Welcome back to the Hell Garage, where you choose to spend eternity chained to your dream project. We got all green last week, with a pair of vintage electric-car projects, and all of that efficiency and compromise in the name of energy conservation made us feel as if we were trapped in Jimmy Carter's living room, circa 1979, with the thermostat set at 68 degrees.
The Hell Garage Demons spent all week clamoring for a gasoline-gulping, conspicuous-consumption Project Car Hell this time, and it's never a good idea to ignore their "suggestions." So, let's channel Fat Elvis and the End-Game Rat Pack, put ourselves in a Las Vegas mind-set, and start shopping for coachbuilt, über-luxury blingmobiles!
This car looks pretty clean at first glance, so why is it priced at 75 percent less than most other Zimmers out there?
There's sort of an unholy trinity when it comes to these machines: the Excalibur, the Johnson Phantom and the Zimmer Golden Spirit. We could go all Japanese and bring the Mitsuoka La Seyde into the mix, but we'll save the Japanese Luxo-Bling cars for another episode.
All three have hectares of chromium, all three boast Great Gatsby-grade side pipes sticking out of the bonnet, and all three are built on big Detroit sedan chassis. The problem with these blingwagons for our purposes is that nobody actually drove the things. Instead, they spend their lives sitting forgotten in a McMansion's six-car garage somewhere, and the result is that nearly every example is a pristine, low-mile car with a price tag well north of 20 grand.
Fortunately, you can find just about anything on the List of Craig, and a bit of judicious digging unearthed this 1987 Zimmer Golden Spirit in Michigan, priced to sell at just $9,500 asking (go here if the listing disappears).
This car looks pretty clean at first glance, so why is it priced at 75 percent less than most other Zimmers out there? A closer look at the interior shows some upholstery thrashing, which means you'll probably need to get the whole thing redone in marmoset hide (or whatever Zimmer's upholstery shop used).
Does it run? We can't say! Is there rust? Your guess is as good as ours! With the seller hewing so closely to the Craigslist tradition of withholding as much useful information as possible, it's gratifying to see that he's also a firm traditionalist when it comes to Craigslist copywriting: CAPS LOCK ALL THE WAY THROUGH. "Chuck" refers to the car as "A NICE PROJECT," which could mean a lot of things. One thing is for sure, it is indeed "A REAL EYE CATCHER."
Read the seller’s description:
When you're talking about these extremely classy coachbuilt machines of the 1970s and 1980s, there's one car we didn't dare even imagine we might be able to find, a car that makes the Zimmer look positively drab by comparison.
We speak, of course, of the Stutz Blackhawk, a mighty Mandrax-munching masterpiece of majestic magnificence, with a body designed by Ghia, coachwork by Carrozzeria Padane in Modena and the chassis of a Pontiac Grand Prix.
Only about 600 were built, mostly sold to discerning art experts such as the Shah of Iran and Evel Knievel, so how could we ever hope to find a project Blackhawk? Well, we've done it— check out this 1975 Stutz Blackhawk in Illinois (go here if the listing disappears), for . . . well, the price is just so low that we can't believe it ourselves: $2,495. Wait, a Blackhawk for about what you'd pay for a beater Kia Rio? How could that be? There was the matter of a small warehouse fire, and this car got completely charred a little toasted around the edges.
Don't think about that, though—read the seller's description: "Automotive Art for sale!!!!!! CAR OF THE STARS!!!!!!" You see? It is isn't quite as bad as it looks, though, because the seller "purcashed and stripped a 1975 Pontiac Grand Prix SJ for parts needed to finish," which means that you just need to bolt all the Grand Prix parts onto the Stutz, then obtain some of the missing components ("Bumpers, grille, rear pan, lights, lakespipes, etc. missing"). Don't worry about finding those, because the Blackhawk used Chevrolet Nova taillights!
