Musclepalooza X afterhours…

Bill Rose is a patient man. The New Jersey resident – who took home Best Paint honors with his ‘68 Chevelle from Musclepalooza VI a few years back – has been waiting for us to get down to his area to photograph the car for an upcoming issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines. So what did he do between then and this past weekend? He finished the restoration of his 1969 El Camino. With a factory L78 under the hood, we just had to grab it while in town.

The El Camino – way in the background – was used by a contractor for many years, and by Bill’s brief account, “Should have been crushed.” More details will be unveiled in an upcoming issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines.

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Stolen car alert: COPO Camaro

Longtime Hemmings Muscle Machines readers will recall the name of Pete Simpson, the Canadian COPO Chevy guy who owns the COPO LT1 Nova from the May 2005 issue and the orange 1969 COPO Camaro from the March 2004 issue. Pete also races another ‘69 COPO Camaro, which last Thursday night was stolen from a restaurant parking lot near Toronto, along with the trailer it rode in and the Chevrolet 2500 that towed it. The trailer showed up the next morning, but the truck and the Camaro remain missing. If anybody spots the car or truck, or has any leads, let us know and we’ll pass them on.

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HMX – say hello to my little axles

So now that the HMX is on the road, the next big thing I want to accomplish with it is a rear suspension rebuild and axle swap. After scraping away a couple decades’ worth of grease, I discovered the Model 15 axle currently under the car, from a 1982 Spirit GT, is an L-code, which means it’s an open rear with a 2.35:1 gear ratio. Yeah, that’s not a typo. One big reason cars of the early ’80s got such a bad rap was the astronomically high rear-axle ratios, implemented as a band-aid to increase fuel mileage.

While I can dream all day long of bolting in a Twin-Grip Model 20 with mid-3 gears, I’m not holding my breath for one of those. Instead, as always, I’m working with what I got, and what I got is a Model 15 axle out of a ‘79 AMX six-cylinder. The K code stamped into the axle indicates a 2.53 gear ratio. (If this axle had come from a California car, it would have had a 3.08 ratio; high-altitude AMXs got a 2.73 ratio. Instead, I got a lowly 49-stater axle.)

So I’ll clean up this K-code axle, along with an AMX-only four-leaf rear suspension. Then after that hope that someday I’ll come across the axle of my dreams.

UPDATE (29.June 2009): Carl Van Deusen called just after he read this post. Carl, btw, is the owner of the 401-powered Gremlin we spotted at Musclepalooza VI. Carl let me know that I shouldn’t worry too much about gear ratios: He was running 14s in the Grem with 2.73 gears.

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