Under Construction May 2010

'68 AMX
Xtreme Build
It started with Peter White, from the Boston area, who bought this '68 AMX in 1981. He drove the car through his last years of high school, then college. Once he got his final graduation papers, he moved to New York City, an environment not suitable for such a neat classic car. The car sat in storage for the next 15 years. Peter moved back to the suburbs of Wellesley, Massachusetts, with his wife and two kids. Life was stable there and he wanted to bring the AMX out of hiding and back onto the street. He charged the battery, replaced the spark plugs, and the thing fired right up. One Thursday (this he remembers clearly) he took the car out to grab dinner for the family when the front left wheel fell off. He decided that now was a good time to do a complete restoration.

Peter brought it to a shop where it spent three years for a relatively minor project. He decided to pull the car out of that shop and look for another one to finish it right. Peter gathered some business cards at the Boston World of Wheels show, and that's what brought him to Xtreme Restoration of Slatersville, Rhode Island.

Todd Lewis, owner of the shop, started out working for his neighbor's body shop out of high school, and quickly tired of the mundane crash repairs on minivans. When he was 22 years old, he started his first shop that grew to 28 employees, with 50 to 60 projects at a time. He sold the business, and started Xtreme where he could build more extreme projects.

Peter took a tour of Todd's shop, and decided to bring his AMX over to be completed. As we've all heard many times before, it came in for a typical restoration with some minor upgrades, but has since turned into a massive transformation of the car. The idea was to build it bigger and better without losing the classic look and feel of the original. They took care to leave the dash in its original form, but modified it heavily. Yes, they could have done an aluminum dash plate for one-third the price, but it wouldn't follow the theme they were after. This project has turned in a direction greater than Peter expected, and he couldn't be more excited for the final product.