Now this is what you call a throat-Collection of cars, even if most of these cars need some work.
Gary Kuchar has been collecting and working on cars for most of his 84 years.
The Nebraska native left his family’s farm after high school to head to California as part of the early hot rod scene, where he became a body man building custom cars.
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He returned home to take over the family business after his father retired, but kept looking for cars to buy and fixed others to have fun with friends.
“He had a wish list of cars and was looking for them,” Kuchar told Fox News Digital.
“I especially like orphaned cars from companies out of business. Studebaker, Kaiser, things that are different.”
After 20 years, Kuchar gave up the farm and moved to the Black Hills of South Dakota in 1992, bringing some of his cars with him.
He parked them on his new property, which is situated in a gorge in Custer, and kept filling it up.
“I live hidden there between the rocks and the trees,” he said. “When I find a car I like, I look for a place to stick it.”
He now has dozens in various states of repair, but all very interesting.
He owns a 1961 Ford Fairlane Police and an Australian four-door Dodge Phoenix and DeSoto from the same year.
He also owns a Graham-Paige sedan and a 1930s Austin Bantam, a 1951 Nash Ambassador and a 1974 Saab Sonnet sports car.
Among the highlights scattered among the trees and sheds are a 1971 AMC AMX muscle car and a “racing” 1981 DeLorean.
Kuchar said that “some of them have been repaired, but I have fallen behind with the rest”, so he decided to put 72 of them up for sale.
“At my age, I don’t get up from the ground under them as fast as I used to,” he joked.
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VanDerBrink Auctions is offering the collection online through October 21, but in-person inspections can be scheduled.
Some cars are fully functional and others “worked when parked”, but some will need a lot of work to make them roadworthy.
Although many of them are rare, there is one that is literally unique and hard to miss.
Kuchar created a hot rod that looks like a Model T race car with an extended frame filled with three Chrysler slant-6 engines that he calls “Three of a Kind.”
“One night, I had a dream where I pictured it. So I mounted a 1925 Model T truck cab to a Graham truck frame with a Ford 9-inch rear axle and installed a motor. So I thought, ‘Why not add plus? ‘”
He never made it run on the trio of engines, but has taken it to car shows over the years.
He says he always gets a lot of attention.
He keeps five cars so he has something to play with, including another creation that is weird, if not as weird as the three-engine build.
It’s a 1966 Ford Mustang coupe, on which he attached the roof of a Volvo P1800 sports car.
“I was leaning against the Mustang, looking at the Volvo and the idea came to me, so I grabbed my tape measure and it worked fine,” he explained of the inspiration for the orange hybrid. He wears the GT1800 badge and has “A Horse of a Different Color” written on the top of his windshield.
And the ideas keep coming.
One of the cars Kuchar is clinging to is a 1951 Hudson that he plans to custom make in the style of George Barris, the late builder responsible for the original TV Batmobile and the Munster Koach from “The Munsters,” along with countless other cars. movies and hot rods.
“I’m not going to copy one,” he said. It will be my own design.