Interesting, Rare, Muscle Car Restorations At Iron Stable Garage

Few shops in the Florida do top-tier muscle car restorations better than Iron Stable Garage in Largo. We found these amazing vehicles in process there.

The shop, long known for its award-winning Superbird and other Mopar restos in the Tampa Bay area, is now famous for its Chevy, Ford and other GM muscle car projects, too.

The shop will also maintain your classic car or rebuild its engine, or basically any other essential service.

We became aware of a few of its projects recently. Most intriguing to us was the 1970 Chevelle SS396/375. The L78 option was long the top-tier powerplant in the Chevelle, but Chevy stopped taking orders for them in October of 1969 to make room for the mighty LS6 454, with its food-chain topping 450-horsepower.

Only 2,144 L78 Chevelles were built in ’70 before Chevy put the option to bed.

The L78 used a solid-lifter cam and rectangular port heads. In most dyno tests, it made around 415 to 425 gross horsepower. But cubic inches were king in 1970, and the mighty 454 Rat was even more powerful.

According to Iron Stable Garage General Manager Don Keefe, this Fathom Blue Chevelle SS will be among the nicest, if not the nicest, Chevelle of its kind when it’s completed later this month.

The L78 now has lowered compression to run on pump unleaded and a different cam than stock. It dyno’d at 415 horsepower.

Iron Stable Garage was tasked with saving this ’65 Mustang from resto-shop hell. The car sat in another establishment for 20 years. It was painted, then stuck on a storage trailer for the better part of two decades, where the paint deteriorated.

The ’66 Impala (below) is in for an engine swap. Iron Stable pulled the 383 stroker someone installed its its place will be this 396 big-block. Other upgrades include a new bucket seat interior, as well as a console and correct steering column.

If you are wondering, the Impala is painted 2019 Ram charcoal grey, and it has a hint of purple in it.

Not every car is getting the full restoration treatment. Case in point the ’65 Olds you see here. It has a 1967 4-4-2 drivetrain in it, but the engine was not running properly. The timing could not be set correctly. Everyone was scratching their heads.

Turns out it had a cam that was intended for another version of the Olds V-8 with a different cylinder block angle. Iron Stable had Rocket Racing and Performance in Wisconsin grind a correct cam for it. Along with new lifters, the engine is going back together the way God and Dr. Oldsmobile intended.