1957 Chevy Timber Wolf Project Car - Pro Street Makeover

Written
by
Rob Kinnan
on August 21, 2007 Contributors: David Freiburger, Randy Lorentzen, Jerry Pitt, Pure VisionIn the Span of Only Five Weeks, Pure Vision Transformed a '57 Chevy Pro Streeter From Run-of-the-Mill to Flamed Standout.

Hot rodding is all about modifying your vehicle for better performance, to make it look cooler, or to just to suit your interests and aesthetics. It can take a long time to get the car just right, but it's worth the effort. Some folks get the car finished, drive it for a while, and then feel the need to tear back into it to do something different, basically starting over. That's especially common when it takes so long to build the car that the style becomes dated, or the owner just changes his mind. Of course, you can always buy someone else's project or finished car, but the downside to that is that it's never truly yours. Drastic change is necessary for it to really come home.

The latter situation is where we found ourselves with this project. In a promotion with Timber Wolf (see the sidebar Win Our Car) we went looking for a car that we could transform from someone else's cast-off to a different car with a brand-new attitude. We knew we wanted a Pro Streeter because it had been forever since HOT ROD had done anything with one, and after some searching we came up with a '57 Chevy that had been given the full back-half job some years ago. It looked good but forlorn sitting in the parking lot of the pawnshop where we found it. We trailered the '57 up to Simi Valley, California, to Steve Strope's Pure Vision shop and started inspecting it closer.

The car looked its Pro Street part, with a big-block Chevy under the hood, fat tires in the tubs, a ladder bar suspension, and a six-point rollcage. It actually seemed so good that we initially thought we'd made a mistake; how could we transform a car that was already so nice? But upon closer inspection, the flaws came to the surface. Strope says, "I had a split impression. For the money we got a pretty straight, nice car. The tub job was decent, and it had what we needed to start with. But once you got into it you found hokey work, and I wasn't thrilled with the execution and attention to detail. The brake lines and wiring were awful, it had mismatched themes using old parts with new billet stuff, and there were bad color choices-the suspension and windshield wiper were orange, for crying out loud! The motor was also a disaster and it had a dopey cage. But the things that needed to be changed were what we were going to change anyway, so it all worked out."

2/33The Timber Wolf Speed Shop '57 Chevy was a typical internet purchase: it looked great in photos-and in fact the body was really good-but mechanically it was a mess. The supposed "LS7 crate engine" turned out to be a truck 454 with a bunch of junk cam lobes.

This is the third giveaway car Strope has worked on for HOT ROD, so we knew it was in good hands. After bench-racing ideas back and forth, we came up with a plan to give the car an old-time drag race theme, complete with a wicked rake and period-style wheels. With a Tavis Highlander rendering in hand, Strope and his guys tore into it. We gave them a five-week deadline since the car had to be on this year's Power Tour(r), and they used every second of it.

As it came together, Strope kept coming up with great ideas to continue the theme, and though it pushed the deadline to hair-pulling extremes, the end result is a trick car. The engine details, like the Edelbrock finned valve covers, white-painted Patriot headers, modified velocity stacks, and handmade fuel block for the dual Edelbrock quads, are all done with a feel for the '60s and '70s. The interior was changed from the black vinyl and cloth the car came with to a bitchin' red interior from Year One, which has just added Tri-Fives to its inventory of catalog offerings. The cliche billet steering wheel was replaced with a three-spoke Corvette-style wheel from Flaming River. The slow power windows were swapped for new aftermarket parts from Electric Life, and the cable-operated external wipers were retrofit with Pacific Western Design's supertrick underdash RainGear wiper motor. Both were hooked up with relays so they work like those of a new car. Strope also spent an inordinate amount of time on the stuff that's not obvious but really makes for a top-notch car, like the brake lines, the wiring, and all the little detail items.

But the crowning touch, the genius move of the whole car build, was to bring in hot rodding legend Scott Sullivan to give it the flame job. Sullivan spent a week in SoCal designing and spraying the flames, and they turned out looking fantastic. The base color on the car looks black in photos (and usually in person too), but it is a very deep, dark purple. In bright sunlight this thing gets major attention, and now thanks to the new GM H.O. 454 from Scoggin-Dickey Parts Center, it can back up that attention with some smoky burnouts.

As sweepstakes giveaway cars go, this is one of the nicest we've seen, and possibly the best of them all. Whoever wins this car is going to be one lucky son of a gun.

27/33Scott Sullivan (sitting) is one of Steve Strope's (standing) heros, and Strope was giddy that they got to work on a car together.

The Flame JobDeciding to put flames on the '57 was the easy part. Then we had to find someone who could do it on our timetable; that was the hard part. But during a conversation between publisher Pitt and former HOT ROD editor (now Car Craft staffer) Jeff Smith, the name Scott Sullivan came up. Smith still talks to Sullivan all the time, so they rang him up and asked if he'd fly from his Dayton, Ohio, home to California to burn our car. "Sure," Sullivan said.

For those of you too young to remember, Scott Sullivan is one of the biggest names in the street machine and Pro Street world. He has built several HOT ROD of the Year cars, starting back in the late '70s, but the most famous is the Cheez Whiz-orange '55 Chevy that he and Smith drove cross country back in 1989. What sets Sullivan apart from the rest is that his cars never seem dated. You could pull the Chevy II he did in the '70s and the '55 from the '80s into any car show today and they'd look contemporary. That's a hard act to pull off, but Sullivan has done it time and time again. Though he's mostly focused on motorcycles for the last decade, Sullivan showed he can still lay some killer licks on a Tri-Five.

Win Our CarThis whole project came about courtesy of Timber Wolf moist snuff, which put together a promotion in which six cars would be built as part of the Timber Wolf Speed Shop, and then consumers of Timber Wolf would be eligible to win all the cars. Up until November 1, you'll find a code under the lid of every Timber Wolf snuff can. Enter that code at www.twspeedshop.com, pick our '57 or one of the other five cars in the program, and estimate how much you think it will be worth once the transformation is complete. For a better estimate of its value, you can watch Web videos of each car's transformation and read this story as well as the ones in Street Rodder, Mopar Muscle, Corvette Fever, Mustang Monthly, and Car Craft. If you're the first person whose bid is on the money, the car is yours. Every lid's a bid. The more Timber Wolf lids you collect, the more estimates you get, and the more chances you have to win. For further information and complete rules, check out www.twspeedshop.com.