docs apollo blue gt coupe

[darkside]

this coupe has been stripped and rebuilt several times in the 27yrs i have owned her ,used to drive her on a regular basis,got heaps of trophies from shows and been in couple magazines,always an interesting thing to read about yur car in them as you learn things about them that never happened,the story they print is mostly fictional and for readers entertainment

[darkside]

she stayed like this for several years but i will add a pic here from when we first thought of the adea of putting graphics on and we dropped the car off one morning to a bloke who had an 'idea",we picked it up that arvo and ,well i'll let the pic tell some of the story hahaha before and after

[290GTP]

Hope you kicked his *** for putting that abortion on your car.

[darkside]

it was very shaggadelic baby yeah!!...there were some explanations as to how they come about but my reaction was not the best and this pleasant part of the gt was over rather abruptly and we got the graphics on it as in the pictures from street machine in 1991 which were taken were now is a housing estate just in front of browns plains industrial estate ....doc

[darkside]

we played with the motor abit and even did the super charger

got tired of the whole idea after awhile and then it went to the next phase of its life Blue black pearl...doc

[darkside]

when we decided to tear down and repaint her the second time we figured we would go something a little more fancy and tried a colour from Spray Chief paints that would put a spin on the theme and we could have a little bit of fun at show an shines etc ....the colour was "blue black pearl"a transluscent colour that had a great effect but turned out to be very hard to capture under the lights of car shows ...i very much have always been a big "pink floyd fan"and this is where the whole" darkside "theme came from we had a ball with it.

if you have a close look you can see where we cut out templates in the engine bay to flatten out panels help get that smoothe custom look,battery tray removed even the firewall coped the mod "yay" ..its at this stage that i wish i could have seen into the future and have known what sikoflex does to steel,not to mention that stuff does not ever ever want to be removed

[darkside]

i set up part of the boot display in our other coupe to get some measurements off the design ...who misses the nineties when technology just wasnt quite there...where you can see the light was actually a crystal prism just like dark side of the moon theme ,cracks me up looking back at it all...

[darkside]

at this stage you will have to forgive the pics ,they are copies and turn out a little washy at times ,we had some center caps made for the hotwires to see if it would add a bit of ...well ..something to the rims .....did i mention the nineties.hahahaha,wish leds would have been about to pick up the colour

[darkside]

after about seven years and a marriage or three ,i got bored with shows and such and stripped her down again and repainted her in black ...YUMMY...nothing quite like a coupe dressed to thrill in all black

[darkside]

so this required some other changes ,the clevo got replaced with a 400m c6 driveline which i will have to go looking for some pics ..the interior got changed from the white and grey velour to the jigsaw type pattern we came up with and blended into the whole interior of a landau ..and the hotwires were sold off to another coupe enthusiast who still owns coupes and replaced with cragar directionals that are fairly hard to find ,and again i wish someone would have stopped me from selling them ,it just cost me alot of $$$$$ to get the 15x10 hotwires back for the last resto i will "hopefully"ever do on this gt

[darkside]

i should also mention that i used to do gold plating on cars in them good old days and the coupe copped her fair share of this too ...god i hope i cant find any pics of the engine bay...can i perhaps say i was on alot of medication for some horrible disease i might have contracted from sniffing too much paint perhaps ..if anyone would have a known problem that this could relate too please pm me ....doc

[darkside]

anyway that will prolly do with the history of this coupe,i have had quite the love affair with her through the years,i have kept her through three marriages and lots of life ,these last pics were about 10-12 yrs ago she was last regoed in 2004 when we decided to restore her to her factory look ,it will not be a concourse job because i will do a few simple changes which we will get to on the road to recovery.it has taken this long to get around to doing the resto because there has been other (hangs head in shame)cars ,sorry honey
because we had so many parts from the coupe that werent to be used we bought another xb which became my wifes car (be good if she did the bl00dy work on it #@!*)and of course along came the car i always wanted .the ac cobra which fell into my arms from the floods in 2011 ..so we are finally starting to do the gt after many years of collecting the bits that we so casually threw away all them years ago ,once again a crystal ball would have been nice ,factory air con ,too heavy rip that useless piece of crap out turf in bin next to factory steering wheel awfull factory aircleaners and 8trak players etc the list is too long and like so many of us found out(the hard way)what these parts would cost us to build these aussie icons back to how they were from the factory....i am suprised now thinking about it that it has only taken me 10 years to get around to this,and a special "THANKS"to some of the evilbay sellers who have fleeced me of my hard earned coin and sent me broken useless parts that looked nothing like what they advertised ,there have been some good scores ..2 actually haha..would have been from swaps,getting tooo old to be getting up that early to troll through peoples rusty bits of useless rubbish that makes you want to douse them in diesel so they stop bringing them to swaps and waste your time again and again same crap differant swap,you would think some of these people would realise that their rusty chrome tappet covers are not heritage listed and despite the dull story they tell about them when noah was a lad who carried his donkey to prep school and lived in a pothole ...rant rant (i will stop here on this topic as you can tell there is some literature that could be toned as offensive ,specially if your one of these busted **** rusty junk hauling rant rant )
anyway let this be a lesson to all the kiddies out there modifying there dream car,go find a hippy and do a deal on his/her crystal ball ,you'll wish you did in about 25/30 yrs time(at least they wont rust away there all plastic)....doc

[darkside]

so we have started with the engine bay,after finding donour panels to replace the mess left by sikoflex ,and of course you would think by now i would remember to take pics hey anyway the repaired and replaced sections of the bay in front of the shock towers came up nice as did the firewall from the past ..errr mods lets call them..i remember flogging the firewall with a small sledge hammer to get it flat enough to fit the plate we made to get the required look we wanted (please no mail bombs for them that take this personally )if its any consolation it took alot of flogging to get it back to its proper shape and several hours of mucking about just to unpick the plate that sits behind the firewall and under the air con unit ,has three protuding bolts that then hold onto charcoal cannister and make a new one,yep cut em off with a grinder dont need them anymore turf them in the bin next to the aircon ..all fixed

[Eric A]

Great story that comes with the car. The car looked nice in the street machine feature, but I'm glad you've come full circle and decided to go factory looking. Apollo Blue GT coupe with sunroof isn't anything to be scoffed at that's for sure. Pretty much my dream car (with white interior and manual )

Looking forward to updates!

[halo9]

Nice coupe and story. There is just something about a coupe with a great black paint job that makes them so good. Wish I had the time and money to give this kind of love to my old girl.