Whoever said Ladas were appalling rust buckets simply doesn't understand the circumstances Eastern Europeans had forced upon them in the times they were built. Garage 54's English-translated YouTube video shows that the top half of a derelict Lada 1200 Engine can take a thrashing like you wouldn't believe.
Don't believe us? Look at these 1970 vintage one rubel coins created to commemorate the 100th anniversary of Vladimir Lenin's birth. To prove a point that Eastern European vehicles are a heck of a lot more sturdy than western media often give them credit for, these are to be the new exhaust valves for this old Lada.
This Lada 1200 is a Soviet example. It is not a Fiat 124 since that one didn't have flush door handles. One thing's for sure. The new exhaust valves are as Soviet as the contents of Leonid Brezhnev's ashtray around the same time these coins were minted. Valve heads were painstakingly crafted out of the coins and fused to the new tails with heat and solder to the exact specifications of those old ones. Using a lathe and a piece of rebar to form a new valve tail, they fit snuggly where the old valves used to sit.
If it were this easy to make a set of valves for a Small Block 350 Chevy motor, we bet you'd never see one in a mechanic's shop ever again. Of course, that's mostly a joke. Then again, we'd be curious to see if a modern U.S. Quarter or JFK Half-Dollar could withstand the insane temperatures most exhaust valves get up to. American coins from 50 years ago assuredly could. But modern ones? We're not quite as sure.
That's why when Garage 54 put the rebuilt engine through more burnouts than most muscle cars will see in a year, we were nothing short of amazed when the engine basically didn't skip a beat. Better still, being sprayed with a liberal dose of some scalding hot exhaust seems to have only polished up these coins to look as vibrant as standing in Lenin's mausoleum in the flesh, praying to high holy heaven that today isn't the day he finally becomes a zombie.
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