jprrbo

Pics of our '87 Iroc on ASC's lot waiting for conversion and at the dealer being prep'd for delivery. Note other F bodies in the background of the one photo also waiting for their convertible tops.

irocarter

iTrader: (1)

nice ride what were they doing with all those caprices?

jprrbo

I don't know what they were doing with the Caprices. I was on a mission and was focused on finding my car. My dealer told me that it left the Norwood plant in March, and was held up at ASC. This was in June, and there was no delivery date in sight. Summer was coming/here, and I was getting impatient. I got my VIN number from my dealer and found the car in a group of dozens off to the left of where these photos were taken. You can see that there were dozens more off the paved area. Some of these were sitting in mud, and GM or ASC had run out of the plastic rear shipping hatches, so some of the cars had plastic sheet that had caved in, and were full of water. Thanks for looking.

Here's the car now

irocarter

iTrader: (1)

so these cars had water sitting on the floor boards since day one. that explains why the one i bought looks like a flintstone mobile

NufNuffZ28

iTrader: (10)

Do you still have the car today?

If so, that's a good story with great history!

jprrbo

Yes, we still have it. If we would have known what we were going to go through to get it, we probably wouldn't have bought it though.

I saw some magazine articles in early '87 about a Camaro convertible. Every Chevy dealer that we asked for a price told us that there was no such thing. They had no sales information on it, and it wasn't in the Camaro sales brochure. Then these guys would look in their little dealer books and they were all surprised to see it in there. We test drove a coupe with the 5.0 TPI and 5 speed and really liked it. But we really liked the looks of the convertible shown in the magazine articles.

When we finally decided to place the order, our sales manager told us that, because he had no information on the convertibles, he would not give us our deposit back if we didn't like the car when it came in.

Our sales guy told us that the car left Norwood and was at ASC in late March/early April. And that was it, for weeks. We kept bugging him, but he couldn't get any new information on when we could expect the car. A friend told me that he saw a "bunch" of Camaros at ASC in Lansing, MI. On June 17th (I remember because it was my birthday) I took a day off from work and, with our VIN number in hand, the wife and I drove over to ASC in Lansing. We saw the cars and drove up to a guard shack.

The guard asked us what the car looked like. I told her that it was black with silver trim, "like this one." The first one that we walked up to was it. She called some one and got permission for us to get a couple of pictures of it, after she moved it away from the sea of cars that it was with. She then drove it up to the front of the line.

Apparently Lansing was not where ASC was doing the conversions, it was a staging area. It took three weeks more for the car to show up at our dealer.

Apparently production issues at ASC, or at one of their suppliers, led to a limited number of production F-Body convertibles in 1987. That's probably why Chevrolet did not promote the Camaro convertible in 1987 and the dealers that we talked to had no idea it was available.

triplec

That's a great story and even better pictures. I have always wanted to know some history on mine but have not gotten far. I really like the fact that you have manual windows. Did you specify manual windows or did it just happen that way?

triplec

Also, how many miles on your vert now?

sonjaab

COOL !

NOTE:
Check out the Impalas in the PDF pics. Note the rear door roof and side window.
Looks like some kind of special landau top installation.

ROCFATHER

Awesome article and pics! It's just amazing that you were able to get into the ASC plant. I always thought all that stuff was top secret! =) Anyhow I'm sure they had their hands full creating all the verts. I can see why they only made so many. Hard to beleive they had some piling up collecting water? WOW.

jprrbo

Sorry for no replies. I've been away from my computer over the holidays. Rhonda and I initially spec'd the car fully loaded. Then we thought real hard about how we were going to use the car; top hardly ever up, no overly hot daytime trips, no grocery lot parking lots and most likely not very often but for many years. We went down within a day or two and changed the order to no power windows/locks/seats/antenna, no cruise control, no air conditioning, etc. (I think this is the base Iroc package 1). We had already ordered it with all performance options we could get; 5-speed, 5.0 TPI (the 5.7 was not available in either the convertible or with the manual transmission), performance axle, engine oil cooler. The only thing(s) that we would have done differently if we could have would have been the 5.7 litre and a black interior (triple black was only offered with the gold accent trim, not the silver, and the convertible top and 5-speed trumped the 5.7 litre, with us). The car now has 12,600 miles on it. Thanks for looking.