Some restorations happen quickly with a large checkbook and a professional shop. Fowler Malone took a considerably longer route with his 1950 Oldsmobile Rocket 88 Deluxe Club Coupe, spending nine years’ worth of weekends bringing the classic back to life in his own garage.
The finished Oldsmobile recently appeared on Lou Costabile‘s My Car Story at the Midnight at the Oasis car show in Yuma, Arizona. Wearing Marol Gray paint and plenty of gleaming chrome, it now looks worlds apart from the tired and rusty car Malone started with.
Malone has owned the Rocket 88 since 2014, although his connection to the model stretches back much further. His father was an Oldsmobile fan, while a high-school friend owned a 1950 Oldsmobile that left a lasting impression on him.
Most of the restoration was completed by Malone himself, with outside help primarily limited to the paint and upholstery. Finding and restoring some of the car’s harder-to-source trim pieces turned the project into a serious exercise in patience.
Nine Years Of Weekend Work
Vintage restorations can become especially challenging when replacement pieces aren’t readily available, and Malone encountered exactly that problem. Some of the stainless trim simply couldn’t be found, forcing him to repair the original pieces by hammering out substantial dents and refinishing them.
Other details required plenty of searching. Malone replaced the deteriorated steering-wheel emblem with a much better example, while copper trim discovered during the restoration was carefully polished after initially appearing as little more than dirty brown metal.
The interior was professionally upholstered to retain its period-correct appearance. Its dashboard remains wonderfully simple by modern standards, featuring traditional gauges, a radio, push-button starter and controls for the ventilation and defroster systems.
Even the day/night rearview mirror was notable equipment for 1950. One imperfection remains: the speedometer currently has a problem, explaining why its mileage reading isn’t particularly useful.
The Rocket 88 Helped Define Early American Performance
The most important hardware sits beneath that enormous hood. Malone’s Oldsmobile retains its 303-cubic-inch Rocket V8, an engine that helped establish the Rocket 88 as one of America’s early postwar performance cars.
Oldsmobile introduced the overhead-valve Rocket V8 for 1949, pairing relatively modern V8 power with a comparatively compact body. That combination gave the 88 a formidable reputation in early stock-car racing and helped establish a formula American manufacturers would pursue for decades.
Malone’s example uses a Rochester two-barrel carburetor with an unusual backdraft arrangement sometimes nicknamed the “turtle back.” It also retains its large oil-bath air cleaner, although the electrical system has been upgraded from the original six-volt setup to 12 volts.
The car now breathes through dual exhausts, and during Costabile’s walkaround, the V8 settled into a remarkably smooth idle. The restoration wasn’t limited to making the Oldsmobile presentable for static displays; it remains a running, driving car.
A Restoration With A Personal Connection
Perhaps the most impressive part of this Rocket 88 isn’t any individual chrome piece or mechanical component. It’s the amount of time Malone was willing to invest in recreating a car that had stuck in his memory since his high-school years.
Nine years of weekends equals hundreds of opportunities to decide a project is taking too long, becoming too expensive, or simply occupying too much garage space. Malone kept going, handling much of the work himself until the once-weathered Oldsmobile looked ready for a 1950 showroom again.
The result is a particularly handsome survivor from an important period in American performance history. Plenty of people dream about owning the cars they admired when they were young; Malone spent nearly a decade making sure his was done properly.