Hemmings Muscle Machines July 2017

 Nothing gets a project moving like a goal and a deadline, a sentiment that certainly applies to old-car efforts. In an all-too-familiar set of excuses, thanks to life’s obligations, I’ve left the ’69 Camaro I’ve owned since my teen years languishing in my garage since moving it there after we bought our house a couple years ago. In terms of security and proximity, it’s probably the best place that car has lived in many years, and it’s probably lulled me into paying less attention to it than I should. “ All those years I’d spent hoarding bits and pieces of cars because ‘I might need this someday’ might finally be poised to pay dividends ”. But then came a text from an old friend proposing a reunion of our group…

DEMON: UNCAGED! Used to be you had to know someone to get a Super Stock special — big-cube engine, no warranty, spartan interior, and parts in the trunk to make it go faster at the local drag strip. Not anymore. Now you just need to visit your Dodge dealer. Dodge’s long-rumored Challenger SRT Demon finally broke cover at the New York International Auto Show this past April. Rated at 840 emissions-legal, five-year/60,000-mile-warranty-backed horsepower, with a brutal 770 pound-feet of torque to shove you off the line, a one-second 0-30 time, a 2.3-second 0-60, and a quarter-mile time deep in the 9s at 140 mph. It lifts the front wheels off the ground at launch. Gadzooks. The already-mad 707-hp, 6.2-liter Hellcat supercharged V-8 was treated to a suite of upgrades: a…

TWO OF THE OLDEST UNRESTORED MUSTANGS ANCHOR MUSEUM’S NEW PONY CAR EXHIBIT Both were built to entice the public into buying a Ford Mustang. Both have gone 50-plus years without a restoration. And both the 1963 Mustang II concept and one of the earliest production Mustangs will share the spotlight in America on Wheels’ upcoming pony car exhibition in Allentown, Pennsylvania. The Tropical Turquoise convertible seen here has been owned since new by Ron Hermann, who remembers seeing the Mustang before its official on-sale date at Philadelphia’s Barr Ford thanks to his father’s connections there. A $100 on-the-spot deposit earned him the right to buy the V-8 and automatic-equipped convertible, but he had to wait at least another month while it toured eastern Pennsylvania Ford dealerships before he could take…

STROKER: THE ARTISTIC WORKS OF TOM MEDLEY Gary Medley • www.strokerbymedley.com • $65.00 plus S&H Wally Parks, Karl and Veda Orr, Alex Xydias, Dean Batchelor, Ak Miller, Eddie “Bud” Meyer, “Multy” Aldrich, Vic Edelbrock, and… Stroker McGurk? Yep. That last one belongs on any list of hot rodding’s greats, too. As does his maker, Tom Medley. Stroker is a cartoon car guy, a hand-drawn wrench-turning everyman, who made his first public appearance in Hot Rod magazine in March 1948. Medley had been hired by Robert Petersen after Petersen saw one of his drawings pinned to a bulletin board in Blair’s Speed Shop on Arroyo Parkway in Pasadena, California. In the era when hot rodding still had the stigma of being the activity of raucous and reckless hoodlums, Medley created…

As Mercury’s Cougar burst onto the pony car scene in the fall of 1966, the genre was exploding into a full-blown market segment, with hundreds of thousands of sales at stake. Cougar was accompanied by fellow 1967 newcomers Chevrolet Camaro and Pontiac Firebird, while redesigns for Ford’s Mustang and Plymouth’s Barracuda promised to make a big splash, as well. The result was a pony car market that now had something for almost any buyer. You want sporty? Got it. Economical? Got that, too. How about muscle? Check. And luxury? Yes, covered as well. Regardless of brand, history shows that each of these cars was a success story in its own right — popular then, and revered now. But rather than revisit the entire field of ’67s over the next few…

SPECIFICATIONS PRICE Price as profiled . . . . . . . . N/A: Pre-production model ENGINE Type . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Ford FE-series OHV V-8; cast-iron block and cylinder heads Cylinder heads . . . . . . . . . Ford FE “390 GT” cast-iron; 2.022/1.55-inch valves Displacement . . . . . . . . . . 390 cubic inches Bore x stroke . . . . . . . . . . . 4.05 x 3.78 inches Compression ratio . . . . . . . 10.5:1 Horsepower @ rpm . . . . . . 320 @ 4,800 Torque @ rpm . . . . . . . . . .…