Who the hell stances out a Dodge Omni?

[dart165]

This is a long and quite possibly boring story, but what the hell...

86 GLH. The Saga.

Back in fall of 2004 I was a broke college student living in Detroit when I started looking for a winter beater. I started looking at mk1 and 2 golfs, but ultimately I decided a GLH Omni would be a cool low key car that I could rock. The way I figured; it looked like a Golf (albeit a bit hokier,) but since I’d had a few Turbo dodges I knew I could push some power out of it, whereas I knew nothing about VWs.
Onto the forums I went. I found one in Lansing - a clean southern car, that the dude had invested serious money under the hood; the car was pushing almost 300hp, and was running solid 12s passes, but his price was way more than my beater budget could swing, so that was that.







Fast forward about 6 months – the car showed back up on the forums with less than half of the asking price. Over the winter, the owner had spun out and put it into a guard rail, crushing the fender, both driver doors, and damaging the rear dogleg. He rattle canned and installed a dr fender and door, but it was purely to sell the car. Nothing was gapped and it needed love. He was just discusted with it, and wanted to get out of turbo dodges and move on to something else.

Here’s what it looked like.










I hit him up, test drove it, and we struck a deal.

(This was probably mistake number one of MANY I’ve made with this car. If there is one thing I learned from my many dumb actions, it’s to not buy a modified car ever again. Over the next few years, I would come to find so many “there, I fixed it” type of mods/fixes, but more on that later.)

Stay tuned... theres 7 years of ups and downs to come.

[parttimeprojectionist]

please keep going....

[philbarbato]

[LOCALTHIRTEEN]

This is already awesome

[scrapinhatchdaily]

Bring on the oil pan breakage

[Leftouch]

Do like. I love omni glh's. I'd go apeshit if someone stanced a rampage properly.

[Nick475]

Yes. And Sean. Go buy that one down the road

[Nagah]

Go on! Now!

[johnnytsunami]

get on with it.

[Bystrov]

ive ben thinking of this a few weeks ago. saw one and thought man it looks like a rabbit, why hasnt anyone ever done it ? anyhow glad some one sees it...

[dart165]

Chapter 1. F*cking Disaster.

I drove it home to Detroit and parked it. I was really geeked to have this monster, even if it was kinda rough looking. I figured once I could scrape some money together I would have the body work done and everything would be golden.
About two weeks later I decided to take the car out and hoon a bit. I hadn’t gotten a chance to get it registered or insured yet, but this was Detroit after all, and I never said that I was the smartest of em, so off I went. Detroit at 5 pm back in '05 was like a ghost town, so pullin whole shots down back streets was no big deal at all. On one particular pull, I went under a viaduct (a train track underpass) which I didn’t realize was totally flooded. As soon as I saw the walls of water I knew I was in trouble, but I figured it I could just make it through… nope. Sputter sputter …dead.
I get out into the 6” deep water and start trying to push the thing uphill and out of the water when a DPD Crusier shows up. Mind you, the car isn’t registered or insured and I had an old plate from another car on it. The cop lined up his push bar with my bumper and pushed the Omni up outta the water. Once on higher ground I jumped out of the car to try my hand at some lame ass excuse, but before I said anything he said "Yup, these Detroit puddles’ll swallow yo shit whole” and drove off.
Well, on one side, I avoided a whole lotta legal trouble, but on the other side, it’s dusk, and I’m alone with this car that’s not runnin. I jumped back in and furiously try and get the thing started, figuring that it was a case of water choking out the exhaust that had stalled it.
(Until this point, I’d never heard of hydrolocking, which for those of you who haven’t heard of it- Hydrolocking occurs when water gets sucked into the intake and then into the engine. Water doesn’t compress like air does, so it’s gotta go somewhere!) In my case, the head gasket literally blew apart. So now with antifreeze pouring in, the car was runnin, albeit REAL rough and blowing smoking like a mid-90’s dance club, but I was able to limp it back home.
Ok, so blew a head gasket... No prob. Did it the next weekend and was thanking my lucky stars that that’s all that my little mishap cost me… till I started it up, and heard the knocking. Turns out I bent 2 connecting rods. …sweet.

[speakerboy]

Ugh! After Chapter 1, my only comfort is the foreshadowing of a 7 year journey. Please go on!

[cereal black]

Yes! Omni love.

[B Rod]

Definitely looking forward to more.

[dart165]

Chapter 2. Shady characters and disappearing Omnis

Earlier in the saga I had mentioned that I was broke and in school. So when all this went down, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time. I had no choice but to let it sit. One day I was driving around and saw a pretty serious looking drag car outside of a shop, so I stopped in and asked about who it belonged to. I met this dude, who told me that he built it himself. After talking about my predicament, he told me that he could rebuild my motor for a super reasonable price… too reasonable, now that I think about it, but hindsight is 20-20 and hope is a dangerous thing when you are desperate.
So dude shows up at my house to trailer the car to the “shop” that he would be using. My area was kinda hood, but where this shop was…. was on some 3rd world shit. Anyway, we came to the understanding that the rebuild would take a bit of time, since he would be doing it on the side, after his 9-5, which I was cool with since I was crazy busy with my last semester of school. I gave the dude half of the money to get him started.

I wish i took more pics back then, I'll try and find some more but in the mean time, here's some shots of it coming apart in the hell hole that it was being worked on in.








The busier I got, the less I was checking in, until one day I called and got no call back. I didn’t sweat it at first, but after about a week, I decided to drop in. The “shop” was still there, but homeboy, and my car were not.

You ever get that sinking feeling that you’ve done it all wrong? It was only then that I realized that on top of not having insurance on it, and never having registered it, I had absolutely zero info on this dude, except for a first name and a cell phone number!
A week passed and I got a call from a buddy who spotted the car up in Highland park with the motor sittin in the trunk, but when I showed up, the car was gone again, and the dudes at the place had no interested in giving my anything info-wise.

Now, if you're asking yourself why I hadn’t gotten the police involved at this point, you have probably not dealt face to face with the Detroit police. The short of it is, they couldn’t give a shit about a stolen car. You can walk to the police station, and fill out a report for insurance purposes, but that’s about as far as it’s gonna go. How do I know this? Because while all of this is goin on, my daily driver gets stolen…. With the transmission for the Omni in the trunk.

Talk about assed out.

Fast forward a month or 2. I had to shift my priority to finishing out school, and getting a job. I’m a car designer, and the field is crazy competitive, so the end of senior year was basically like drafts. You either got picked up by a car company, or you were seriously out of luck. I got a job, and started making a living, so the first thing is did was use one of those shade-ball "pay for info" internet reverse cellphone look-up services and tracked down dudes wife since the phone happened to be in her name.
I contemplated doing some real dumb things to get the car back, and even had an offer from a friend who had “friends” to get involved once I located it, but as soon as I started leaving her voicemails, dude was real quick to resurface. He gave me some bologna story about being outta state for some drag races which is why he didn’t return the last …47 calls, but at that point I was totally drained and I just wanted the car back. So I cut my losses and had him drop it off. The car showed up unfinished, and had acquired a bunch of dings, dents, scratches, and bruises that dude had no explanation for, but at least I had it back.

-To tackle the issue of not having a trans, my dude had a parts car GLH and I traded him some Nike Dunks for the trans. (only in the D!)
-To tackle the issue of finishing what homeboy had started, I randomly found a dude around here that specialized in turbo dodges. I brought the car to him, and eventually it was buttoned up, though pretty much all the money that I had spent the first time around was a wash....expensive life lesson learned.

Here's the car getting finally completed/gone through: