Customer Reviews

How to Rebuild and Modify Your Muscle Car: High-Performace Restoration (Motorbooks Workshop)

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I learned about this book after I bought a copy of Scott's "How To Tune Your 1982-1998 Camaro", while fixing up my '92 25th Anniversary Camaro. I really liked that book, so when I picked up an old '70 Nova to play with, I decided to get this book.

This book was even more helpful than the Camaro had been. Scott describes what's wrong with muscle car suspensions, brakes, engines, transmissions and other parts, then tells you how to fix those problems. Yes, it's a bit generic. But the advice applies to just about any muscle car, and there are plenty of specific examples throughout the book for every make and many models.

My biggest complaint with the Nova was the suspension. It felt like a marshmallow. This book pointed out a bunch of ways to cure that by modifying parts I already had, or ones I could get at the junkyard. It also suggests new hi-perf parts you can buy, to save yourself some of the work. I did a combination: got larger used wheels & tires, new poly bushings, new shocks and cheap replacement springs. It worked great. It won't out-handle my 92 Camaro, but it's now much more fun to drive. And more controllable. And it cost me about $150.

The money I saved on the suspension rebuild more than paid for this book. And I've already seen a bunch of tips I want to try in the other chapters.

If you've got an old muscle car that you like to really drive, get this book.You won't regret it.

I've spent the last 10 years modifying and restoring a classic Corvette and I've read several how-to guides. Most of them have decent information, but there are always minor errors here and there. This one has a BIG one.

In the chapter on the electrical system it says that you can add a second battery to your muscle car to get more electrical capacity. This is true, but the author got it backwards. If you hook up two twelve-volt batteries with one positive terminal connected to the negative terminal of the second battery, you will DOUBLE the voltage. If you don't believe me, try it with a couple of D-cells and a voltmeter.

There is some good information on performance upgrades, but the author is kind of a nervous-Nancy. He leans towards that "factory original" conservative-collector anal-retentive obsessive-compulsive... restoration. Practically every chapter has a paragraph that says the factory original design was perfectly adequate for most street applications. For example, he tells the reader to never use a NOS system on the street. (Believe me, hot rodders have been using NOS on street driven cars since it was invented.) He is not entirely incorrect, just slightly biased.

He also is a little paranoid about the EPA. If you have a muscle car that is pre-'73 (varies with state), you are going to be exempt from emissions laws (at least in America). If you have just purchased one of these cars it is extremely unlikely that it has ANY emissions controls on it because a previous owner probably took it all off. But, if you have a car that has not been stripped of its emissions systems, I would suggest that you leave them on. Unless you are competitively racing the car, you won't notice much of a performance decrease.

In my opinion, those people who are "collectors" are actually causing the muscle car hobby to BECOME extinct. If everyone who owned a muscle car never drove it or rarely drove it, the businesses that supply the restoration parts would soon go out of business. The classic muscle car hobby would eventually become extinct. There are those owners who like to drive their Mercedes to work, but they have one or more muscle cars they keep for an "investment" because they won't settle for those old cars as daily drivers. This is BS. Please don't become one of them.

Just my two cents.