Welcome to Project Car Hell, where you choose your eternity by selecting the project that's the coolest... and the most hellish! In yesterday's Alphabet Soup Edition Choose Your Eternity challenge, the TVR went all GBH on the NSU in the poll, sending us scurrying to the nearest W.A.S.T.E. mailbox to inform our friends in San Narciso that PCH Superpower Britain has once again triumphed over Germany. Today we're going to contemplate a pair of projects that will provide years of entertaining debate with your local Homeowners' Association, while remaining totally ridiculous practical.
Motorhomes are great, as we've seen before, and when you own one you'll be able to live in comfort as you travel to such events as the Superfund Site Cook-Off™ and the Artillery-R-Us Unexploded Munitions Scavenger Hunt™. But why drive some boring ol' Winnebago or haul a jackknifey trailer, listening to the gurgling sound of your cash being swilled by that great big engine's insatiable thirst? What you need is a camper with vintage style and a modern fuel-efficient powerplant- something along the lines of this '40 Ford with integrated Bolar trailer and Pontiac 4-cylinder engine! Yes, that's a front-wheel-drive Pontiac engine/transaxle, which we're assuming came out of an early-80s Phoenix, and that setup gives this travelin' machine a claimed 27 miles per gallon! Sure, you might have a tough time climbing up hills or even driving into the wind, given that the first iterations of the ol' Iron Duke put out 86 horsepower, but this vehicle sleeps four and boasts a full kitchen. The bodywork looks to have been performed with a minimum of duct tape and/or pop rivets, so perhaps there will be no nasty surprises as you prepare to fix the paint job. The description is a bit vague about the running condition, especially the part about the "friend that has a pretty low mileage engine in a car 2 years newer that has full injection with all the extras he stored this for me so when i came back from china i was going to fix it," but you'll sort that out after the purchase. Thanks to 42FordTrucks for the tip!
A custom motorhome would be fun, but what if you need something that will really turn heads at Spirochete Spiro's Strip Club? The Spirochete dancers probably won't want to climb into that '40, no matter how many Hawaiian Punch-and-Everclear Sno-Cones you buy for them. No, you need a limo for that, and we don't mean your everyday boring Town Car. We mean a limo more like this stretched 1980 VW Rabbit! This is no backyard conversion; the seller swears it was"Professionally stretched when new," and some of the rusty body panels have been replaced. A metal shop made the floors, and a "roof panel from an 84 Jetta GLI welded in with a sunroof" is more or less firmly affixed on top. There's no fuel tank and thus no way to drive it, but the seller states "It did run and drive great prior," though worrywarts might wring their hands over the lack of any mention of how long it's been since it ran. With an automatic transmission, it might be on the pokey side, but limos aren't about going fast! Thanks to YotaLoLux for the tip.