After noting the powerful income of Ford and Mercury coupe utilities (which came to be known as utes) in Australia, Ford released the station-wagon-chassis-dependent Ranchero to North Individuals for the 1957 design year. GM jumped in with the new El Camino for 1959, and— after a dalliance with a Corvair-centered cartruck for a handful of years— sold Chevelle-dependent El Caminos (and, sooner or later, their GMC Sprint and Caballero siblings) all the way as a result of 1987. I discover a good deal of discarded Rancheros all through my quest for junkyard heritage lessons, but the El Camino is another story. This is a very rough but nevertheless identifiable ’73, discovered in a Denver-region automobile graveyard.
Certainly, there have been a long time of enterprise in the front/celebration in the back for this Elco, but now it’s entirely utilized up.
The Chevelle got more substantial and cushier for the 1973 product year (just in time to be blindsided by certain geopolitical gatherings that gave tiny-vehicle product sales a substantial improve), and so the pickup-ized Chevelle also grew larger sized. The El Camino Typical was the truck edition of the Malibu (which was an upscale Chevelle trim amount at the time but afterwards shoved the Chevelle name apart), with Malibu-design and style trim and interior bits.
In reality, this El Camino may perhaps have just the fender from a Typical — a lot of mix-and-match pieces swappage has taken position in this article.
It appears that the original engine was a 350-cubic-inch (5.7-liter) little-block V8, an optional plant rated at 175 horsepower. The base engine for the 1973 El Camino was the 307-cubic-inch (5.-liter) modest-block, with just 115 horses and a status as one of the minimum desirable Chevy modest-blocks at any time created.
Is this that authentic 350? I failed to come to feel like receiving filthy scraping absent historical schmutz to peek at the block casting quantities to find out. My guess is that this cartruck’s engine compartment has hosted at minimum a handful of engines during its lifestyle.
The bandanna gasoline cap tells us that this Elco did not get significantly tender loving treatment in the course of its last months on the highway.
This generation of El Camino was created by means of 1977, just after which the more compact and much more angular G-body El Camino carried on till the conclude.
1 tough motor vehicle. 1 snug pickup.
Primarily a C10 with the convenience of a Monte Carlo. It was not extensive right before true pickups acquired sufficiently snug to make cartrucks considerably less applicable.
