Our poor American V8 project has been a little on the slow side but the guys at Magnaflow Exhaust sent us two presents (Part #: 36456 and 16829) which are getting installed on the 91 Camaro this week.

The exhaust and catalytic converter are going to get this bad boy 50 state legal (most importantly California SMOG legal) and we will be firing up on this American V8 project car. We also ordered some restoration pieces to help get the old lady back into a decent looking shape!

So once we picked up our new 1991 Chevrolet Camaro we had quite a bit of maintenance to do. The last owner hadn’t done much to keep it in good shape and it had been sitting for quite some time. Thankfully our trusty mechanic Paul lives in Colorado and supplied some tools and space to work on the new project car.

A few lights were out in the gauge cluster so we went ahead and replaced all of them while we had the cluster out. Our shifter also had burnt out lights so we replaced those as well at the same time.

While at NAPA Auto Parts my road trip partner Jayke Milton had to pick up this American flag air freshener for the trip. Jayke has been working on Wrecked Magazine since the beginning of the website and had a blast with him on our road trip home. Our American flag air freshener is now hanging on our rear view mirror on American Project V8.

The NAPA store down the road in Evergreen, Colorado scored us almost all the parts we needed. The car came with a cracked head light so we got a replacement one. We also needed some new DOT3 brake fluid and Mobil 1 Synthetic ATF transmission fluid to get this car back on track. We also picked up some Bosch Super Plus spark plugs along with a distribution parts and wires.

You can see one of the old plugs we pulled from the car was in pretty bad shape. Getting the new plugs in the Camaro really helped it run better right off the bat.

Here is the cracked headlight on the drivers side of the Camaro we replaced. The car has a headlight/lightbulb all in one unit so we fixed the bulb at the same time by swapping the headlight housing.

We had some small oil leaking from the valve cover so we went ahead and did a new valve cover gasket. This was one of the longest projects,time wise that we had to do before we could head to California.

The photos above show the nasty fluid our car came with in the brake reservoir. We drained out the fluid and pumped new fluid in while bleeding the brakes until we got all of the junk fluid out of the system. The last photograph shows you what our new fluid looked like compared to the fluid we started with.

After that weekend of servicing and Pikes Peak it was time to leave Colorado and head back home to Los Angeles. Our next post will talk about our quick trip home in Project American V8!

We scored this Chevrolet Camaro from a guy in Denver, Colorado for super cheap. It’s a 1991 Camaro RS with a 305 engine. Since the car was purchased in Colorado we had to make  road trip to go pick it up and trek home 1,000 miles back to California.

This is the American V8 drift car that we are doing in conjunction with the Import V8 S13 drift project we are doing. The dual projects will allow you to see how you can take similarly cheap cars and produce amazing drift cars regardless if you want a Nissan or Chevrolet. Stay tuned to both of our V8 engine drift projects as they come together in the near future!