70 Rebel SST

I accentuated that distinction in THE INTERNATIONAL REBEL MACHINE NEWSLETTER. The reason I was writing the newsletter was to help me identify owners of 25A (striped Red, White and Blue) Machines who needed stripe kits because I needed one myself. No one was selling stripe kits then. I needed ten orders to make up a run. The newsletter was the vehicle. 

The idea was that a striped Machine was inherently worth a grand more than a solid Machine. If it wasn't true before, it became true. Actually 25A owners paid more for their cars when they ticked the option for the stripe kits.

So my stories were geared to ensuring the magazines became hooked enough to start including Machines in their offerings. It worked. Machines started appearing in the magazines after a long hiatus and the extra publicity started driving Machine prices up as they should have been all along. 

The first Machine to sell for over 20 grand was when Nick Patterson bought the Anderson Rebel from a concert Promoter here in Canada. It was at the time considered the best known example of a 25A car. Rich Miller's Morrocan Brown Machine was an unrestored 8,000 mile car and still not worth anywhere near the same price. It was also mostly unknown to the world since only his friends knew he had it.

Before that I stated publicly that it would happen and I got jumped on by all the AMC bullies of the day for saying so. But I had the last laugh less than two months later. The value of Machines is going to rise some more because I and others are going to start publicizing them again. 

From the mid-nineties the prices kept rising in step with the value of money. The value of money was going down. 

So really the real value of Machines has remained static since day one practically while the value of money has steadily decreased. A soft drink cost ten cents in 1970. I haven't bought one in a long time so I don't know what the cost now but that gives you a platform upon which to decide the value of a Machine or anything else that you know the prices of. Machines listed at $4,400 in 1969 -70 what ever a 10 oz soft drink costs today gives you the multiple of what a Machine costs today most likely. Pretty well everything rises at the same rate. 

There are exceptions and the automotive exceptions are the high performance Chrysler built. They were cheap junk compared to all other muscle cars but the Hemi engine and their success at the track inflated their value. So did the Dukes of Hazard. That didn't happen for any other marque or at least not to that extent.