once we got the car back from the Blaster and we could really see what was going on.

We put the freshly disassembled chassis into our metal shop and we are pleasantly surprised by the chassis because it looked pretty bad when it arrived. but most of that rust was simply very light surface scale and disappeared during the media explosion. There were some areas that needed to be fixed, like on a lot of these General Motors body platform cars, they have a body mount that holds the body to the frame and those body mounting holes housed some rubber bushings that were holding water over the years and those body mounts were rusting and wearing out, so we made some new body mounts and did a couple of small repairs to the frame, so we're cleaning up the frame, we've got all the patches done, which We sent it back to the blaster for one last quick blast, now we are cleaning it up, getting ready to rust it and we will spray it with two coats of epoxy and two coats of Imran.

This nice protective layer before it is reassembled overseas. Our GTO frame has been sandblasted and painted with a satin black Imran industrial finish and we are starting to put it back together. We decided to use a BMR suspension tubular suspension system. This kit has front upper and lower tubular control arms, high performance coil springs, Bilstein shocks, a larger diameter front sway bar, urethane bushings that can be greased, its rear suspension also has those tubular control arms and the bar. rear stabilizer we rebuilt the gears in the rear. We finished before putting everything together and putting new seals and bearings in everything strange, we got a classic disc brake kit and it's pretty simple to install the parts with bolts to where the backing plate was.

It actually uses a front caliper, which is quite nice. Because the Ford caliper actually has a better e-braking situation than many of the GM rear disc calipers that have come out so far, it goes quite well, so this car will handle better and stop better with too. the disc brakes again. The goal was to build a cruiser, you know, a car that looked good, that was still comfortable to drive, we didn't want to put too much suspension on it, so to speak, and overdo it, this owner wasn't going to race this car. on an autocross course or something, I just wanted it to feel a little more modern than it did in '67.

The body became a bigger project than we thought and sometimes that happens again, the mission was to make what it seemed like on the first day. new, so we knew it was going to require some work. Basically, you know, we got an Opgi catalog and we just wrote yes on the cover and sent it off and then a truck full of sheet metal showed up and we ended up replacing it. trunk upper filler panel both side panels main cabin floor rear wheel houses entire trunk floor rear panel top of dash firewall we fixed some patches on the doors and fenders but reused the hood so it would be fresh There are some challenges with doing so much metal work: you run the risk of the whole structure moving and losing its shape if you cut it completely, so the first thing we like to do is fix the body on a jig, we have a table of chassis and then we support the body by welding braces in every place we can and then we measure everything repeatedly and record those measurements because you don't want to cut something out only to find out later that the new piece is not in the right place and then the glass is not. adjust it or trim it, or you know, the list goes on and on, we knew we were going to keep the air conditioning, but we were going to change it to an old air system, so the original General Motors firewall had a big hole, the Vintage system Air no.

We don't need that big hole anymore, so instead of making a small block of plate, we made a completely new firewall and used our Mittler bead roller to put an interesting pattern on it, so that when you open the hood you get something. With a little styling, replacing the floors and trunk floors on a car like this is a pretty big job, especially if you use the one-piece floor like we like to use because you have to open the bottom of the car. enough to accept the new floor panel but still hold it in place. Did I mention we also replaced the rocker panels on this car, so all the sheet metal on the underside of the car has been replaced and you have to follow this step methodically. step by step and panel by panel and on things that have multiple panels that will interact with each other, like the trunk, the tail, panoramic, the deck lid, the quarter panels, the wheelhouses, you want to put them in place and, Often, you have to know how to work them to make them fit a little.

We always like to screw everything together before welding it so we can fit all the adjacent panels and make sure the details are correct, like the trunk weather stripping channel, you know if you get it wrong the trunk is going to leak, we like that too Test the fit of the moldings around the windows. These GTOs have that buttress style treatment on both sides of the rear window which of course rusts on all, especially if it had a vinyl top and The new side panels of course have that feature, but if you put them together and something isn't exactly right, the window trim and glass may not even fit, so there is a lot of checking along the way and this is where we adjust the gaps correctly. so the metal work was done for the most part, but we wanted to make sure that all the door spaces were symmetrical, consistent, nice and tight, but had enough room that the panels could be opened and closed without you know , rubbing up against each other after a long process of replacing body panels, we put our GTO back on a spit and again scraped the entire car, scraped all those new panels and sprayed them with an epoxy primer so that later The entire bodywork will be clean.

It was sealed and then from there the bottom was painted with that Imran black once again to have a nice satin black look. When the chassis was rollable, we then mounted the body back onto the chassis and then installed all the sheet metal, fenders and doors. the hood, rear decklid, GTOs are interesting, the fit of the hood has a relationship to the upper hood screen and the front fenders, hood and lower rocker panels, there are a lot of straight lines there and if they don't fit well , it's obvious, so we spent some time getting all of that to fit properly while all this was going on, we took a look at the engine, it's the original Pontiac 400 V8, we basically took the engine apart, checked the bearing clearances, looked inside the the cylinders, we look at the cylinder.

The heads determined it was in pretty good shape, it was a little dirty and ugly. We took a few minutes to polish the valves with a little compound just to clean those surfaces and then we took the block off, cleaned it all up, and ran it. through the painting process and I sprayed it with the original Pontiac light blue spray or whatever the color is called, then the car went through the body phase and even though it is a new sheet metal it still needs straightening, you will find hammer marks in the assembly. process and little things and things that you know are not as smooth as glass, so our body team spent a lot of time working with body filler block, primer block sanding, poly block sanding, sanding and on At this point we also put all the decorations on the car.

The edge of the window, even the letters GTO, so we knew everything was going to fit during final assembly, is blocked and sanded with a finer and finer grid so that soon all the panels will be laser straight and provide that beautiful straight Reflection of the horizon that everyone wants, especially in a car with Big Slab sides like this, while the car was in the body shop, our interior shop got to work removing the original seats and taking a look at the springs. the seats and the internal parts of these seats, but I always like the media to blow up the seat frames, fix any springs that are broken, cut them off or re-weld them, that happens a lot.

You don't want to put a familiar seat in new upholstery and then when you sit down, it collapses again. As I usually did, we painted all those seat frames and then Jay at our interior shop went ahead and put new covers on them and filled them with the appropriate amount of seed foam. Sometimes you see restored cars that are overloaded and so are you. When you're sitting, you're going too high in the seat, so it's a bit of a dance to get the feel right because the materials they used in '67 aren't really available today, they're just different.

It evolved so you had to pay attention that the next step in the painting process was to paint the door jambs and areas under the hood and this is where we finally started to see some color; We've been painting a lot of epoxy and black on the dash and the interior and the underside and all that, but, uh, Jeff, our painter, put together a Tyrolean blue mix and photographed some of the areas that are easier to get to with the car disassembled, so again, the door jambs, the rear, the inside of the trunk area and I will tell you the color looked incredible.

I love this color, it has a high level of metallic, it's a nice beautiful blue now, to minimize further risk we set the engine in place and did some of the dash wiring and everything. without the front sheet metal we like to do that if we know we're painting the whole car and this way we can do the plumbing, do the brakes, get everything working and we won't have to be leaning over freshly painted fenders. You know, if we had put this engine in after painting the car on the outside it makes sense and then we topped it off with a Phi Tech fuel injection unit that will provide a little more reliability in driving this car if you want a modern one. car, that was our goal, it's one of those systems where as you drive it, it's refined and then you put the sheet metal back on and apply primer, so now we had color in the jam primer on outside and we were able to turn it on.

We were very happy to see how well the Pontiac 400 performed from the beginning, so it was finally time to take this car to the paint booth, which is always a super exciting moment because when you put color on a car it is a very dramatic visual change moment, right, and especially when it goes from a boring gray primer to a beautiful color like this Tyro blue, our painter Jeff brought the car to Mass, cleaned it all up, cleaned it up and started spraying the paint system of two stages it's a base coat and a foreign foreign foreign clear coat after the color has been applied of course go back to the paint booth and spray some clear we put a bunch of coats of clear on this one because We knew we wanted a car finish.exhibition. because for lack of a better term, thanks, I'm Jeff, I did a wonderful job getting the metallic pattern nice and uniform and consistent, the color turned out beautiful after the final paint, it was time to put some of the details back in on the insignia.

We grilled the new bumpers, all those jewelry pieces we got from opgi to make it look nice, then we installed the vinyl top. I grew up not liking them because they always retained moisture and rusted, but when a vinyl top is new and crisp against the new paint on a car that is not rusty, I think they look amazing, I think this one turned out tremendous. I reinstalled the door panels, it sounds good inside the car. I put in a new carpet. We finish the board. We put in some Dakota Digital meters. We put in a custom car.

The audio system added power windows, put on a new headliner, and before you knew it the car was practically finished, but one of the best parts of this project was being able to present it to the owner and his family at the

muscle

car. Corvette National show in Chicago now, to me, the Muscle Car Corbett Nationals is the best Muscle Car show in the world. It's an indoor show that happens in November in the Chicago area every year and is packed with super super high-end invitational exhibits. Rare

muscle

cars coming from all over the country, even different countries, to be on display, it's something special, sure, okay, y'all.

I'm here with Janet and Jerry Hilsenback, who just finished a

restoration

of their

1967

GTO, and we're here at the musclecar at the Corvette Nationals in Rosemont Illinois to introduce it, gentlemen, without further ado, how about the V8 shop team Speed ​​​​​​and Resto presented the car to the owners and their family? Let's take a look. The team did a tremendous job restoring this car. better than the New and Jerry showroom, what I'd like to do now is hand you the keys to your new GTO, take it off and go for a spin, the crews and the tigers.

The GTO Club was in attendance and presented the owner with an honorary membership to their GTO Club, but perhaps the highlight was the incredible score the car received after being judged in the street modified class. The car scored 997 out of 1000 possible points. Every car here is a top tier winner and yours is one of them now sees multiple generations enjoying the car and sees the team's hard work recognized at this national event. Thank you. It's hard not to like the car. It handled beautifully. It sounded great. It had good power. He went around. It stops. Starts.

Comfortable but looks like dynamite, it just looks great and we are all very lucky that the family has allowed us to return this car to them. It was an honor to work with such nice people and such a cool car, so if you have a family heirloom or a project like this that you would like to see return from something that looked like a creature from the Black Lagoon to a spectacular one. This car is an example that anything can happen. You know, anything you drag out of a lake can happen. be a show winner with proper care, we will be happy to help you, you can contact us at v8speedshop.com while you are there, take a look at the photo gallery, we have thousands of images detailing every step of the restoration and You can see firsthand how Swamp Thing became a beauty queen.