The floors, the bed, the quarter-panels, and both fenders were toast. Schwichtenberg informed us that pretty much every piece of sheetmetal had to be replaced. Once we started digging into it, I came to the conclusion, that we should have looked for another car, but we were too far into this one to turn back.” Apparently, it was used as a landscape truck before it was left for dead in the desert. Well, it really wasn’t, but the pickin’s were slim, so we bought it anyway. “There is a guy in the area who has a bunch of Chevys in his yard just baking in the sun, and he had a 1970 El Camino I figured was worth looking into. “We found the car out here in Phoenix,” Schwichtenberg reveals. The bad news was that the one he located was pretty much a disaster. The good news is that Schwichtenberg was able to find one through his network of hot rodder friends. Read More: From Grocery Getter to Heartthrob 1970 El Camino “So, he was my first choice to scope out and build my El Camino.” “ had a shop here in Alaska and was known for doing outstanding work,” Dana says. Schwichtenberg also grew up in Alaska, which is where the long-distance connection (in climate and miles) between him and Dana comes from. He reached out to a former Alaska resident and shop owner AJ Schwichtenberg of GoodFellows Classic Cars in Phoenix for some help in finding a solid example, knowing the chance of finding a vintage El Camino in Alaska is pretty much zero to none. Recently, he got the itch to revisit his younger self and build a classic El Camino of his own. It’s those memories that helped Dana adopt the muscle car lifestyle –growing up, he always had some form of hot rod, from race cars to souped-up airplanes to coincide with his rambunctious personality. I took my driver’s test in Dad’s El Camino, and in the summer, I’d wash it on Saturdays in hopes he would let me drive it on dates.” “They were rugged enough to handle Alaska’s extreme weather conditions–60 degrees below 0 in the winter and 80 degrees in the summer. “My dad used them for work, took us to school, filled the bed with trash and hit the dump, went on hunting trips, and even used them to tow our boats and snowmobile trailers,” Dana says. Dana looks at the Elco as the original crossover vehicle.
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