Preserving The Essence Of This 1982 AMC Spirit's Authenticity

A young guy working with history

Preston Rose understands. He’s the 26-year-old owner of this 1982 AMC Spirit. If Preston’s name seems familiar, it’s probably because he assists historian Casey Maxson in documenting historic vehicles for preservation at the Library of Congress. That’s an effort that began life as the Historic Vehicle Association. The idea is to create a register of historic vehicles along the same lines that the Historic American Buildings Survey documents America’s real-estate treasures before they’re lost to accident or redevelopment. So far, it’s a catalog that includes everything from President Taft’s White steam car to a street-racing Hemi-powered 1970 Dodge Challenger.

Even more so than historical buildings, old cars are subject to modification, deterioration, and outright destruction over time, depending on the financial means, goals, and even whims of the owner. That’s likely why this Spirit appealed so much to Preston. It suffered minimally from previous-owner syndrome and putting it back to factory has mostly been a matter of fun projects rather than major overhaul.

That’s not to say Preston doesn’t know how to do all the heavy lifting of restoring a car. His dad, Paul Rose, was a co-founder of Vintage Motorcar Company in Inwood, West Virginia, and is the current proprietor of Custom Interiors in Ridgeway, Ohio, but the family infatuation with cars goes back even further, to Preston’s grandfather

A 1951 Chevy started it all

“My grandpa was kind of a car guy,” Preston says. “But not an expert or anything, you know. He built houses.” That makes him more or less like most American men of his age. Knowledge of basic mechanics was a survival skill for most of the 20th century and by extension, often gave rise to pastimes of a DIY nature.

“In the mid-’70s, he saw a ’51 Chevy Deluxe two-door sedan—it came with trim and a clock—for sale parked in front of a post office in Maryland near DC. He thought, first of all, that he liked the car.” It reminded him of another and may have appeared quite pristine by comparison. “Grandpa’s attraction to the Chevrolet was due in part to nostalgia. He was stationed with the Air Force in Newfoundland in the ’50s and while he was there, he had the rattiest, most used up ’50 Chevy. The door hinges rotted off the body and the trunk was full of cinderblocks for traction,” Preston says.

Such an unkillable nature probably played into the rest of his justification for buying the car. It would be ideal transportation for the next generation of drivers in the household. “My aunt was about to get her license. Grandpa thought it would be perfect to have a car that reminded him of his childhood and to teach her to drive a stick on—it’s a three-speed manual. He had my aunt follow him home in his pickup truck so nobody could see there wasn’t a plate.”

While presumably Grandpa Rose could have taken out an ad in Hemmings Motor News back then to find repair parts for the ’51, he invested some sweat equity instead when sprucing up the car. “He got it home, put pop-rivet patches in, and did stuff you would expect when a carpenter works on a car. He was just an average Joe. At the time it was just an old clunker, and my aunt wasn’t a car girl or anything, so she was kind of embarrassed to be seen driving this 20-year-old car to high school,” Preston says. “They had a 1968 Galaxie convertible, so she said she was going to drive that and not the Chevy. My grandpa was bummed that she didn’t like the car.” Aunt Christy now kicks herself for not appreciating the ’51 more back then. In fact, she’s had a string of oldies since, including “a Keller-era Plymouth, a ’64 Corvette, and a few Beetles,” Preston says. Nevertheless, her loss was young Paul’s gain. “My dad was 12 at the time and my grandpa told him, ‘Paul, here’s a Chilton’s book. Don’t run yourself over with it or anything.’ My dad fixed up the Chevy and learned to run it around the orchard.” It was the beginning of that career in auto restoration that would take him to apprenticeships at world-class establishments before going on his own.

You absolutely do not have to be a car person from birth to get into old cars, and sometimes kids immersed in car culture will run headlong the other way when they get to adulthood, but Preston is now the third-generation owner of the Chevy.

“He gave it to me when I turned 12, the age that he got it, and while it’s not a particularly nice car—my dad had somewhat fixed it up, but he’s always told me he was kind of embarrassed about the work he’d done—it’s a good-driving car. It’s the right car to go get an ice-cream cone in.” No hot rod, despite a 235-cu.in. engine swapped in place of the original 216-cu.in. six-cylinder, the no-fuss ’51 probably set the stage for Preston appreciating cars for things other than their ability to accelerate and/or go fast. Driving fun comes in all sorts of forms, after all.

An appreciation for this Iron Duke-powered Spirit was not a foregone conclusion, however, as Preston wasn’t necessarily raised in the AMC milieu or with an appreciation for Detroit-style cars (regardless of AMC’s actual Kenosha, Wisconsin, provenance) produced in the 1973-’86 era between the introduction of things like “park-bench” 5-mph bumpers, catalytic convertors, and the American auto industry’s eventual reinvention of itself via digitalization. In fact, cost was something of a factor, as was romance.

“When I was probably in my early 20s, I started dating my girlfriend, Hallie Krala, who has two AMC Eagles—a wagon and a Kammback—and I thought they were pretty neat. I ended up getting a Spirit after that, but I didn’t know much about it. I learned along the way and decided I liked those cars quite a bit. I’ve been driving the AMCs for four or five years now.”

That first Spirit was not this one, though he’s still got that less-pristine Iron Duke/automatic-equipped 1980 sedan. It provided a valuable insight into the workings of our featured car and his ability to recognize it as something worthy of preservation.

“Most people who are into AMCs see one with an Iron Duke four-cylinder and they say, ‘oh no, I want the car with the AMC engine,’ so I found them affordable,” Preston says. That’s right: While it is emphatically not true that American Motors sourced all its parts from other carmakers, the perpetual fourth runner of the American auto industry also didn’t hesitate to occasionally purchase good designs from others—something the Big Three did on occasion, too. In this case, the 2.5 liter/151-cu.in., 82-hp engine was a Pontiac design, sold by General Motors to AMC for use in both cars like the Spirit and in certain Jeeps. While hardly a coveted option (or non-option, as it was literally the standard engine), the Iron Duke’s origins as an engine for the Pontiac H-body line of RWD compacts makes it a logical choice in the Spirit. The partnership worked out better than the notoriously stillborn GM Wankel rotary engine. The GM Wankel’s failure to materialize thus heavily compromised AMC’s attempt at revolutionizing compacts with the Pacer.

Since AMC long ago merged into Chrysler Corporation and is now a dormant Stellantis brand, it’s probably true that the conservative approach of continuing to generate new iterations of a 13-year-old design, complete with cost-leader, bare-bones transportation like this, was a losing course. Nevertheless, if you’re a fan of earlier cars, you’ll find a lot to like in Preston’s Spirit.

“It feels substantial,” he says. “A lot of what makes them ‘not-very-competent drivers cars’ is what makes them similar to older cars: somewhat heavy steering, doors that weigh 200 pounds, stuff like that. The springs are kind of cushy and they have tall tires, a lot of sidewall—features that make them feel older than they are.”

It’s worth remembering that those making judgments about driving competence were a generation of car journalists very, very into anything not made here. American driving manners were out, and high-winding, Eurasian hatchbacks were in. Unbound by such early ’80s fads, the modern driver is free to enjoy the Spirit for what it is.

“The way this one is equipped, with this engine, it’s really at its best putting around town and on low-speed highways. It’s really not geared for anything over 65. You can go faster, but the Iron Duke isn’t really a revvy engine,” Preston says. The next year, AMC actually offered the overdriven Borg-Warner T-5 five-speed in the Spirit, but this car has its ancestor, the T-4 four-speed. With a direct-drive top gear, that means the limiting factor becomes the 3.08:1 axle ratio.

The combination of the Iron Duke with a clutch pedal changes the character of the car dramatically, compared with an automatic. All 125 lb-ft of torque are available and while nobody outside can probably tell, the driver is having fun. Yeah, fun. In a basic transportation car. It seems the Spirit has aged like a fine wine in some respects, buoyed by comparison with what has come since.

“I think with a four-speed, it’s a much better car to drive. It’s not as if either car was ever designed to be fun to drive. Really, AMC was catering to people who wanted one of the cheapest economy cars available. Their advertising was that the car was really tough—tougher than Chevette or whatever. The four-speed makes it a much more drivable car: You’re not working with much with the Iron Duke.”

The secret to happiness is knowing how to use a vacuum gauge

A lot of credit must go to Preston, however, in maximizing what the Iron Duke offers. Just as the smog-control systems of the ’70s and ’80s suffered at the hands of inexperienced and unenthusiastic tuners (a malady also common to British-built cars with Lucas electrical systems), so too can they benefit from the attentions of someone who respects them and wants them at peak performance. Sure, the era’s smog controls really complicated what were still recognizably ’50s and ’60s technologies underhood (computerization probably had a psychological benefit to mechanics no longer confronted by miles of vacuum hose and electro-mechanical sensors), but they were mostly well-designed at the outset and will provide like-new service if kept in like-new condition.

Unfortunately, Preston hasn’t entirely been able to replicate the showroom experience in the engine bay—some of the era’s smog parts have gone extinct. That’s too bad, because AMC has a reputation for having done a notably good job adapting mid-century engines to late-century emissions controls.

“I’ve heard from others, who were admittedly probably biased because they were AMC people, that when the emissions systems are kept up and people haven’t gone disconnecting vacuum lines and plugging things, they felt almost as good as a fuel-injected car at the time.

“I’ve tried to be a hero and keep all the emissions stuff intact and make it run well. I haven’t succeeded. I’m looking for a thermal switch that screws into the thermostat housing and controls vacuum. It has three vacuum ports on it, and it will allow the ignition timing to advance while also letting cold air into the air cleaner and stuff like that. Even stuff like finding that switch, I’ve had difficulty with,” Preston says. “The air-injection pipes started leaking, they’re very thin metal tubes with pipe thread fittings that go into the exhaust manifold. The air pump seized, and I don’t know the first thing about repairing one or finding a set of those lines, so I’ve removed those parts and plugged the ports in the head.”

Qualify that by saying our owner has failed only in his attempt to keep all the emissions parts in place. The car does run well, something Preston credits to those same basic mechanic’s skills that made his grandfather think he could take on the ’51 Chevy way back when.

“I’ve learned to tune them to be as good or better than when they were set up originally. I take pride in my ability to set timing, advance, jetting, and stuff like that to make them feel good to drive. The vacuum gauge has probably been the most useful tool I’ve ever had. It will tell you how an engine’s feeling and what’s going on. There are so many ways you can use a vacuum gauge to determine a lot of factors in how an engine’s running.”

And the engine runs well with almost its full complement of period parts, including many that are commonly replaced on other Iron Dukes. Take the Rochester Varajet carburetor, a progressive two-barrel that is essentially one primary and one secondary barrel from a Quadrajet, allowing the engine to maximize its economy at low speeds while still permitting enough venturi area for higher speeds. Many less dedicated to preservation tossed those away in favor of similar carbs from Holley or Weber. A concession, meanwhile, is the vacuum-advance pot on the distributor, which comes from a 1960s Chevrolet.

“That limits the total advance. In the early ’80s they were trying to squeeze every bit of efficiency out of these engines, but I was starting to get some detonation. They had these set up with 35 degrees total advance and I’ve eliminated some of that. It’s more sluggish at highway speeds, but it’s safer on the engine,” Preston says.

That safety margin is there in part to protect the original, un-rebuilt rotating assembly. Preston has ambitions to rebuild the Iron Duke one day and doesn’t want to damage any parts through abuse in the meanwhile. You could say that’s the theme of the whole car.

“The whole idea is not that I’m trying to put it away and totally try and keep it perfect. I don’t feel bad driving it, I don’t drive it every day, but I’ll take it out on weekends, to a show, or whatever. I just want to keep it as original as I can.”