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American Motors eXperimental
Owners X-perience Javelin AMX 1 - 10
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I'm sending you pictures of my 1974 Javelin AMX clone that I bought 6 years ago on my 16th birthday. It was originally white with green interior. I decided to give the car a more aggressive look and changed the interior to black and painted the car red. I also collected all the necessary parts to build an AMX clone. All the paint and bodywork was performed by myself. It has a 360 4v automatic. I plan to keep this car for the rest of my life. I'm also in the process of restoring a 1969 AMX 343 4-speed.
Chris Sorensen - Minneapolis, MN
Here are a couple of pictures of my 1972 Javelin AMX. I've owned for a little over a year. It has the 360 Go-Pak in it with the 4-spd and the 3.54 posi. It has a 496/282 cam in it with edelbrock performer and a Road Demon 625cfm.
Todd Evans - APG, MD
1973 Javelin AMX
Here's a picture of my 1974 Javelin. It's a 401/727 combo. The car is a daily driven street/strip car and has pulled a best 1/4 mile time of 12.66 @108mph (at 5000ft of elevation and no nitrous). Thanks,
Jim Steffensmeier - Wicked 6 Racing - Casper, Wyoming
My name is Al Gaines and I live in Springfield, OR. I work as the Youth Guidance Director with Lane County Youth For Christ and Chaplain for the Lane County Juvenile Justice Center. I have dedicated my life to helping at-risk youth in our community.
Ten years ago, I was given (as a donation) a 1971 Javelin SST. I had the guy call me and he knew that I loved the car for many years that he was building for his son. He said that his son loved the car and drove it a short time and rolled it during a snow storm and all the bodywork was done and now his son wanted a 4x4 and the car is just sitting there outside of his home.
He didn't want the car to sit there and rot so he offered to put insurance on it and let me drive it. It sounded great to me and I thought that it was a great looking car with a lot of potential. He asked if I could help him put the lights back in it and then I could take it. I told him that I would be over the next day. The next day he said that he didn't sleep very much the night before as God told him that the car was mine, so he just handed me the title and said that he had all the parts from another car that was bought for parts. That was really cool, what a gift!!!
I drove it for 5 years without doing anything to it. I fell in love with the body style and decided that this was too nice a car to see run into the ground. It had a 304/BW auto with white paint and red interior. I started by rebuilding the 304 with a nice cam, a cast iron intake and a 4 barrel carb. Then it was time to rebuild the tranny. I kept adding more and more chrome parts as I could only afford a little at a time. The Edelbrock intake and 600 cfm carb was next. Rebuilt the driveline and did a full brake job on the drum brakes.
With the mechanical done, it was time to do the body work! The paint was shot and it had a lot of bondo, so I stripped the body to bare metal and started the 9 month task of straightening the body without the use of bondo. Well I did it and it came out great.
The bodyman who helped me told me that my car was made for "extreme paint!" He said that I'll never see a car that has so many curves ever be made out of metal again and with all these curves, the extreme paint would go crazy! What an investment, it cost almost $3000 just for the paint products. It took 9 months work on the body to get it straight, at least two months of that was on the roof section. I chose Diamont Extreme Rainbow paint, it came out amazing, I had never seen anything like it anywhere. After all that work, I had the chrome bumpers re-chromed and all the stainless polished out. The car was amazing, a real head turner.
Well, it lasted 1 month on the road before the first accident, sitting at a light a big truck in front of me started rolling slowly back and came right over the front of me as I was honking my horn and screaming, NO, NO, NO!!! He cut two big holes right through the hood of the car and pinned me to the ground. The guy came back to see what he had done and when he looked he said "Why couldn't it have been a Pinto!". There was over $5,000 damage. After replacing the hood, we ended up painting the whole car again with ghost flames (my first time with flaming anything) and adding a wing spoiler in the back.
Then, after being on the road for 6 more months and getting ready for the first car show of the season, I was sitting in a turn lane at a light again. I heard the sound of a four barrel kicking in and when I realized that it was a car coming fast and it was going to run the red light! I was piledrived head on by a 70 year old lady in an ugly Chevy Laguna (over $10,000 damage to the car and about $100,000 damage to me!). She hit me in the front left corner at about 50 mph after hitting a Ford 4x4 pickup, which bent the frame over and shoved the steering wheel into my chest. Her car spun me around and another car hit me on the other side. The guy in the 4x4 ran into 3 other cars before people could get to his truck and stop it, he died later that day. Bummer! I took the money that the insurance gave me and got the most from doing a lot of the work myself. I used up every resource I had kept track of from other parts cars. I just keep on putting the money back into the car and now it's been 4 accidents (all State Farm Insurance) and over $22,000 insurance money re-invested back into the car with a lot of the work done by me to be able to do more.
I have won almost 30 Trophies in the last three years and much of that time it was in the body shop.
Right now it's going into winter 2003 and I'm building a 401 while my transmission guy is rebuilding a torqueflite to go behind it. The 401 is getting closer to being finished. I got one of the Edelbrock RPM Air Gap intakes and had it polished out, and yes I know that I could've bought it polished, but I saved money and it looks great! I went with 30 over forged pistons (so I can run NOS), a nice Crower Cam and lifters, roller rockers for the ported and polished heads, and it's all balanced and I'm down to getting the Chrysler valves and some big springs and I will have it installed next weekend (Feb 9, 2004).
-I don't think that I will ever finish this car, I've got about $25 - $30,000 in it and I keep thinking of more things to do. This year I pulled the whole re-upholstered interior I had and replaced the whole interior out of a Honda Prelude, now I have real bucket seats. I dropped the exhaust system and installed side pipes, added a lot of lights, neons, strobes, and more pieces in the engine compartment chromed. My tires kept rubbing in the back so I put in air shocks. Finally, I replaced all the front end parts and pulled the drums off the front and got some disk brakes to get this bad boy stopped!
After pulling the built 304 and rebuilt BW auto and replacing it with the 401 and a torqueflite tranny, the next thing will be a rear end and maybe tubbing the back end and putting some big meats on the back. Right now I'm running 265-50-15's on the rear and 215-60-15's on the fronts. I don't think that will give me enough traction.
I just got done repainting 3/4 of the car again and repairing several places in the body that were bubbling up under the paint. I spent so much trying anything and everything to make that rust go away and I am very convinced that the only way to fix rust is to cut it out and weld in some new metal. My quarter panels were so packed out underneath the panel and the metal always looked clean on the outside but there were tiny microscopic holes that would let out water and bubble the paint. When you are painting with Dimont Extreme Rainbow paint that runs $340 a pint wholesale, you have to fix it right.
After cutting and buffing out the car, I had a couple days until the next show so I decided that it was a good time to put in the power windows and power door locks. It seemed simple enough, but I was wrong! It's great having them work after all of the work to put them in! When I start the car, the doors lock automatically and when I press the alarm
button, the doors lock. It's cool!
Al Gaines
This 1971 Javelin SST is a Calif. car with the 360 ci. I purchased it from one of my brother's and it now makes its home in Missouri. It's silver with black ghost flames and a black leather interior. My brother purchased it from the original owner including owners manual and original sales slips. I'm looking forward to putting a little more
punch in the motor. Fond memories of my oldest brother draggin' me around in his 1968 AMX 343ci make the AMC's extra special for me.
John
This is my 1973 AMX that I entirely rebuilt myself in high school. Has a rebuilt 360 with a comp cam and roller rockers. Working on fabricating ram air out of the dual scoops. 255/50 15s on all four with shaved front wheel wells. Turns out the unibody was a little too rusted out so I'll be swapping everything over to a Arizona Javelin car this summer. Will be the meanest thing in the parking lot.
This is Wayne's 1971 360 Javelin AMX.
1973 Javelin AMX.
1974 AMX 360 auto/ac/ps/pdb/cowl induction/15 in rallyes. Updates include sanden compressor, 700r4 o/d tranny and Autosound am/fm cd changer. Original color was T/A Red, Now jellybean purple. Soon to be Commadore Blue Met. with wht T-stripe. Thanks,
Jeff Gibson - Tampa, Fl
