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| mn :: corvair | |
I'd always wanted a classic car, but I wasn't interested in driving a muscle car around. I just don't think I'm a Mustang-drivin, Camaro-drivin, backwards-baseball-cap kinda guy. I'd love a Studebaker or a Sunbeam, but I didn't have that kind of money to spend on a car. So I was looking at Falcons and Darts and Novas, and I came close to buying a 66 MGB in need of serious help. Then one day my wife saw an unusual car with a crowd around it and a For Sale sign in the window...
Here's the vital specs:
I'm told that the car was originally bought somewhere in the Rocky states (CO?) and driven to Walnut Creek, California. The owner quit driving it within a few years and it sat in a field for the next two decades. When her husband retired, he took on the car as a project and rebuilt the engine -- at 30,000 original miles. Unfortunately he used the factory specified neoprene O-rings, which degenerate after about six months in oil :-(. They've been replaced with Viton rings and the car run exceptionally well. He also put bondo on the car (badly) and painted it (fairly well).
The car was next sold to Matthew Calkins in Berkeley, CA. Matthew had a sunroof installed, completely overhauled the brakes and suspension, and did a lot of work on the interior. My only complaint is that he tended to use silicon to plug leaks instead of replacing the eroded rubber. Matthew put another 10,000 miles on the car in a year of owning it, then had to sell it.
Unfortunately, I've found that two toddlers, a demanding job, and other hobbies don't leave a lot of time for a classic car that needs restoring. So far I have replaced a few leaky gaskets and repaired some minor electrical (turn signals). Most of that work was done at M & J Vairmart in San Jose. But when it came to the body work, that was clearly more work than I wanted to do. That was also more work than most of the other Corvair nuts in the world wanted to do, so it was difficult to sell the car when the brakes started to seize up and I couldn't bring myself to fix them. After a few weeks, I put it on Ebay. The high bidder, one Brandon Lane, backed out and so the car went to Ron Hansen for about 10% of what I paid for it. You win some, you lose some -- I had fun driving it and got 15,000 miles of transportation for a net loss of about $4,000, including gas and oil.
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Last modified: Nov 25, 2005 12:48 pm.
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