Cheap Thrils

Feel Shut Out of the Hot-Car Market? Lower Your Standards

- Chris Shelton

All Bryan Barlow wanted was a ’65 Chevelle. “I’d been collecting parts to build one for quite some time,” he begins. “I just couldn’t find a good car for it all to go in, at least for what I could afford.”

So when a close friend called to report that his neighbor was looking to sell just the car Bryan wanted, he ran right over. “I’m like, ‘So where is it?’ He says I’m standing right next to it. I look at the car that’s next to me. Then I look at him. ‘Dude, that’s a Plymouth!’

“Todd Schiewe is one of my closest friends and a great guy. But he’s not really a car guy. He just saw an old car that looked kind of like the cars I showed him.”

What Bryan didn’t realize is that Schiewe inadvertently gave him a gift far more valuable than a low-buck Chevelle. He gave him a taste of freedom. “So I get to looking at the thing,” Bryan continues. “It actually ticks all the boxes: it’s a hardtop, it’s solid, it doesn’t really need paint or anything.”

Though he continued his quest for a Chevelle, the Scamp remained in the back of his mind. Bryan began to explore the prospect of building a Chevy-powered Plymouth. But as he asked around, he discovered something: the deep rift between Chevrolet and Mopar worlds. “I was shocked when I heard that this rivalry even existed,” he exclaims. “I had to do it.”

The guys Bryan first hired to make the changes cut the car up within 24 hours, but took six weeks to return a simple phone call. “When I went looking I realized that there was a problem: the car had been cut apart by people who had no idea how they were going to put it back together.” Not surprisingly, the shop and so-called fabricators parted ways. And the shop really didn’t want anything to do with Bryan’s poop-glitter orphan.