Well, probably not- a career of filming Ukrainian junkies performing lewd acts with surplus Soviet Navy dental gear requires more dedication to one's craft than I can muster. Anyway, during 1984 and 1985 I put together a few short Super 8 films, with my sleazeball friends as cast and plenty of beater vehicles. You've already seen the protagonist of The Green Death, a cautionary sex-education film warning America's youth of a brain-dissolving STD, siphoning gas for his '68 Cyclone, and now I've dug up a few outtakes from The Phone Police, a crypto-documentary showing the psychosurgical methods employed by lab-coated, Ford Granada-driving rent-a-cops employed by The Bell System. We've got the beater 1956 Chevrolet Bel Air owned by my friend Willy (seen here flying off the hood of his car) and the evil ex-rental-car 1979 Ford Granada that spent most of the 1980s as La Familia Martin's vehicular punching bag; I believe it had already been wrecked and repaired with junkyard parts on three occasions at the time of The Phone Police's shooting.

Last week, we saw this junked Mercury LN7, and one of its competitors from back in the day was located just a few rows away: this '84 Nissan Pulsar NX.

The Pulsar NX (sold in Europe as the Pulsar EXA) was a two-seater with a great deal of Sentra ancestry. This one managed to survive with just two seats and no cup holders through just about the entire rise and fall of the SUV, yet now it will be joining all those Clunkerized Explorers in the cold steel jaws of The Crusher.

Bad people, that's who doesn't love happy little Triumphs! You're not a bad person, are you? Of course not! Thing is, most of the affordable Triumph projects these days are Malaise Era TR7s and Spitfires with huge bumpers. Is it even possible to find a pre-Malaise Triumph project for cheap? Really cheap, that is. What's that sound? Why, it's the doors to Project Car Hell opening, and they don't squeak one bit… because they're lubed with the blood of Triumph owners!

After you saw James May turn a Triumph Herald into a sailboat, you probably thought something like "Whoa, I haven't seen a Triumph Herald in… well, ever!" They didn't sell particularly well in North America, and that's a damned shame. You see, the Herald combined simplicity with Italian styling and woefully underpowered nimble performance, at a time when Americans had to buy Datsun 411s for such features. That doesn't mean you can't find them for reasonable prices nowadays, provided you're willing to overlook a bit of the ol' iron oxide. We've found this '64 Herald convertible in Baltimore (go here if the ad disappears), and it's only 400 bucks! Sure, sure, you should could turn this staggeringly terrible basket case TLC-deprived project into an awesome 24 Hours Of LeMons car, but that's taking the easy way out! We say you ought to do an obsessive frame-off restoration, correct down to the original warm-beer-influenced Coventry chalk marks and OEM Lucas Electrics components. The seller doesn't go into any detail about the rust situation, but then he doesn't have to. But hey, it has a clear title!

The Herald really wasn't a proper sports car, with a one-main-bearing four-cylinder displacing 18 Whitworth cubic inches or some such (slight exaggeration) and all. You need more engine in your Triumph! You could go for a Stag- which we strongly, in fact overwhelmingly recommend- but for the purposes of this challenge we're going to stick with smaller Triumph offerings. The GT6 is a truly wretched fine machine, and certainly affordable if you look hard enough, but we really like the iconic TR6 when it comes time for a six-banger Triumph. But dang, have you seen what sellers are asking for the pretty and/or running TR6s? These are hard times we're in, and you need your shillings to feed the gas meter in your dismal, mildew-coated flat! That's what makes this '68 Triumph TR6 (go here if the ad disappears) so appealing. It ran when parked, and that phrase always means eternal torment an easy walk in the park! The seller isn't trying to do a hard sell here, freely admitting that the "CAR IS RUSTY & ROT BUT HAS MANY GOOD PARTS," and it's true that it's composed entirely of rust and fungus a little rough, but you couldn't possibley can solve those problems with a cubic yard of $100 bills little elbow grease in your pit full of boiling sulfur garage! Come on, it's only 500 bucks!

Yes, the X-11 is right up there with the Renault Fuego Turbo, the Lancia Scorpion, and the Humber Sceptre when it comes to 200-proof 24 Hours Of LeMons awesomeness: the "high-performance" version of what may well be the worst platform General Motors ever manufactured (cue the hate mail from enraged Pontiac Phoenix owners).



For '84, the Citation X-11 had functional cowl induction and 135 horses from its 2.8 liter V6, and it featured a better axle ratio and stiffer suspension than the base Citation. An X-11 should actually be pretty quick on the race track, if the performance of the closely related Cavalier wagon is any guide. You see, consumer-alienating stuff like 3/4" body panel gaps, overnight corrosion, window cranks that come off in your hand, etc., don't matter on a race car, so the X-11 will finally be in its element!

The last time we saw this team, things didn't go so well for their Corolla FX16. That car has been fixed by now, but the Schumacher Taxi Service will become Team Craptation for the 24 Hours Of LeMons New England race next month.

Equipped with active aerodynamic devices (toilet seats on the trunk lid) and the number 2, the Craptation will be out there waving the Chevrolet flag, right next to UDMan's '63 Corvair sedan. Do any other teams even have a shot at the Index Of Effluency? We'll see!

Here's what Craptation captain Jerry has to say about his team's race car:

The car: a daily driver last state inspected in 2006, this beast sat in a neighbor's front yard for sale for a few weeks. Each time I drove by, I wondered about it. it was so damned ugly no one would WANT it, especially not for street use. So I inquired, and it was all there—-V6, four speed, it started—-intermittently. I lowballed the guy with a $300 offer and he took it instantly. Guess I overpaid. Here's what it looked like then:
So we auotcrossed the car in November. On it's maidenm voyage, it was clear something was amiss with the suspension, but worse still, Rob, a Schumacher teammate, rode with and was upended when the passenger seat decided to break loose from the floor. Amid his laughter, all I could say to him after the run was "You broke my seat!"
The shock change and cutting of the springs helped a little , but it still has this incredible rear suspension setup.
The heater core came out with a BFH, but left this gigantic 18 inch hole in the firewall. Not to worry, we had a 1964 Rover door ready to give its life. So it was cut up and screwed in.
And the smog pump left the bay as well. It left a tube feeding into the exhaust which we quickly filled with a tree branch. Seemed to fit and it was free!
Now to solve why it's running so poorly. We pulled a plug wire and found wet plugs. hmmm. After some serious head scratching, we siphoned this out of the gas tank! In total we had over a gallon of water in there! ugh.
We raced the car again, and what a crowd gathered! This is a sexy beast! It still handles like crap, only now each time you unspring a side and then reload it, the spring makes a gawd awful BANG! Perfect for LeMons racing!
Theme. Why not run with the Craptation theme! We got number 2, and we are in process of adding the rolling portapottie features. The spare tire well makes an excellent reservoir for waste. Rob and I are demonstrating.
We still have work to do, on the beast. We've campaigned a number of cars in LeMons racing, but this was a new direction for us. We KNOW this car embodies the spirit of LeMons racing. A poor, orphaned American crapbox with no other possibilities of leading a useful life. We can't wait to bring it to Stafford.

Pontiac's bosses had taken the radical step of dropping the "J" from the J2000 name for 1983, and a year later they figured the Sunbird name might as well get slapped onto the end. After all, memories of the Vega/Monza-based H-body Sunbird were still fresh in 1984, and the marketers must have figured that so many potential car buyers had eaten so many dangerous drugs during the late 70s that they might hallucinate a sheen of reliability over their hazy recollections of the H-bodies. Laser sound effects! Coal-powered CGI graphics!

And calling the VG30DE-T the Plasma is pretty cool; apparently the name is an acronym for Powerful, Economic, Lightweight, Accurate, Silent, Mighty, Advanced.

This car has been through some punishing experiences, yet it's still being used to haul groceries and has yet to fall into the hands of a kid who will howl "Hey y'all, watch this!" as he disappears into a haze of tire smoke. You can tell from the rust around the front body damage that the fender-bender wasn't particularly recent, but it still gets the job done and the owner hasn't had to put bodywork real high on the priority list.


We've seen a couple of other AE86s on the island, including this '85 and this '86, but this is the first one in the series with SR5 badging (and no JDM emblems anywhere to be seen).
This has been a great neighborhood for DOTS sightings; we've seen the '78 Dodge Colt, '87 BMW M6, and- best of all- the very first car in the series was photographed about 20 feet from this Corolla's parking space. And hey, can you spot the '66 Datsun 411 in the photo above?

If you don't think the Renault 5 Turbo is one of the most awesome factory hot rods ever made, you need to reevaluate your automotive priorities ASAP! To build this rally monster, Renault ditched the front-wheel-drive setup normally found in the 5 and replaced it with a turbocharged engine mounted behind the driver and delivering totally unreasonable amounts of power to the rear wheels. The few hundred street-legal units sold for homologation purposes had 185 horsepower, and they sold for $22,500 in 1984. That's about $46,000 in 2009 dollars, so how much is a very nice 34,000-mile example worth today? Would you pay $39,500 for one?
[Princeton Lotus, thanks to MyDatsunIsInCali for the tip!]

While Chrysler's front-wheel-drive K cars were giving the company a new lease on life after near-failure and a government bailout at the tail end of the Malaise Era, The General wasn't doing quite as well with its X-Body platform. Sure, the X was front-wheel-drive and quite roomy for its exterior dimensions, but the performance was pretty grim and the build quality even worse. You could get a Citation, an Omega, a Phoenix, and a Skylark version of the X, with the Iron Duke four or the 2.8 V6.


These things are really, really rare on the street nowadays (I haven't seen a Phoenix for at least a decade, and even Citation sightings are noteworthy), so I was happy to find this daily-driven Skylark beating the odds.

It turns out that 65% of you believe that $76,000 is too much for an armored Mercedes-Benz S500, but it's really hard to find any basis for comparison for such an oddball machine. Not so with today's cars; we've got two very nice, low-mileage, T-top-equipped '84 300ZX Turbos, each priced within spittin' distance of the $30,000 mark. The first one (go here if the ad disappears) doesn't come with much description, but the odometer speaks loudly: 18,897 miles! $28,500 for that Nissan jewel. Then we've got this nearly identical car, which is being sold by the same folks who gave us the $25,000 Dodge Daytona Turbo Z. This one's got 27,129 miles on the clock and the price is $28,900, but you get way more info about the car in the description; in fact, we're a little disturbed by the very un-eBay-like correct spelling and grammar in the car's writeup- doesn't Best Of Show Automotive have any respect for eBay tradition? Thanks to Tomsk and Dolo54 for the tips!

The roof-mounted vacuum-powered skulls have been retrofitted with electrical innards and anatomically correct arms; when you pull the Metal Switch (a BMW 2002 hazard-light switch) on the dash, a PA speaker blasts Immortal, the skulls' red eyes flash, and the jaws snap open and closed.


We'll have a how-to on this project later on, but for now all you need to know is that Volvo 240 door-lock motors move the jaws, and a turn signal flasher hooked up to a set of three Bosch relays controls them. Sadly, it appears that the VDO designers who made these lock actuators never anticipated a duty cycle involving nonstop up-down-up-down operation for hours at a time, so the skulls have had some reliability issues.


The drivers of a Swedish car must be armed with Thor's Hammer, aka Mjöllnir, so I made some for the team out of rusty steel and spikes. A few junkyard trips netted a bunch of Volvo emblems, while various emblems provided many numeral 8s (BMW 318s, Mercedes-Benz 280s, and Volvo 850s were good sources). You don't want to step on one of these babies barefoot!


Add some post-Halloween clearance-sale monk costumes, and there's your Black Metal V8olvo uniform!


Your metal is weak! That's what the Swedish text down the sides of the car means.

I assume that these things are still pretty commonplace all over the continent, but maybe the Rust Monster's appetite for Japanese steel has been insatiable in the road-salty regions of the land. They're big, they're simple, and they've got the good ol' six-banger F engine called for by to hallowed Land Cruiser tradition.


How about a truck styling touch that isn't a super-macho slab of monster-truck chrome? For that matter, how about a Toyota that even has hokey-yet-cool styling touches of any sort? Come on Toyota, start by calling all your automatic transmissions Toyoglides and go from there!

[eBay Motors], thanks to DodgePolara500 for the tip!

Now that I'm looking for these cars (and don't worry, 5 Series fans, I'll get some of your cars too), I'm seeing them all over the island. This '84 has seen shinier days, but it still gets its owner to work every day.


The list price for one of these babies? $36,335, or $76,510 in 2008 dollars. For that, you got BMW's 181-horsepower six, leather, and an instant credit line with your local retailer of white powder.

Thanks to a whole bunch of you for the tip! [eBay Motors]

When you want to drive a car that was once owned by a famous actor, you can expect to pay big bucks, and when the car is a vintage Italian machine with suicide doors? Forget it! Hold on, though, because we work miracles here at Project Car Hell… and we can put you behind the wheel of this 1960 Lancia Appia (sorry, the ad got pulled from Craigslist, so we have to use a screenshot), which was once owned by Fabio! You think some of Mr. Bodice Ripper's charismatic glow will rub off on you from this car? Sure thing! Of course, before that can happen, you'll need to get it running. The seller doesn't mention the running condition (or lack thereof) in the description, but "needs restoration" is generally accepted as Craigslist-ese for "nothing works." Don't worry about finding parts for your new Lancia, however, because the seller claims "Car is complete and no missing parts." Easy!

Maybe Fabio is a little too wholesome for you, what with his romance-novel faux-bad-boy image and all, and you want your famous car to be something notorious. You ain't getting Bonnie and Clyde's Ford V8, but how about a car that figured as the centerpiece in a squalid B-list divorce nightmare, culminating in allegations of abduction and rape and- naturally- leading to the publication of a documentary, a book, and a reality TV show? That's what you get with the Star Crazy Volvo 244, which figured prominently in Pauley Perrette's legal battles with- we ain't making this up- Coyote Shivers. You'll need to go to this site to get Mr. Shivers' side of the story, or you could just watch his statement below:



It's pretty much a run-of-the-mill '84 Volvo 244, with no mention of running condition or anything else, but it's priced at just 400 bucks with no reserve. Are you thinking 24 Hours Of LeMons V8 Volvo? You should be!

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