Its owner was quite the handyman by the looks. No garage? No problem. He built one - using whatever materials were lying around the house, including glass windows from old ovens.

And when the plastic door pull on your 1972 Chrysler Valiant Charger does the Australian-built thing, and falls off? He made a new one, from wood.

Years later, YouTube channel Beyond the Redline has extracted this classic of a bygone era from under its blankets in its homemade garage in Braddon, Canberra (that yes, includes oven glass in the garage door), and the Charger is seeing the light of day again, up for sale in our Unique and Classic Auction.

And remarkably, even after sitting untouched for more than a decade, it even still runs. After a bit of coaxing. 

Here's the story ...

When a Charger was just a Charger

Today, even mentioning an Australian-built Charger tends to bring up four things: misty eyes, R/T badges, the Bathurst years and increasingly large amounts of money.

But this one is refreshingly removed from all of that.

The Charger arrived in 1971 as the shorter, sportier member of Chrysler Australia's new VH Valiant range, giving the company an answer to the Holden Monaro and Ford's increasingly serious performance Falcons. It won the 1971 Wheels Car of the Year award and, through increasingly potent R/T versions, quickly became one of Chrysler Australia's most important cars.

The pinnacle was the 1972 E49, with its 265ci Hemi six. This isn't one of those, however.

Instead, our car has the smaller 245ci Hemi six, a three-speed manual and very little else. When the Beyond the Redline crew inspected the option codes, their assessment was succinct: “Absolutely zero options on this thing.”

Plenty of regular Chargers have spent the past 50 years gaining R/T stripes, bigger wheels and other bits to make them look like their more valuable siblings, but this one is still much closer to the car somebody actually bought in Canberra in 1972. Well, apart from its wooden driver's door pull.

Not that regular Chargers are exactly cheap anymore. Recent documented sales of 245-powered VH Chargers have landed around the $36,000-$52,000 mark, depending on condition, while the proper performance versions can comfortably reach six figures. An E49 sold for $210,000 in 2025.

So finding an apparently solid, one-family example hiding under blankets in suburban Canberra is bit special.

More than 50 years in the same family

Beyond the Redline doesn't know every detail of this Charger's life, but we do know it was bought new in Canberra in the early 1970s and originally belonged to the current owner's brother. When he passed away, the Charger remained in the family, eventually finding its way into the homemade garage in Braddon.

The owner had been unwell for some time, so we estimate the car has been sitting there for more than a decade. Curiously, though, it hadn't simply been abandoned. The registration kept being renewed even while it was off the road.

And once the blankets were removed, things looked surprisingly promising. 

Yes, there are dents, scratches and various other “war wounds”, as Beyond the Redline puts it in their video of the extraction. And yes, there's that wooden door pull. But after checking around the usual trouble spots, the crew found remarkably little rust.

Inspecting the Charger with CARBIDS CEO Ben Hastings (right).

“From what I can see, it's pretty bloody good."

Getting it out was one challenge. Finding out whether the 245 Hemi still worked was another.

Back at the CARBIDS warehouse in Fyshwick, the team changed the oil, added fresh fuel and put some oil down the cylinders before attempting to turn it over.

The first attempt was met by sputtering signs of life, and a few more pumps and the Hemi was officially declared alive. The three-speed manual then tried to select two gears at once, which wasn't especially helpful, but after some fiddling with the linkage the Charger was driving again too.

Beyond the Redline's verdict after taking it down the road? 

“It drives really well. Really impressive.”

The Charger, all scrubbed up for our Unique & Classic Auction (closing Wednesday night, 7 October).

From a Charger to a Mighty Boy

Digging interesting old cars out of strange situations is rather the thing for Mick and Davey from Canberra-based YouTube channel Beyond the Redline, and the Charger isn't even their only entrant for this month's Unique and Classic Auction. 

They also uncovered a 1985 Suzuki Mighty Boy - a Japanese kei car that takes a slightly different approach to Australian motoring nostalgia.

Where the Charger gets a 4.0-litre Hemi six, the Mighty Boy gets 543cc. Yep, and around 7 horsepower. And where the Chrysler barely fitted inside its homemade garage, you could probably store the Suzuki underneath an outdoor table setting.

Both are now running and driving, and open for bidding in the CARBIDS Unique and Classic Auction, closing Wednesday, 7 October.

This 1985 Suzuki Mighty Boy was also rescued by Beyond the Redline.