On July 11, 2016 I found this Hornet Hatchback on a Craigslist ad in North Carolina and I live in Indiana.
I had been looking for almost a year for reasonably priced Hornet Hatchback.
When I called Steve about it he told me the interior had got wet and he figured the floor pans were gone.
Since he could get $200 for it at the scrapyard I offered him $200 and he accepted the offer. I told him I couldn't pick it up for awhile and he was okay with that.
About mid October my friend Aaron that I got a job on an oil rig in the Gulf shows up at my house with a brand new pickup truck and want's to go on a road trip.
Aaron says, "If I pay for fuel and food we can take his truck."
I call Steve and tell him I ready to come pickup the car. He tells me he's in Florida on vacation, but come on down and he'll let the neighbors know we are coming.
Now it's a 600 mile trip one way and we leave about 2pm in the afternoon, we stop a few times and get down to Bakersville, NC about midnight.
We are on a skinny dirt road, on top of a mountain, and it's pitch black. The exhaust is still hanging down from the 6-cylinder removal, but we can't see it.
It hooks on the underside of the trailer (I didn't mention we had no tools with us) so it takes us an hour to get it broke off and get the car loaded on.
Around 1:30am we start for Indiana. Now I went to grad school in Johnson City, TN and there is an all night joint called Mid City Grill that has great hamburgers.
We stop in and the owner Jeff who I know lets us wash up in the back and we get some food. Now it's 3:30am and we leave J.C. for Indiana.
We drove all night and got to Indianapolis around 10:30 am so I stopped at a carwash and cleaned it up a bit and then ran by a friends house to show it off.
Around 1pm we roll in with neither of us ever sleeping. Total cost of fuel and food $178, so I now have the car home for $378.
Over the course of about 5 months I sold everything off the car that I didn't need or want for around $925. At this point I've made $547 profit and had a great story to tell.
After I stripped and sold the parts I cleaned the body up and then life got busy and it sat in the garage for years with me working on it here and there.
First thing I did was cut the drip rails off and TIG welded the skins back together and then it sat for a few years while life went by.
Then in the spring of 2023 I got the time and interest to start working on it again. I started working on it by cutting the windshield wiper pivots out and filling in the cowl vents.
Since I am making a fiberglass hood mold that extends all the way to the windshield, this had to be done, but then winter came and I didn't play with again until April of this year.
This year I removed the dent in the C-pillar, welded in 23 trim holes on the passenger side, removed a dent in the passenger door, sanded the roof down, did all the bodywork over
those areas, primed and block all those areas. Between the materials it took to get to this point am probably just now to the breakeven point and I have ZERO dollars in it.
That's my story of how cheap I am and I am sticking to it.
Tom
call: make / manufacturer:
amcmodel name / number:
Hornet
☎ (828) ***-XXXX
Posted: 12 days ago
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amc hornet - $300 (Bakersville nc)
rolling chassis
no motor no transmission no title
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