The El Camino has been painted!

Rebuilding Tim’s El Camino has been a dream of his for awhile now. The ELCO is his daily driver, but also the car that showcases his paint and body skills. We’re excited to have made the time to work on our own car, and look forward to a summer of car shows!

The paint job is completely custom, of course. Tim has been dreaming of a certain paint color for his car for a long time, but could never find just the right color. So instead, he worked with our paint specialist to custom mix his own color. He found a blue paint and added drops of violet in little by little to get just the right hint of purple.

There are a few different design elements on the car (…or is it a truck?). The lace on the hood is wrapped in silver scallops, with silver stripes encasing the lace details on the rest of the car. The lace pattern is featured on the hood, roof and sail panels.

There were quite a few layers to this paint job, including lace pattern, pinstriping, and silver scallops. We use actual lace to create the look. The great thing with using lace fabric is that it gives us a lot of different options for patterns. For the El Camino, Tim chose a bandana type of lace pattern, as you can see here.

The rear license plate was shaved flush on the tailgate and relocated underneath to give us plenty of space for the TD Customs logo. The TD Customs logo is proudly represented on the tailgate, as well as on each of the fenders. The ones on the sides of the car are light up with Lumilor, our electroluminescent paint. We’ll have to get some pictures in the dark soon.

The Heart of the ELCO: A 388

The motor in the TD Customs El Camino is a custom built 388 stroker motor that we rebuilt from the old 350. It has Scat forged internals, Wiseco pistons, competition rods, Tricflo push rods, Adept performance 1.6 roller rocker arms, and a 505 lift Voodoo cam. We decided to go with the 505 lift Voodoo cam to give the car a lopey idle (Tim’s choice, not mine lol) and plenty of low-end torque. For the transmission, we went with a mild built turbo 350 and a  2600 stall converter. In an attempt to put all this new power to the ground, the car has 3:73 gears and Eaton posi unit. The exhaust has Hooker long-tube headers into a full 2 1/2 inch exhaust with Thrush welded mufflers.

We also paid attention to the aesthetics of the engine, choosing blue components when we could to match the paint job. The motor is accented with anodized blue roller rocker arms and an anodized blue two-piece aluminum Aeroflow timing cover. We also got the intake filter in blue.

Tim happened to stumble on the clear valve covers online, and hadn’t seen anything like them before. The distributor is also clear so you can see working, moving internals. I must say, it’s pretty cool to see all the blue pieces working together as the motor is running.

If all this talk of motor parts sounds like another language to you (I hear ya), the motor is basically a well built performance motor that’s going to be fast, loud but not obnoxious, and pretty to look at!

It’s been hard squeezing our own El Camino in when we have so much other work in the shop, but we were determined to make it happen. We’ve been lucky enough to have had some extra help and got it on the road this week!

I don’t know what Tim is most excited about; the new, awesome paint job or the supped up motor he finally gets to break in now. It’s safe to say he’s like a kid on Christmas!

Coming soon we’ve got our motorcycle that is getting a matching paint job, so stay tuned because it’s going to be just as awesome, if not even MORE SO! We’ve got exciting things coming. Make sure to Follow us on Facebook to keep up with all the fun!