AWESOME.....I do not know why some people have to diss your find...or chime in to say how stupid or ****y it is...if they do not have anything nice to say they should just go out the thier "cooler find" and not comment at all.....oh they probably don't have one!!! Hey, IM me if you do want to sell or trade that beast....I'm always up for stuff others hate!!! Keep us posted of your progress with it if you do decide to keep it and use it.
I can remember helping my best bud in HS back in '76 get some street cred by putting in a 400 Poncho and T400 in his '71 Gremlin. It looked pretty cool with the Anson Sprints all around but when he'd fire it up that 258 6 banger would just be embarr***ing, finally one night I talked him into letting me swap in something a little more "manly". Looked all over for a 390 or 401 out of a Javelin but couldn't find one, but found a complete '70 Firebird with an interior fire for a whopping $200 (remember those days?!?!). I remember it was a pretty easy swap, even for a HS senior. Those small AMC's had very wide engine bays with front coil towers tucked out of the way. Used the stock AMC frame mounts, stock GM block mounts (with single stud) and made a 2 x 4 tube adapter boxed on one end for strength. I don't think the rear crossmember was an issue either, I think all I had to do was drill new holes in the front subframe. Had to go hoodless because the carb sat up too high and didn't want to add a scoop. Biggest expense was using a remote oil filter with new line etc. Of course it became very apparent that it was a little nose heavy and light in tail, but that just made for great smoky burnouts with the big L60 meats. Don't know what happened to that car, I went in the USAF about 2 months after I finished it and he traded it in on a brand new Ford Courier (yuk!!) because his parents and girlfriend didn't like it. The Ford dealer never kept it so who knows???? The car was in NorCal and was dark green.
I worked with a guy just after high school that bragged he had the fastest gremlin this side of the Mississippi....his dad owened the largest AMC wrecking yard in the nation...somewhere on the east side of Detroit...The owners name wasn't Jim , was it???
In the 70's I use to run auto-x-s and there were a couple of v-8 gremlins in the street prepared cl*** that were fast, probably because they were short, and wide.
I've seen that orange Gremlin in Car Craft mag a couple of times running the year-end wheelie event at Byron. I wish I lived back there to watch all those 8 and 9 second cars take their wheelie bars off at the end of the season and totally abuse them. Didn't some guy in a Chevette go all the way over on his roof in '08?
It is being slipped through under the pitty rule!!! It was all good and set at rest...then some new guys just had to go and post on it again!!! RIP Gremlin Racer
well, at least the thread resurrector said more than "cool! rock on!" ... Nothing wrong with Gremlins, they replaced the '30s coupe bodies on the stock cars, short, wide, available with a V8, and AMC made that same basic body shell for almost 20 years so parts aren't a big deal.
When those things were new I had a fellow where I worked that thought they were the cat's *** (wonder if it was the same cat that was in this one). Anyway, we kept kidding him about buying one if he thought they were so neat. Lo and behold he showed up with one a couple of weeks later. Asking him how he finally decided to get one he said he was drinking heavily a couple of days before at a local bar and the guy that he was riding with took off with a bar maid leaving him alone. Deciding to leave he had someone call him a cab and when the driver asked him "where to" he told us "I said the AMC dealer". Well, after being dropped off he told us if he were ever going to buy a Gremlin no time like now and sat down, filled out the papers and drove the damn thing home. If I remember correctly he put about 100,000 miles on that pile and put next to nothing in maintenance. It's demise was on a snowy winter night when he slid making a turn and crashed in to a phone pole totaling it out. Frank
The Jalopy Journal
