First Wash Since 1995: ABANDONED Camaro! | Car Detailing Restoration

We found a classic Camaro sitting in a garage for the last 30 years, but it's the most bizarre finding we've had on this channel yet. Why is it bizarre? Let me show you. If you walk into my backyard, you'll see my fence got destroyed along with a tree right here, and that's because Ohio got hit by a tornado a few months ago, and that tree falling broke my fence, which led me to talk to my next door neighbor, and he showed me what he had hiding in this garage right next to me all along. Oh, now that's what I'm talking about. Dude, this thing's way up there. It is way up there. What's it on, 32s? Oh, it's on jack stands. Yeah, it's maxed out jack stands. Very nice. This is our first Gen 2 Camaro ever, ever on the channel. We've done like, I don't know, what, four or five Gen 3s? We've done the V6 Gen 3s, we've done the V8 Gen 3s, we've done the D28s, and the IROC Z in the Gen 3. We've never had a Gen 2, and we'll always be chasing a Gen 1, but this is awesome. I actually really like these Camaros a lot. I don't see them very often here in Ohio. They're always rusted out, so maybe if you're lucky at an old car show, you might see one, but I've never been hands-on with one of these, so this is pretty exciting for me. And the craziest part is, is this was hiding right under our noses the whole entire time. This is Brent's neighbor's car, so Brent's like, hey, my neighbor found our videos and said, hey, I have a Camaro in my garage that you guys might want to film. Not neighbor down the street. Next door neighbor. Right there. Yeah, nuts. And it's, I mean, it's everything that we look for when it comes, I mean, I think it's been sitting here for over 30 years. It's a single owner car, and it's dirty. It's perfect. Yeah, but he stored it right. He had it up in the air, so that's a great start. Absolutely. I say we go grab Brent's neighbor and ask him a couple questions about it before we start the load process. Should I say, like, all right, guys, we're here with Brent's neighbor, Ron, who is the owner of the car. We had no idea that this was next door the whole entire time. How did you even figure that out? My wife. No, it was when my tree fell down. No, my wife saw you. She saw you on a video. Oh, oh. Cleaning the Corvettes. Oh, cool. She saw a couple of those things. I've seen the one with the Z28, and they even had you cleaning. That's a rarity. Mike? Mike was cleaning, and then he had you, and then you put the camera down, and then you went over and started doing it. That's funny. Yeah, when he said Brent came back to the shop, he's like, this is a second-gen Camaro right next door to my neighbor's. And I was like, you gotta be kidding me. He was right there the whole entire time. He was like, yeah, it's covered in dust. It's perfect for it. Yeah, my wife saw that, and then we were talking about the tree, and I said, hey, wait. I said, I got this right here. You oughta see this. I mean, this ain't like 50 years, but this is like 35 years. I haven't cleaned it since the early 90s. We'll take it. That's good enough for us. I guess the question becomes, when did it stop being a car and start becoming a storage rack? How long ago did you actually put it inside, and why? I put it in when we moved in here. That was in the early 90s. With the Cleveland Winters, I put it in there, went to go out to start it, and you couldn't get the door open because it was frozen. So now it was stuck for the weather. Had to wait for the weather to break. I got in there to take a look, and I found a dead squirrel in the trunk. So it wasn't running when you put it in here? Oh, yeah, it was running. Oh, okay. And I'm pretty sure, we were talking a little bit earlier, and you had mentioned that you actually ordered this car, got to pick the color, got to pick the interior, got it brand new, shipped to the dealer. It's a one-owner car, and you're the only owner that's ever had. I ordered this car in February of 78. Oh, cool. I got it in just before the expiration date for ordering a new car. I was gonna get a 77, but they got the metal bumpers. This is the first year they did that front end. You wanted the fiberglass front end? Yeah. Or the plastic front end? Yeah, they were supposed to do a concept car called the Beretta, and this thing looks sweet, but it wasn't exactly what they were showing. So I waited, I got this, but it's also got the cluster dash. In 1979, they smoothed that out, and it's been like that ever since. This is the only year that it looks like that. Thank you for the opportunity. I guess you have to move all this stuff first, and then drop the car and get it in the trailer. All right, Mike. All right, Brent. Let's move all this stuff together. By let's, I mean you two. That's what I thought. Mike, what is our friendly wager of the day? I haven't even given it a thought. You're gonna have to give me some time here. Maybe after we get through here, we'll find something to wager on. If you can guess what engine's in here, he never told you. I might be close. All right. Mike knows more though, about these than I do. You know, in all honesty, this generation Camaro, I don't know much about. All right, can we at least, it's a V8 car, right? Man, I'm gonna sound like an idiot. I don't know what they put in these. What's the bet then? Mike's been talking about canes for the last. Canes? Okay, we could bet canes. Do you wanna go first, guess first, or do you want me to guess first? If they put the 305 in the Gen 3, I bet. I'm just trying to figure it out. Yeah. It wasn't, it definitely wasn't a 350. You know what? I'm gonna say that they never, they didn't change it. I'm gonna guess it was a 305 in this too. Well, I'm gonna guess that it's a larger motor, say it's a 350 in here. Ron, what engine's in here? 354, man. Oh my God! Dude, I'm 0 for 3. 3 and 0. We have been on a bit of a health kick here at WD. Everyone's trying to get a little bit healthier. You know, drop a couple pounds, put on a couple pounds of muscle. We decided that after the summer would be the best time, because let's look terrible during the summer. So I actually purposely lose all these bets so that Mike has to eat bad food and fails at his weight loss journey. What do you say? So, the owner let me know that the way that he put this up originally was lifting the front end up, putting on the jack stands, then lifting the back end up, putting on the jack stands. So we're gonna do that in reverse. I'm gonna lift the back end up from the center, pull these two jack stands, lower it down, and then take those out and bring it down. Hopefully this goes well. This thing's way up here. Yeah, it is. I'm good up here. RJ, if you could keep an eye on those front ones. Yeah, it looks pretty good. Yeah. Oh, now that's what I'm talking about. It's like those old time movies when the guy gets pulled off the stage for stinking it up. Almost. So now as we start pulling the Camaro out of the garage for the first time since 1995, I wanna ask you guys, what is your favorite generation of Camaro? We've worked on quite a few different gens on this channel. I have to say they're all pretty cool in their own right. Which one do you like best? Leave a comment below. And if you're not subscribed to our channel, make sure you take a second and hit that subscribe button because we're trying to hit 1.2 million subscribers and we're getting pretty close. We're back safe and sound with the second generation Camaro. And I gotta say, now that it's in our shop under controlled lighting and I can take a look at all the body lines in the front end, I think this is my favorite generation of Camaro ever made. I have to agree with RJ. This front end, something about it, the sharpness of it, it just takes like the 70s blocky muscle car, but right towards the end of the age where they started to use some aerodynamics that makes this car look super aggressive, really like a muscle car that looks powerful. Yeah, you can definitely tell that Chevrolet was carrying a lot of styling cues throughout all of its sports cars from this time period particularly, even down to the font of the Camaro badge here. It looks eerily similar to the Corvette badging from the same time period. And looking closer at this badge, you can see that, as Mike would say, it's seen better days and it definitely has, for some reason, starting to turn green. Let us know down below why the badge has started to turn green. I'm not sure what they made these out of, but we are gonna make sure to clean these up and make them look brand new. Much like we're about to start cleaning up the wheels and making these look brand new, we're gonna start with our tire cleaner to obviously clean the sidewalls here, a SOS pad to brighten up the tire lettering, and then we're gonna use our iron-removing wheel gel to clean up these alloy wheels and hopefully make them look as like new as possible. So let's get to it. Hey Mike, is the gas store behind the license plate back there? No, I think it's right above it. What's this? Chomps? That's not fuel for cars. That's fuel for us. Chomps is a family-owned healthy snack brand that offers sustainably sourced protein snacks with no harmful ingredients that are perfect for when we're out looking for these abandoned vehicles or we're on the go. Here at WD, we've become way more health conscious, especially when it comes to snacking. The best thing about Chomps is that it has 10 to 12 grams of protein per stick, zero sugar, and an ingredients list that anyone can understand. It's guilt-free snacking, especially when you find out that they are committed to raising their animals ethically, as well as never treating the animals with hormones or antibiotics. Chomps comes in a variety of flavors, including the original, which is Mike's favorite, salt and pepper, original turkey, or my personal favorite, the jalapeno. Drop in the comments below whether you would prefer jalapeno or original, but we all know the right answer. The best part is about Chomps, and why we were so excited to do this brand deal was because me and Mike have been buying this at the grocery store every time we're in the checkout line, every time we go grocery shopping. And actually, one time, Mike bought each of us a stick because we were going on a trip to pick up a car, and then he withheld it from me and said that I couldn't eat it until after we picked up the car. Well, then he forgot to give it to me, and he ate both of them at home without me. So, thanks Mike. So if you guys don't want your good buddy Mike to withhold Chomps from you, you can go to chomps.com slash WDDetailing, find all their flavors, buy Chomps, or find a local retailer near you that sells Chomps. And now that we're all fueled up by Chomps, it's time to get back to the Camaro and start the exterior wash process. First, Mike's gonna go ahead and use our pre-soak to help lift up all this dirt and contamination off the paint, and then he's gonna pressure wash it all the way and get it all ready for the wash. And now we're gonna blast off the bottom of the car, and the more that we use this tool, the more I actually really like it. You can see everything coming off the bottom of the car that otherwise we probably would not have gotten. So, I think in the future we're gonna continue using this tool. The only thing is if a car's too low, it's not that easy to get underneath it. But other than that, it's been pretty great. All right, so it took quite a while for me to figure out how to open up this hood, and I'm not sure if the lever's actually broken or if this is how you're supposed to open 1978 Camaros, but I had to reach all the way under the front bumper, up under one of the gaps in the bumper, and then pull this lever, and then it pops the hood up. It's not easy to reach. This isn't something that I can't imagine that they didn't have some easier option to pop the hood. But let me know in the comments if this is just missing a component that would make it nice and easy. Oh wait, let me know in the comments Let me know in the comments if the car is missing some component or you're supposed to reach under the bumper and grab that lever and just ignore what just happened there. All right, thanks to RJ for opening this hood because I don't know if I would have figured that out. And thank you to this Camaro for being a 350, got me some canes. The one thing I do know about this 350 engine that's a 5.7 liter is it was kind of the same engine as a Corvette. I'm not sure if this was the same exact L48 that is in the Corvette. You guys gotta let me know down in the comments below. But it is a 5.7 liter 350 crate motor that makes about 185 horsepower. And that's exactly what was in some of the older Corvettes that we did the C3 generation. RJ also made the comparison of how the C3 and this model has the same font of Camaro. So it kind of makes sense that would use this motor in multiple vehicles. Let me pop this top off because I see it's open. I hope we don't have any critters in here, but you never know. Hey, that's not too bad. Eh, I spoke too soon. There definitely was somebody in here. Got this moisture and a little bit of gunk in there. Some mouse droppings, but overall, not too bad. So what I'm gonna do now is remove the rest of the air box and then cover up that carburetor. We'll spray down the engine bay with the pressure washer and we'll be using our engine degreaser to degrease this motor down and get it all cleaned up so we can take it to power and performance and have them take a look at this car. Moving on to the interior of this 78 Camaro, I must say they definitely did it better in the 70s than they did in the 80s in these cars. In the 80s, everything was so boxy and bolted together. It looked very weird. I really like this dashboard, how it's kind of rounded out and the instrument cluster, how this is laid out. The one thing I don't really like about this instrument cluster is that there's no tachometer or RPM gauge, which I guess doesn't matter too much because it's an automatic car, but I really prefer to have it. It is in awful condition. This thing is really dirty. It is really moldy. Down here, it looks like we have this piece from the door. Ooh, and under it, we have, it looks like little baby mice. Ah, gross. We need to get the heck out of this thing and start on this interior. So first thing when we do the interior, we pull the seats out and of course, underneath the back seat, we found a massive mouse nest. It seems like almost every time we find mice nests, they're always underneath the back seats of cars. I don't know why mice always migrate to that exact location in every car we do, but it seems to be a very popular spot. But we're gonna go ahead and vacuum everything up. We're about to get started cleaning the seat, but first, me and Mike had a really tough time getting these out because as you can see, the seat rails are extremely, extremely rusty and we couldn't move the seat forward far enough to get to the bolts, so we had to reach in there and guess where the bolt head was. And eventually, we did get it out. But now that I'm here with the seat out of the car, I'm gonna go ahead and load this thing up with some lubricant and then I got my trusty, dusty hammer, which is Mike's favorite hammer actually. He gave this to the WD shop to use. We're going to pull the lever. I'm gonna try and brace this and hopefully get this. Wow, this thing is really frozen in there. Might have to let this WD-40 sit overnight. In the meantime, my plan of action for cleaning the seat, as you can see, it has a ton of mildew and it's all imprinted into the top layer of the vinyl, so I'm gonna use an all-purpose cleaner and a various amount of brushes as well as a steamer to try and exfoliate this vinyl and bring all that dirt and contamination to the top so I can wipe it away and then I'll put a conditioner on it and try and keep what's left of this vinyl a little bit more supple. Back to the driver's seat. Oftentimes, we work on these cars and things are stuck and difficult and cause us a bunch of headache. So, what did I do to get this undone? Sprayed it and left it alone. That is very important to give penetrating oil time to actually seep into the cracks and crevices and then B, beat the heck out of it with a hammer, but not to the point where it'd cause any structural damage. So, it's not moving perfectly because this is in terrible condition, but if I move this, I can now move it crusty with my hands still. I would say the best plan of action is to take this apart completely and clean that all out, maybe even grind down some of the rust and everything out of there and re-lubricate it, but we are under the gun here and we need to get this car over and power performance, so this seat needs to go back in ASAP. But now we're gonna clean the rest of the interior just the same way we cleaned the seats. Okay, it's time to polish the Camaro and I'm very, very excited about this one because it is a single-stage paint job and it's very, very oxidized and the reason why I like both of those two things is because single-stage lacquer is very easy to polish in order to remove the oxidation and so the 50-50 of the area that I polish is going to be a bright, deep, dark blue where the area that I haven't polished is still gonna be cloudy. It's like a cheat code. I don't have to put that much work in for an amazing result. I'm just gonna use a light polish and a foam pad. So we're gonna remove the oxidation, we're gonna bring back the color of this car, we're gonna make it shine again and all I'm gonna use is a light foam pad, a light polish and you guys will see what I mean when I talk about paint bleed is you're actually gonna see the red pad, rather, pull up all the color, the single-stage color, the blue and it's gonna turn purple. I'll show you guys real quick right now. So first, I'll show you guys the pad and now I will show you the paint underneath. Now that's flippin' awesome. Single-stage paint is really prone to oxidation but it's also very soft so you can remove it very easily which means that making it shine again is easy too. Now we're gonna finish up the detail by first doing the windows and then we're gonna dress the tires and finally add a ceramic sealant to the paint to make sure it's protected and it looks good and shiny but make sure you guys keep watching because right after the B-roll when we went to Power and Performance, I planned a surprise with them for Mike and RJ that they had no idea about and you guys don't wanna miss it, it's huge. And just as promised, as we were pulling up to Cleveland Power and Performance, I had a surprise for RJ and Mike that I knew about and planned with them and if you guys have been paying attention to the IROC Camaro that we bought a few videos ago, well, this is for you. Dude, what's that? What? He's doing a burnout! What is that? Oh my God! What is that? No way! Oh my God, Luke! Dude, that was so sick! Oh my God, you knew about this, Brent? Oh my God! You got us good with that. Dude, that is so sick! I'm gonna film a new segment! Oh my God! Dude, that thing was screaming, holy crap! He's going again. He's gonna try to get both wheels going good. I thought both of them did it, did they lock the diff? The one stopped on the one side. Holy crap, that was sick! Dude, that was, you should've told me to shut up earlier, I would've stopped talking, dude, oh my God! So I have to ask, how long did you guys plan that? You actually put us out, me and Adam been sitting at the end of the driveway waiting for him since yesterday. Because the plan was originally that you guys were gonna come Wednesday. I had texted Brent, said, hey, is there something we could do maybe? Will this work audio wise? Will it work video wise to come in the driveway while we're doing a burnout? He said, yeah, absolutely. But no, I texted Brent again today and I said, hey, what do you think? Because I don't know, he's the mastermind. Obviously he knows what he's doing, he's professional. This is what he does for a living. And he said, yeah, he gave me the green light and said, yeah, that'll work, I think it'll be good. Adam of course was on board and we just put it all together. It was just one of those things that kind of came organically because we wanted to get an organic reaction from you and I haven't seen it yet. So I hope it's as awesome as I think it will be. It was so cool. It was seriously so cool. But now that we saw a burnout from the third gen Camaro, we decided to bring you guys this week's car, our first second gen Camaro that we've ever had on the channel. Is it because nobody likes them? I don't know. Why don't people like them? I don't know. RJ loves this one. I thought it looked cool. It's a beautiful color. It's not the year for the second gen. They started off so strong. That 70 split bumper, one of the most iconic Camaros, even more than the first gen. That's a hot take. That's my personal opinion. A lot of people love the first gens. I love the third gens. In my opinion, the most iconic Camaro is that 70, 70 and a half split bumper. It's just sick. I thought this thing was cool. It kind of looks like a vulture from the front. It has that like end of that time period, the end of the 70s kind of plastic. Well, this is the first year they use urethane bumpers on these cars. Oh, okay. They were steel bumpers until 1978. That's when they put the urethane bumpers on them. It's also the first year that they offer T-tops on them. It's interesting because every time you bring us something, it's from the smog EPA era of cars. In 1970, when the second gen came out, like Adam said, they were coming out hard. They're coming out strong and they had to dial everything back because it's got the big urethane bumpers. It does give it a unique look among the other second gens. Yeah, and they have this removable grill down here too, which is really nice. Oh, nice. Show throw girl. Yeah, we found that out on accident. I mean, look at those taillights. Tell me that these cars are not related. It's got two heights and that one's got three. If only it had a wing. If it had a little bit of a wing, the back end wouldn't be so heady. Wing? Like big wing? That Camaro without a wing or a C3 Vette without a wing or this without a wing, I think just looks wrong. Do you think this needs a wing? Just that little bit. Oh, okay, okay. Just that little bit. Like this got nothing. If this had, you know what I'm talking about. Yep, little wicker bill or a little bit. Just a little bit of something just ties this together because same with the C3, just so lackluster without anything on the back of the car. I did want to say, and I feel like the WD fan base would know the answer to this question. What movie features a 78 Camaro? A big part of the cars that the WD guys have been bringing us are, what film are they known for? What television show are they known for? What movie is this known for? I did some research online and I found a couple little maybe suggestions, a couple still images, but what obscure movies are we missing? What movie is this from? If anyone was questioning why we had this car burning out at the bottom of the street when we pulled up here, it's because we actually dragged this out of a barn. It was, you know, two inches in mud in the back of a barn at the bottom of the hill. We dragged it out, we made a full video on it, and then we brought it here so that Adam and the guys at PMP could help get it back up and on the road. And to be honest, at the beginning, I thought that this engine was locked up and we were going to have to do a whole entire engine swap. Somehow Adam figured out a bunch of stuff about this car. Is there any way you can give us like a 30 second recap of all the things you had to do? It came to us, it wouldn't turn over with the wrench. It was tight, it had a large fire back by the distributor. I got it to free up, so I cranked over by hand, put a new distributor in it, fixed a bunch of wires, went to hit the key, fuel pump didn't work. We put a fuel pump in it, got fuel pressure, fired it up, it actually ran, but it was on like maybe four and a half cylinders. So we sent the injectors out to Cleveland Injector Hospital. They were toast. Got a new replacement set. It's running like it is. After that, we've been going through issues. We put a different radiator in it because that was leaking. And those rear brake lines were toast. I went through and ran a new rear brake line all the way to the back. So we got four wheels that'll stop now. And the best part is that you guys can watch that whole entire rebuild on Cleveland Power & Performance, all the repairs that they had to do in order to get this back up and running and to surprise us like that. And for that, we actually have a surprise for you, Adam. So I'm gonna go run to the truck real quick, I'll be back. We did a video, we were doing burnouts in this car like two weeks ago. I had to stay media silent. I could not spoil this for anybody. I couldn't spoil this for you guys. I couldn't show anybody but Adam, the burnout videos. And he was the one doing the burnout. I couldn't even show my wife because I didn't want her to talk about it. Confidentiality, non-compete, waterboarding, all of that was involved in keeping the secret of the burnout. But we got to show you the burnout today. Well, you can deny this, Adam, because I know we owe you some money, but I know you really love this car. I do. And we'd really love for you to be doing more work for WD. I think you've been a killer addition to the channel. So if it's all right with you, we'd love to trade you the car for your help. I can't wait. I can't wait to drive this thing to work in the morning. I can't wait to enjoy this car. This car has made my last six weeks because it's been so much fun getting it back up and running. Like I got a new Camaro. That thing's great. You hop in it and start it and drive down the road. It's fun, but I want a project. And this is a killer project. And this is awesome. The best part is- Should we end this segment before we do the reveal on the second gen with some, what do you call it? Not a B roll. What do you call it? A montage of us driving this thing? Okay, guys, we just got the Camaro back to the owner's house. It's in his driveway. He's at the door. He hasn't seen it yet. I'm going to go grab him and we're going to get the reveal. There he is. How's it going? How you doing? Good, good. You ready to see it? Yeah. Oh, wow. It shines. Been a while since it looked like that, huh? Yeah, yeah. Oh, even, yeah. Look at that. That's nice. Does it bring back memories? Yeah. Yeah, it does. Yeah, that's sharp. It's a beautiful car. Thank you very much, yeah. And we didn't try and start it just because obviously it didn't have any oil in it. Yeah. And we were kind of running a little bit under the gun. Maybe that work is best served in your hands, so. Yeah, that's my next step, is to push it back in the garage, lift up the front end, and take what remains of the oil filter off of it. I got another one in the garage to put on, and then I'll put some oil in. Sweet. And then start going through. Yeah, you'll have to promise us that, well, you don't live far away, so whenever you do get it running, let Brent know, because he'd love to show everyone the progress. I'm just not sure about the wheels, whether I want to stay with the custom wheels or go back to the steel rims with the hubcaps. I think it looks good either way. Yeah. So it can't go wrong, but I'd start with the engine first. Yeah. Thank you so much for the opportunity. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And we'll definitely help you get it back into the garage. And thank all of you for watching. We really appreciate all the support that you guys give us. If you enjoyed this video, please give it a thumbs up. And if you want to see more videos like it, hit subscribe and we'll see you next week.