AMX GT redux – popular concept car in the midst of re-creation

Posted on Oct 14, 2018 in Featured | 2 comments

Couldn’t be that hard, many people think, to slam an AMX and a Gremlin together to re-create the long-lost 1968 AMX GT concept car, right? Except that nobody has ever whipped up such an automotive portmanteau, given it the requisite red white, and blue paint scheme, and rolled it out to see the light of day—until now.

We first got word of the project through reader Mikel Smithson, who chimed in following our recent rundown of all the cars carrying the name AMX. He spotted it at Bill Borneman’s Blast From the Past shop—what has since been passed on to his son Dave and is now known as Borneman’s Blast From the Past Restoration and Customs—in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, and put us in touch with the Bornemans.

AMC photo.

Commissioned by the same customer who had Bill put together a replica of the Alexander Brothers’ 69er showcar, the AMX GT re-creation doesn’t exactly replicate the original rivet for rivet. The original, after all, was a pushmobile built in part to hype the then-new AMX and Javelin and to test the waters with the chopback design that would eventually migrate from the Javelin platform to the Hornet platform and become the Gremlin. The Bornemans’ customer wanted to actually drive his car, so he charged the shop with figuring out how to make that happen.

The Bornemans thus located both a 1968 Javelin and a 1973 Gremlin, cut away the latter from the B-pillars forward and the former from the B-pillars aft, and started welding. Of the two cars, the Gremlin actually had the larger fender flares front and rear, so the Bornemans grafted the Gremlin’s front flares to the Javelin’s front fenders. A 1970 AMX hood has a scoop rather close to the AMX GT’s, so they located one of those to use.

Mating the two car halves together got the Bornemans in the ballpark with the right wheelbase and the right shape, but they still had plenty of details to rough out. The customer specified a pillarless hardtop like the original, which meant cutting away the window frames from the doors and getting the windows to fit. The roof also required a re-skin to get the right lip above the rear window. And unlike the original, that rear window would have to slide down into the car.

Oh, and they’d also have to completely redo the interior structure of the car to accommodate a custom tube chassis, a smoothed firewall, a custom dash and a lower floor.

The tube chassis, Dave Borneman explained, makes it easier to install the customer-specified C5 Corvette transaxle, torque tube and independent front and rear suspensions. For power, they decided to go with a Chevrolet LS3 E-Rod V-8, good for 430 horsepower in stock form and breathing through catalytic converters.

“The 69er we built for the customer is all chrome underneath, so he wanted something he could beat the hell out of,” Dave said.

A set of custom-built American Racing wheels in 18 inches will fill the wheel wells, while a pair of 1967 Corvette side-pipe covers will fill the span in between, Dave said.

The Bornemans started the project about two years ago and already had a year’s worth of work under their belt when Mikel took these photos. Dave said they probably have another six months to go before completing the car.

As for the original AMX GT? After all the research Bill Borneman and the customer did before starting this project, Bill said he believes AMC crushed the pushmobile after it was done lugging the car around the show circuit. It was last seen in the 1969 report to AMX shareholders.