It's been said that you can never really own a Camaro Super Sport - you can only hope to possess one for a while. Still, when Tim Slager picked up his 1967 SS a few years back, he knew right away that he wanted to leave his mark on the car.
"We were looking for a car to resto-rod or high performance-ize without destroying the value of a legitimate Super Sport," Slager explains, "so this became kind of my own version. It looks like a Super Sport, but it's my own deal."
An experienced builder with restoration experience stretching back decades, Slager and his son handled all of the Camaro's body and engine modifications in their garage, overhauling everything - transmission, brakes, frame and interior. But, when it came time to outfit the car with a show-worthy audio system, they deferred to the pros at Auto Toyz in Coralville, IA. "I kind of let them have a free hand with the system," Slager says, "so I had no preconceived notion of what it would look like."
Since completing the project last year, Slager has shown the car off at several Camaro meetups in the Midwest and has taken it to a number of Goodguys Rod & Custom shows in the area. He's also planning a trip to the American Camaro Association Show later this year.
But this SS is more than just a show car, it's also one of the Slager family's regular drivers. "This is no trailer queen," he laughs. "It started out as a fun high school project car for my son, but we just got a little carried away with it."
Modern soundIt terms of audio, the Camaro was essentially a blank canvas when it got to Jeremy Parrish at Auto Toyz. "The body work was done, the motor work was done, there was just no interior in the car," Parrish remembers. "And he handed us the keys and said 'I want an awesome stereo.'"
But Slager also wanted to retain as much of the Camaro's factory interior look as possible. He was planning to replace the seats and update the paneling, but everything was still going to look fairly stock. The goal was to install a thoroughly modern audio system without sacrificing the car's late '60s appeal.
Still, like most older cars, the Camaro was noisy on the road, so the installation team started with a full treatment of sound dampening material. "Everything metal in that car is black from the HushMat," Parrish says. "We sprayed it all."
From there, it was on to the head unit. Slager liked the clean lines of the Eclipse CD8445; and it offered the high-performance sound that he was looking for. Additionally, by installing it into the factory dash opening, the black faceplate all but disappears into the dash, exactly like Slager wanted.
Since a factory look was the goal, there was only so much that Parrish and Co. could do in terms of speaker placements. Rather than cut into Slager's new door and dash panels, they installed a set of Orion P6.2 component speakers into custom kick panels. "Basically, the owner had some factory panels that were in all right shape," Parrish says, "so we glassed them and bonded them and painted them up so they look like they're supposed to be there. Now the tweeter fires up and toward you, just like a standard kick panel would. It was really the only place to put them."