by Jerrie Pierce

Created on: June 18, 2008   Last Updated: November 07, 2008

Buying a Used Muscle Car

Investment or hobby? A shared experience with a son or daughter or a mid-life crisis? A muscle car is all that and more. Most of us can't afford a new Corvette or Viper, but when you start looking at used muscle cars you need to have a plan.
First of all, you want to decide what your end result should be. If you buy a used muscle car with the idea of fixing a couple of things and selling it for a profit, you need to really know the history, or provenance, of the car. If you had taken a new 1965 Mustang and put it in cold storage and then taken if out today, you would have a very, very valuable car. No miles, no damage, nothing missing, and all the paperwork still in place. Collectors would be lining up at your garage door with blank checks in hand. Of course that's missing the fun of muscle cars for the majority of us. Muscle cars are about speed, performance, looks, and the ever important "cool" factor! So, ask yourself, "Why do I want a muscle car?" Then let the answer guide you.

The next part is a little bit like playing the stock market and a poker game. You might win or lose, but you want to have fun either way. You want to pick a muscle car that is going to get more valuable as time passes, but one that you can still get parts for. You need to spend some quality time with speed equipment catalogs, replacement body panel catalogs, and with OEM (original equipment manufacturer) and NOS (new old stock means new parts that have been sitting on a shelf for years) sources. When you're out there comparing a nice GTO with a missing gauge panel and a mean looking Camaro with a broken grill, you need to have an idea if either of these parts are still available and at what cost. You at least need to be able to grab your laptop and check a couple of sources before you spend your dollars. Even better is the rare situation where you find a decent muscle car with a matching "donor" car of the same model. The donor car will be so damaged that it will be irreparable, but it will be a gold mine of parts. Depending on the price of metal, you may even be able to recover most of the cost of the donor car just by selling the bare shell when you're through harvesting parts.
While we're talking about parts, there is a very important fact about muscle cars that you may not know. Chevys (Camaro, Nova, and Corvette) share a lot of the same parts. If you're buying a used muscle car just for fun, a Chevy will provide you the most options in terms of mixing

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