Vehicle Description
Wow, this factory-ordered 1977 Plymouth Gran Fury Police car is
really one of a kind. Fully restored with the original 440 V8 with
an added 6pack setup. Restored by Totally Auto In PA at a cost of
over $50,000 who specializes in Mopar restoration. Original ordered
with the Brougham package which gives the added options like power
windows, carpet and upgraded material seats. During restoration
some items where added/changed like the round side markers lights
which give it an awesome look. Show quality exterior finish and is
laser straight. Featured in Mopar Magazine. A true must see!
Mopar Magazine Write Up: Lou Sitars, in Southeast Pennsy, is fairly
typical among Mopar enthusiasts, in that he's a fifty-five-year-old
guy who remembers when we were buying these things as nothing more
than used cars and paying nothing more than used car prices for
them. Obviously, those days are gone. Like us, Lou started buying
hot Mopars as playthings in the late seventies, and continued
buying them as toys and as collector's items as their values
increased steadily throughout the eighties and nineties. Through
the decades, he's had everything from Road Runners to "Cudas to
Challengers, and just about everything in between, and like many of
us, having grown up around these cars, and having been surrounded
by them for the last forty years, you start to reach a saturation
point. It's not a matter of not liking the cars anymore, that's
hardly the case, but we know a lot of hobbyists who look at
something like a '70 GTX (for example), and having seen zillions of
them, remember the days when you could pick them up for $2,000 in
decent shape, and you just have a hard time wrapping your head
around dropping $35K to put that car in your driveway, knowing
there will be a hundred of them at the next big Mopar show you
attend. Yeah, you still like the car, but there's just a struggle
between the ears about 'em that's hard to overcome when it comes to
going out and buying one. That's pretty much where Lou's head was
back in 2005 after selling his last muscle Mopar, and he wanted
something different. Thinking and thinking about what should come
next, Lou was drawn back to something he'd been fascinated with in
his childhood years, and all of us around his age know good and
well what he's talking about - cop cars. Back when we were kids,
the world of cop cars was very different than it is today. Every
department had different types of cars with different paint
schemes, they usually upgraded or changed cars at least every two
years, and even within each department, there were a dozen
variations of the cars themselves depending on what they were
intended. There were the posher police chief-type cars, the
high-speed interceptors (which honestly sometimes had hood scoops
on them), and the general run-of-the-mill cruisers or "beat" cars.
Lou was fascinated with them when he was a kid because his town got
new cop cars every year, and it was always fascinating to see their
new cars and check out the latest lights and gadgets, the
old-school sirens just sounded cool, and when their carbs opened
up, there was no mistaking that deep and sudden roar that came from
their generally less-restricted dual exhaust systems. Yeah, we know
a lot of departments use the new Chargers these days, but if you
were around back then, you already know, cop cars were cooler back
in the sixties and seventies. So, that got Lou into the mindset of
thinking he should look into buying an old police car for his next
hobby machine; it would be a lot of fun, fulfill childhood
fantasies, and it would be darned affordable compared to most other
options, and that's how the search began. In the beginning, he
didn't have any particular year or model cop car in mind, but
shortly after the search began, he ran across an ad on the interweb
for a 1977 Plymouth Gran Fury that was reportedly a former North
Carolina State Police cruiser. The car was still in North Carolina,
it looked decent, and the price was more than reasonable, so Lou
took a trip south and met a guy named Tony Graham, who happened to
know pretty much all there was to know about the car. In an unusual
twist of fate, Tony was the big Plymouth's second owner, having
acquired it directly through a state surplus auction in 1980! He'd
bought it for his wife, and she had used the Fury as her daily
driver for the better part of the next twenty years, but with the
car just being rather old, it was time to let it go. He had a
decent amount of paperwork with the Fury, and it's a very unusual
car in that it was definitely a North Carolina State Police car
when new, but it was delivered new with a solid black paint job,
rather than their customary silver-and-black, and it had the deluxe
Brougham package on it, which gave it a posher interior and a bit
more trim than you'd find in a regular cruiser, and power windows,
too. Both Tony and Lou could only speculate, logically, that this
had been a troop commander's car, or some such thing, as it was
only used from '78 and retired before 1980 when it turned up at the
auction; it had a lot of non-standard deluxe features, it was
non-standard solid black, and the mileage was very low in 1980
(somewhere around 30.000 miles). Without a speck of rust on it and
an immaculate original interior still in place, Lou wasn't going to
pass this one up and returned home with the biggest Mopar he'd ever
bought in the late summer of 2005. For those first few years, Lou
just enjoyed cruising around in the big 440-powered beast, which
ran pretty darn good and drove well enough. The car was wearing an
old black repaint that looked to have been done just prior to the
auction, but nothing else major had ever been done to it. Lou put a
push bar on the front, started collecting cop car lights and light
bars, and eventually planned to do something with the Gran Fury,
but he didn't want to stop driving it long enough to do too much -
it was also a bit of the "If it ain't broke, don't fix it"
philosophy, because the car wasn't that bad as it was. By 2014,
however, the police wagon was starting to show its age and needed
some attention if it was going to be a reliable, fun car. Having
met Dave Ferro at local car shows years before, Lou began talking
to Dave about bringing the car over to Totally Auto for a
revamping, and they finally came to an accord when Lou brought
Ferro the Plymouth and pretty much told him to "Go nuts," with only
one major request "Just don't paint it black." Having a lot of
black cars Through the years, and being tired of trying to keep
them clean, Lou was leaning more towards some type of gray or
silver metallic - obviously, the customer always knows best! Thus,
the project began as a side-burner bit of work by Totally Auto and
Ferro's crew not long after Carlisle 2014, and about every six
weeks or so, Lou would take the forty-five-minute drive to Dave's
shop to see what was going on, bounce ideas off each other, see
what Dave had come up with, and every so often, drop off a check.
So, it went, for the next two-and-a-half years, since there wasn't
any particular hurry to get the thing done. This is a good thing,
and a bad thing, because if you know Dave Ferro, that gives him too
much time to think, but it also results in some spectacularly
well-done work where no little detail gets overlooked. Things
started off innocently enough, with Totally Auto shaving almost all
the trim and emblems of the car to give it a cleaner look, then he
revamped the push bar up front, adding another bar in the middle,
then he set about working on the Fury's suspension to get it
sitting lower and make it into a better handing machine; this
entailed changing out the rear springs and rebuilding the fr...for
more information please contact the seller.
