Project Car Hell: Mustang Or Camaro?

In an agonizingly close race, the Rover SD1 beat the Rolls-Royce Silver Shadow in yesterday's Choose Your Eternity poll, and it was telling that our British readers all seemed to fear/love the British Leyland product the most. Now we move on to an important question: Can you believe it's been since August that we've had a matchup of the two most recycled Detroit muscle archetypes ever, and that was a couple of hundred-buck 80s beaters? Today we're going to go back to the source of all things Camaro and Mustang, with a pair of cars from the makes' heydays: the 1960s! So put on "(Sittin' On The) Dock Of The Bay" for the 800,000th time, pretend the 60s in America weren't a nightmare of burning cities and Southeast Asian quagmires, and get ready for Mustang/Camaro Hell!

Now, since you can pretty much buy everything you need to build a '65 Mustang from scratch these days, thanks to a booming aftermarket catering to lovers of the little Falcon sibling, the only way to make a Mustang project hellish enough is to get one that's just on the borderline between "hopeless basket case" and "needs restoration." That way you'll be convinced that it's possible to get the project done, rather than just going out and buying a nicely restored '65 for half the total money cost (and one-thousandth the pain) of your project. So here we go- this 1965 Mustang has it all! It's got the nearly unreadable CAPS LOCK style so beloved by car sellers, it's got rust so bad that some body parts simply disappeared during blasting, it's got a confusing set of photos that may or may not show before-and-after versions of the same car, and- most important of all- there's a "HUGE BONUS INCLUDED!!!" You need to slog your way through endless headache-inducing ALLCAPS (in black, blue, and red font) before you find out that the bonus is... a rebuilt 302 that was put together a couple years ago and never started. But still... this car would be lots of fun with a nice paint job, a Paxton-ized 351W, and a suspension a few generations newer than the stagecoach rig it has now.

But let's say you're a Camaro person, someone who wouldn't be caught dead in a goddamn Mustang! Sure, if you'd just landed from another planet you might think they were pretty similar vehicles- leaf-spring rears, pushrod V8s, cool-looking styling touches- but so what? That's why I've searched high and low for a Camaro that somehow stands astride that possible/impossible project-car line in the same way as the Mustang... and this '67 seems to do just that. Hey, it's the first year of the Camaro! All those 140-horse '79 Z28s and V6-powered '85s can look to this car as their great-grandpappy! This seller eschews the ALLCAPS routine in favor the e.e. cummings no-caps style, so it's easier to extract useful information than it was with the Mustang. Information such as the fact that this is a 4-speed car, which is a big plus. But then there's a few bad-news items: the seller doesn't know anything about the engine, other than its V8-ness, and there's some question about the body (other than the massive systemic rust, there's the worrying statement "its a complete nose that was pulled from another car and its just bolted on with a few bolts"). Naturally, there's no paperwork on the car, but at least the frame rails are good! OK, so it's pretty rough... but you'll have several hundred engine types to choose from when it comes time to powering your Camaro project, because it's a Chevy! Imagine this car with the body miraculously fixed and a thousand-horse 292 six-banger under the hood. You know it's possible!

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