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The She-Devil
On July 4, 2000. Something loud made its way home with me. Another '82. I saw this sitting in a local gas station. All lonely. And of course, I couldn't help myself to look at it. I hadn't gotten over losing my first Monte, and this one just stirred all those feelings back up again. It wasn't even a real pretty car. But it was a Monte. And of course, it was like a magnet to me for that reason. I looked at this car every day for two weeks. Ther was a tach on the steering wheel. Of course, I had to wonder why. I looked at the VIN; according to that, it was a 267 (4.4l) V8 car, and the inspection sticker noted over 117,000 miles. Ok, what was up with the tach and the dual exhaust if was just a 267? Either someone had tinkered with the little motor, or there was something else hiding under the hood that I didn't know about. Technically, the car was for my little brother. I knew he'd like the car, because he liked my first one. But legally, it had to be mine...yanno, all that insurance stuff and whatnot. *wink* The second the mechanic turned the key in this thing, the car just snorted itself to life. It sounded well, positively riotous. The car found her way home two days and $1800 later and straight into my neighbor's driveway where no unsavory people from the neighborhood would see her.
This one was from Brooklyn, originally. The car actually had 119,000 on the body. There weren't any exterior mods; it was Beige with a Redwood interior, standard chrome mirrors and a slight tint from the opera windows back. It had blue bucket seats of undetermined origin, a Grant GT Challenger steering wheel that I hated, a Sport Comp tach, and a host of aftermarket gauges. The body was fairly staright, though it had some places that looked like it kissed something somewhere in its history. It had a set of crappy 235/60R15 Firestones on some black American Racing wheels that reminded me vaguely of the wheels on a Buick GN. Supposedly the engine was swapped two years prior to us getting the car; I have no idea where it was from, outside of it was a 350 from a pre-emissions car. It had an Edelbrock Performer 1406 carb, a Performer RPM intake, MSD 6AL ignition box, a Hypertech power coil, MSD wires, and Hooker headers. It had a relatively recent TH350 trans with a B&M Star shifter that took me forever to get used to. It had a 10-bolt rear and no posi; one tire would just smoke itself into oblivion, but oh was it nice. I'm not sure what kind of power this car was making; probably no more than 250-300, but it made a boatload of torque. The car was drag-raced by the former owner (who had the car for 10 years); it was running NOS (the bottle bracket and all the plumbing were still in the trunk). The car was on its third engine probably for that reason.
This was was a world of deja-vu for me. It came from the same Baltimore plant as my first car - two weeks apart -, and it had the same identical paint/interor colors (save for it being two-tone, which it wasn't). The interiors were identically optioned. Scary. This one ran okay....for a while. The horns never did work. Some of the exterior lights were out. The car was missing most of its emblems. The coolant was NASTY and needed to be flushed. The oil was indescribably black. It got so hot it'd refuse to start if you shut it off. It shot flames out of the tailpipes. But damn, it was fun. The VIN
on the She-Devil decoded as follows:
1 - Made
in the U.S.A. In September 2000, the whole driver's side of the car failed the Bondo test. We couldn't get one magnet to stick to anything on the lower back half of the door, the lower fender, and a portion of the roof. The passenger side was fine. Makes me wonder if it kissed a guardrail at a track. Or rolled over. Or both. In October, we pulled all the plugs to try to fix a skip in the engine. Couldn't get #6 out because of the headers. The plugs were really disappointing for what was supposedly a motor that'd only been in hte car for two years. #1 had just a little bit of oil. I didn't think anything much of that one. #3, #5, and #7, however were a different story. They were drenched. They looked like something you could have pulled out of my old 229 at the end of its life. On the other side of the engine, #2 was too hot. #4 looked like the insulator had cracked. #8 had so much crud on it, I wondered how it was firing. After changing the plugs (except that damn #6, which no one and no tool could get out), the car decided it was free to burn oil in a copious, Batmobile-smoke-screen kinda manner. And then it stopped. Ran around with 7 spark plugs for a while. The car ran lke a bat out of hell. And then, oh then. My brother got into an accident with it. *smacks forehead* My brother took the car out to pick up two of his friends. He was double-parked, I would assume (I wasn't there). When somehow during the process of pulling out, the throttle supposedly got stuck. I secretly think that my brother just pounded on the gas and wasn't paying attention to where the car's nose was, but I digress. Needless to say, the car took a flying leap forward and plowed headlong into a 1996 Buick Riviera that was parked on the street. The Buick walked away with a hole in the tail lens, and a ding in the bumper. With paint and labor, it's about $800 worth of damage on the Riv that my brother had to pay for. She-Devil, however, wasn't so lucky.
As you can see from this shot, the car took a pretty good whack on the passenger side corner. I was baffled at the damage because it was simply from the car jumping forward into a parked car, not from actual great forward speed like on the highway. The header panel and the bumper cover buckled in, and the fender kind of wound up forward and out towards the curb. The trim, which this car luckily had all of when my brother bought it, was trashed. The front marker light didn't survive, but strangely, the turn signal did!
Another angle shows how the fender is sticking way out from the side of the car. It's a wonder he didn't catch it on anything in the way home. This picture also shows how the header panel and the bumper are kind of on a downward angle. The headlights on that side of the Monte, especially the outside one, when on, aimed towards the road immediately in front of the car. Amazingly, the grill survived. Nothing past the inboard edge of the headlight trim was damaged.
Whatever Bondo was on the bumper (why there was Bondo over urethane, I'll never know) was gone, leaving that nasty yellow urethane underneath. The nose of the car was pretty much sagging now, but it wasn't loose, which I figured it would be. The fender as it is in this picture was VERY close to the front tire, but fortunately, it was sticking out far enough so that the car could take a turn without cutting the tire. The car, unfortunately, balked on left turns after this. I would figure that there'd be steering problems on the right, where the car was hit, but it's when making a left turn, that the steering was binding. The car could be nudged past where it seems to be binding, but it took some effort. I never was able to get the car on a lift yet to see if there was any front end suspension or steering damage, or to what extent the car was going to need work in that area.
This is a shot from the top, which really shows how far out from the car the fender is. It also shows how far back the header panel got pushed, and how misaligned the entire front of the car is now. The hood, fortunately stayed fairly straight.
This is by far, in my book, the worst picture. Again, you can see how far the fender got pushed outwards. The headlight trim was unsalvageble simply just because of the angle it got bent at. It looks like it's broken in the lower outside corner, but in fact, it's jammed underneath the bumper cover. Unfortunately, we all know that headlight trim isn't exactly made out of sturdy material. It was so warped I wouldn't think of trying to pull it off of the car and straighten it out. You can also see the front marker is in a million pieces and that the lower trim on the side of the bumper cover was separated from the body. The paint of course, was all fractured across that side of the nose and where the fender and the header panel made friends. The sagging on that side of the car was very apparent if you use the corner of the hood as a reference point. I figured that my brother would get into some kind of minor 'oops' with the car, since it was his first. I wasn't expecting to see something like this. The most important thing is, that no one who was riding in the car at the time (a total of three) got hurt. The unfortunate thing, though it was mostly cosmetic damage, is that my brother didn't have the finances to fix it. There was no collision coverage on my insurance. I hadn't gotten an estimate from a body shop, but I'm assuming well over the $3000 mark to replace the fender, the header panel, and the bumper cover (and of course all of the trim), and shoot it all with primer. The only thing that got done was whacking the fender inwards with a rubber mallet so it doesn't get caught on parked cars or cut down the front tire. The Monte was capable of being driven, however, and there was no damage to the engine (or anything important under the hood), the transmission, or the rear. Therefore, I had no intentions of scrapping the car since it was mechanically sound. In the month since this car was in the accident, it only spent the first four days immediately after sitting in the street. It was used almost every day since, though definitely with concern for the front end - which amounted to being careful on corners and keeping the speed range tame. The car was definitely out of alignment. From what I did see, though, the sheetmetal stopped most of the force and the frame looked great. Guess I have to give kudos to Chevy indestructability! We woud up selling this one to a friend of my brothers who's got a whole herd of cars. Last I knew, it had an SS front end on it and I belive its opinion of the whole ordeal was to toss the timing chain. :-)
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