It's been over a year now, 13 months to be precise, that our '76 Camaro project car has been out of circulation. I know a lot of you are second-gen fans, and it's killing you to wait for the updates. Well here goes. The g/28 has been at Johnson's Hot Rod Shop, which is in Gadsden , AL. Alan Johnson is one of the country's top street rod and hot rod builders. You may remember him as the guy who built Bob Johnson's G-Force '71 'Cuda and won Street Machine Of The Year with it. Alan had been ribbing me for almost a year to paint my car. You'd think I would jump at the opportunity to get it in his shop, but my fear was always that once it got painted by him, it would be too nice to drive. I like real drivers, so it wasn't easy to say "yes," but I finally gave in. Over the last year, I've been ordering parts from Classic Industries, and having them sent to Alan's. I was surprised to find out how much stuff Classic makes for the "disco era" Camaros. Turns out, a lot of the stuff is the same as the more desirable '70 - '73 Camaros. When you look at g/28 now, practically everything on it is new. And yeah, it's almost too nice to drive, but drive it I will. The idea was for Alan to have the car finished in time for the 2007 SEMA show, and he didn't disappoint. When I finally saw it for the first time in Las Vegas, I was shocked at how nice it looked. Never did I imagine in my wildest dreams that it would look this good. And just in case you're wondering, the paint isn't the original Firethorn, it's garnet red, taken off an '83 to '86 Jeep. The SS stripes are a matte finish bronze mist metallic, which is a recent Chevy truck color. We plan on running a huge Body & Paint issue in April, and you'll get to see the entire transformation process then. (Alan took some really detailed photos over the course of a year). After SEMA, I drove it back from Vegas to the LA area. This thing runs as good as it looks, pulling down 17 mpg at 90 mph. The best part was driving back in a huge caravan with major recording artist, Kenny Wayne Shepherd. He had his Duster displayed at the Mopar booth, and we just hammered down the road, stopping for food and gas occasionally. You'll notice that the Camaro's front bumper looks strangely good for its vintage. That's because Alan did a bunch of work to tighten up the bumper. He narrowed and shortened the bumper, pulled the rubber strip, filled the holes, smoothed it, then shot it body color. The result is a stock-looking bumper that looks way better than the original one. One of the sidebars for the story will probably be "How to Make A Disco Bumper look Cool." Who knows, maybe we'll do a whole story on it. Another thing we did was swap the old 383 stroker for the 350 Vortec we built in the November 2006 issue. You might remember--it was called Budget Sledgehammer, and made 447 hp on pump gas with inexpensive iron EQ cylinder heads. This engine cost only $3,500 to build, and we finally got it in the car, and running good. Maybe later, we'll put a better exhaust on it and do some dyno tuning. The single 3-inch exhaust and catalytic converter are really choking it down with back-pressure. There's an easy 20 hp to be had here. Check back later, and I'll post an update!
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