ironwill

Bought this car new back in 1986 after having been away from performance cars for many years. It remains all-original other than the 17" Americans/BFG Sport Comps. The car has about 36,000 miles on the odometer.

BizJetTech

iTrader: (3)

Very cool !!

BOTTLEDZ28

iTrader: (9)

What the heck took you so long to post? Thats a beautiful car you have there.

ironwill

Thnx!




Lulz. I was a long-term poster (and moderator) on a very large, high-traffic, non-auto-related forum for many years; most of my online time was spent there. I've since stepped away from that forum, and rediscovered this one.

Thnx.

88IROCvertZ

iTrader: (1)

dagwood

iTrader: (5)

Looks awesome!

chazman

iTrader: (4)

Very nice!

dmccain

iTrader: (2)

Very nice. Like those wheels too.

ksr

I can't imagine owning such a beautiful car for 33 years and only putting 36,000 miles on it. You have a lot of restraint! I'd be out cruising around in that one all the time.

ironwill

add some Thnx. I don't have any available pics of the engine or interior since they still look the same as the day I bought the car. I'll take a few shots and post them as soon as I'm able.



Thnx.



Thnx.



Thnx. The rims are American Torque Thrust M Anthracite, 17x8 w/4.5 bs. I have the original IROC rims and Gatorbacks in storage.



I've always had a daily driver so as to keep the Camaro out of bad weather. It's never seen rain nor snow, nor the road salt that is prevalent here in the Winter.

ironwill

A few recent pics:

88IROCvertZ

iTrader: (1)

Wow super clean!

Love the underside shots! You’re lucky yours wasn’t undercoated when new! Seems like the dealers did a good job of
talking most people into that back in the day (especially up north)

Engine looks awesome..

You should throw up some shots of the original wheels with the Gators.. Can’t get enough of those around here even if they’re off the car..

ironwill

Thnx.

I completely agree with you about the lack of any undercoating; that stuff eventually proved to be a major cause of cars rusting out due to it's penchant to delaminate after a couple of years, and actually hold moisture and road salt between it and the sheet metal. I can't even imagine how difficult it would have been to get that stuff off the underside of a car while it is still assembled.

As I recall, the salesman from whom I bought the car was a really young guy, and mine may have been among his first sales. He never mentioned any dealer add-ons at all; we fairly quickly agreed on a price, I signed all the paperwork, and then they moved several other cars in the showroom out of the way and opened a pair of large glass doors to the lot, and I drove the Camaro home.

I know it's probably hard to believe, but other than an occasional wash and wax and interior vacuuming, I've never done any detail work to any part of the car; the interior, engine, and undercarriage are exactly as they look without ever being touched by me or anyone else since the day the car left Norwood.



They're stashed away in a storage building off-site, so I don't have ready access to them. The wheels are as pristine as the rest of the car, but the Gatorbacks are really worn out. Oddly enough, even with 30 years on them, and even though they're as bald as a billiard ball, the sidewalls show no age cracks.

I had planned to simply replace them (tires), but quickly realized that since even econo-boxes these days have 17+ inch rims on them, the current selection of performance tires in 16" size is relatively small. As a result, I moved up one size (17s is as big a diameter as I think looks 'right' on a 3rd gen) so I could get the tires I wanted (245/45ZR-17 BFGoodrich g-Force Sport COMP-2).

88IROCvertZ

iTrader: (1)

I agree.. I wouldn’t go bigger than 17” on these cars.. I even feel the 16” looks like a big wheel on the car because of the shape of the fenders..

I had the same problem where any tires I was interested in didn’t come in 16”

I’m probably going to get the replica Hawk 17” wheels and store my original wheels as well. They are in amazing shape and want to keep them that way. If I ever curbed one of those wheels or got a flat I’d be pretty bummed.. I’m excited about the 17” tire choices..

My car was undercoated, but luckily not driven in winter. No rust on the control arms, suspension, or anywhere on the floor pans or frame.. There’s a few bolts here and there with surface rust but I could clean those up.. I wish I could get the undercoating off without doing damage, but it’s not too big a deal to me. I do appreciate a clean underside like yours though!

I just brought up the gatorbacks because that’s another thing so wish I had.. The previous owner had the gatorbacks and was going to let me know if he found them.. Said he might have tossed them out because they were garbage.. Said he saved at least two of them that were in better shape. I haven’t heard back in years so I’m assuming it’s a no go..

I know folks around here would love replica gators.. we’ll see..

ironwill

I considered the same thing---replica wheels in 17" diameter, but am so old school as to not be able to get past a set of 5-spoke Americans. I'd have even bought a set of the old-style Torque Thrust Ds if it weren't for the fact that they didn't offer them in a diameter larger than 16".



Based on multiple posts I've seen on this site, Gatorbacks are popular with many 3rd gen owners, but I can't see enough profitability for Coker or anyone else to manufacture repros for such a small potential market. You never know, though; Corvettes back then were shod with Gatorbacks as well (albeit in 255 size rather than the IROC's 245), and if there's any owner group that is picky about authenticy, it's Corvette owners!

ironwill

Dan Baker

Looks way better with stock rims. IMHO

DaveyDug

iTrader: (3)

Very nice. Love it.

ironwill

They're in storage, and in pristine condition like the rest of the car. Their only drawback is in the fact that the front and rear rims have different offsets, negating the ability to rotate the tires. Additionally, performance tire choices to fit 16" rims are pretty limited these days (which is why I moved up to 17s in the first place, plus the Americans are all the same offset). I'll eventually mount a set of BFGs on them (the factory rims) to replace those ancient Gatorbacks, and run them occasionally.




Thnx. There doesn't seem to be a great love of totally original 3rd gens on this site, most posts I see mentioning engine swaps, headers, cat-backs, etc., and that's OK. But this car is just as it was when it left Norwood 33 years ago.

dagwood

iTrader: (5)

There actually IS a ton of originality gurus here. Me being one of them. I can name several guys. And it is the pristine, original cars that are fetching the big money. I'm glad that you've kept yours that way!

FWIW, I just installed General G-max tires on my IROC about a month ago and I absolutely LOVE them. They are a high performance, directional tire in the stock size 245/50/16. And they are priced right....like $125 each.

dagwood

iTrader: (5)

Here's what the tread design looks like

ironwill

Way back in the day, when port fuel injection was first starting to appear on cars, most hot rodders weren't all that willing to mess with it, so engine swaps---carbureted--- were somewhat popular. The hot rod magazines at the time (late '80s-early '90s) had many articles about big-block swaps; I had an empty 427 block and crank and a pair of square-port heads and I considered that for a while.

Then, a few years later, when then-new factory cars were touting more and more horsepower, I came close to building a 383; I planned to keep everything stock-looking under the hood with the exception of headers and a true dual exhaust system. At the time, I wasn't sure about how to deal with the factory TPI's 5000 RPM ceiling; I considered a process used at the time called 'extrude-honing' to make the ports larger, but realized it wouldn't help much. I considered going back to a carburetor, but really wanted to maintain a stock underhood appearance. I eventually shelved the plan.

As the years wore on, I came to realize that these early attempts by Detroit (TPI Camaros and 5.0 Mustangs) to get out from under the pitiful lack of performance in their vehicles from the years of smog regulations that killed the muscle car era of the '60s-early '70s are something that should be preserved. The few original examples of these cars that are left, I feel, need to be kept that way. Where I live, there are no longer any other 3rd gens on the road; the last one I saw other than mine was almost 5 years ago.



I don't really care that most SUVs these days have more horsepower than my IROC, and will outrun it a quarter mile. Those cars all look alike (my wife has had a few amusing instances trying to find her new CRV on crowded big-box store parking lots that are a sea of indistinguishable SUVs), and the vast majority of them have no soul at all. They're just a means to get from point A to point B, and at the end of their useful lives, they'll go to the crusher with not a single tear shed for them. Ever since I was a little kid, cars have always meant much more than mere transportation to me.

I let a lot of cars that I'd still like to own get away from me in the past due to circumstances, but I'm determined not to allow that to happen with this one.


Thanks for the info; this Fall, I'll look into them. I've never run a set of Generals, but know that they make good tires.

ironwill

Another old pic, this one from 1987. I wasn't much into photography back then (which I deeply regret today) due mostly to all the hassles involved in buying and getting 35 mm film developed, inability to share photos, etc., but I have a few pics which I occasionally come across while looking for something else.This photo was shot by my friend, the guy who owned the '64 Fuelie Corvette also in the pic. And while the car (the Vette) looks good in this pic, it was a 20-footer. It was very crusty underneath, and needed a lot of work. Not too long after this photo was taken, we did a frame-off restoration on it. Or rather, we started one. We pulled the body and interior, and had completely restored the frame, brakes, and suspension along with new trailing arms and hubs/bearings, did some repairs to previously-poorly-done-by-others-fiberglass repairs to minor body damage, completely rebuilt the engine, and put new synchros in the 4-speed. He had already bought all the parts needed to re-assemble the car when, unfortunately, he just lost interest in the project, and we never finished it. The car sat in his garage, frame in one stall, body in the other for a year or so, untouched, when he sold it to the father of another friend of mine, who hauled it all home and promptly put the car back together. AFAIK, he's still driving it to this day.

ironwill

Another thread posted today prompted me to recall a few funny stories from my considerable efforts to find my IROC back in 1986. I had already decided on the options I wanted, and then went looking for that car among the many Chevy dealerships in the area.


At one, there were 5 new Camaros parked side-by-side in the showroom. As soon as I walked through the door, a salesman swooped in on me, asking what I was looking for. I explained my list of requirements to him, and he immediately took me to one of the Camaros that had none of my listed options. He began to argue with me that "all Camaros come with 4-wheel disc brakes," even after I pointed out one of the cars sitting right there had drums on the rear, easily seen through the back wheel. He then tried to steer me towards one Camaro that was carbureted instead of TPI, and by that time, I'd heard enough. As I turned to leave, he pushed a business card at me, which I took just to get myself out the door. As I glanced at it, it had the name of a local Chrysler/Plymouth dealership crossed out and the name of the Chevy dealership penciled in. As I neared the door, I noticed one of those large, cylindrical, sand-filled ash trays, and that's where Mr. SuperSalesman's business card got planted. In the many years since that time, I have bought 3 new Chevy trucks, but none were ever purchased there. Indeed; I've never returned to that particular dealership.


I originally planned to buy a yellow IROC. I even sat down with a salesman and ordered the car at one of the other dealerships. When the promised delivery date came and went with no call from the salesman, I attempted to call him, but was informed he no longer worked there, and had botched the paperwork for my order, which had remained unfilled. I then declined the dealership's offer to re-order the car, and instead, continued looking elsewhere.


After several more weeks of searching in-person and on the phone didn't turn up the exact car I wanted, I decided to put my search on hold for a while. A few days later, while driving somewhere else, on a whim, I turned into another Chevy dealership new-car lot. Right in the middle of the showroom was my car, albeit a different color that my original choice. That dark red looked too good to pass up when I read the window sticker and realized the car had every option I wanted. As I mentioned in a previous post ITT, I drove that car off the showroom floor that day.

Monteman71

Wow,very nice!
Those wheels would look nice on my 86,are they Torq Thrust M ?
Shawn

885speed

iTrader: (1)

Absolutely love seeing unmolested, untouched, and well cared for original cars. Yours is an almost 100% perfect example of one(minus the wheels, but hey I get it)
I keep telling myself I was born in the wrong decade, I'd commit high crimes just to be able to have a brand new 86-92 Camaro with all my preferred options.


EDIT: Wait a sec, after scrolling through the pictures in this thread again to add more drool to the already large puddle I noticed that the speedo is not a 145mph one. Was 87 the first year for the 145mph speedo?
I thought that all Z28's got the 145 speedo.

ironwill

thnx.

Yes, they're TT M Anthracite, 17x8/4.5" bs. with 245/45ZR-17 BFGoodrich g-Force Sport COMP-2s. I bought the tires and wheels as a package from Tire Rack several years ago; I can't say enough about just how good their customer service is. First-rate company all the way.





thnx.

As I posted above, there were a few times over the years when I considered making major modifications (as I've done in the past with many other cars I've owned), but eventually came to the realization that this one should remain just as Norwood built it. The 17" rims, all with the same offset, allowed me to not only have a much wider selection of tires (over and above the limited choices in 16"), but permit me to rotate them, greatly increasing tire service life.

LULZ @ wrong decade. I think probably most of us have some feelings along those lines, for better or worse.


AFAIK, 145 speedos didn't appear until the 1987 model year; something about Federal Interstate speed limit laws, I think. I'll also add that the topic has been debated back and forth on this site in the past.





Another thought on 'wrong decade:' Hindsight is always 20-20, and growing up in the Golden Age of muscle cars in the '60s left me a bit jaded---at the time---at what was easily available. In 1971, during a search for a nice midyear Corvette for myself when I got home from a hitch in the Army, I passed on a '68 L88 (IIRC, the seller wanted $4000.00) because it wasn't a midyear, wasn't considered anything 'special' at the time (!), it had spent it's entire life on the drag strip, and had been beat nearly to death. Today, a fully restored 1968 L88 is worth a couple hundred thousand $$$.....................
GTOs, big-block Chevelles, and first-gen Camaros were a dime a dozen; dealership used-car lots would almost give 'em away, especially during the mid-'70s gas crunch. Tri-fives---really clean ones---could be had for a few hundred bucks.

ironwill

drknow90rs_ss@y

iTrader: (3)

That IS a gorgeous car. IMO, these cars just beg to be modded, however, sometimes you see one in such perfect condition, that you just have to leave it alone. I wouldn't mod your car much more than you already have.
DR.K.

ironwill

Thnx.

A couple of months ago, I vacated the off-premise storage space in which I've been keeping the original wheels/tires (and a bunch of other stuff), and now have them at hand. At some point this Summer, I'm planning to get new tires mounted, and get them back on the car. It'll then be exactly as it left Norwood all those years ago. This is the only vehicle out of about a dozen I've owned over many years that I've left totally stock, and I plan to keep it that way. Survivors are becoming rare, even vehicles built as recently as 3rd gens.

ironwill

For my brother:


Part 1

The seeds of what was to come for us were planted in Texas in 1957, when I, at 9 years old, and my brother, who was 12, saved up our allowance money and bought an old Fox go-kart frame from a friend of my brother's. It had no motor, steering gear, wheels, axles or seat; only a beat-up empty frame. My brother scrounged an old rototiller that had a horizontal-shaft Briggs & Stratton motor, and we spent the next few months putting the two together. Our dad worked for an aluminum extrusion and fabricating company with a whole crew of welders, and he was able to get welding done for us for free.

Just a couple of blocks away was the local high school, and on weekends, we'd take the kart over there and run it around the parking lot. There were several other karters who would come there too, and we'd have impromptu races. The local police were extremely tolerant of all this; only rarely would they show up and tell us to leave because we were making too much noise. I guess they figured it was better to let us run around in that parking lot rather than on the streets.

The Briggs motor soon burned a valve (in hindsight, probably due to the lack of any exhaust system other than a short piece of iron pipe and no muffler), and we wanted something faster anyway. At the time, the hot setup was to run McCulloch chain saw motors on go karts so that's what we went to. The kart went faster, but still not fast enough to keep up with some of the other guys' karts. We bought a manifold that accepted two carburetors and started running it on alcohol. We had a megaphone-looking-exhaust on that motor, and at WOT, a big blue flame would shoot out.

Soon after, we moved back to Central Ohio, and had to sell the kart.





In 1961, me at at age 13, my older brother, now 16, bought his first car. It was 1954 Ford convertible with a 239 Y-block V8, auto trans, and a 6-volt electrical system that consistently refused to start the engine at any temp below about 15 degrees. That car, while looking really nice, was full of mechanical gremlins, and gave he and I plenty of opportunity to try to figure out what might be wrong with it. Under the hood of that car is where we got our start on what would become a lifetime's interest in making cars go faster.

He soon sold the '54, and bought a cherry 1937 Ford Coupe; eggshell blue, baby moon hubcaps, the original flathead V8, and standard 3-speed tranny. He promptly blew the motor, and we replaced it with another flathead out of a '53 Mercury from the local wrecking yard, Wirthman Brothers Auto Parts, still in business today in Columbus, Ohio. That one didn't last long under his heavy right foot either, and our next adventure was to drop in a 283 Chevy V8 out of a wrecked -60-'61 (I can't recall) Corvette. We bought an Ansen transmission adapter to mate the 'Vette engine to the Ford tranny, and promptly blew it up ( a 250 hp Chevy engine greatly overpowered the trans that was designed for a 100-horse motor). Next was to replace the Ford trans with the 4-speed trans out of the same wrecked Corvette that gave up it's engine.

Backyard hot-rodding is a game of attrition; make one thing stronger/bigger/more powerful, and the next-weakest link will break. For the '37, the next thing to break was the old, tired rear end. One out of a full-size Chevy (a '59 or '60?) was adapted to mate to the Ford springs, and a new drive shaft was commissioned to hook everything up.

By now that car was reliable, and for it's time, pretty fast. My brother left for the Air Force shortly thereafter, and he took the Coupe with him. When he got orders to ship overseas several months later, he brought the car back home; our dad was tasked to drive it once a week to keep it in shape. What happened though, was that any time my parents were away for the evening, I'd take it out and drive it around---no drivers' license, no insurance, no nuthin. Sometimes, it's better to be lucky than smart. When my brother returned stateside, he wound up at Glasgow AFB in Montana, where he took the Coupe after retrieving it from home while on leave. He got a big laugh out of my driving it whenever I could.




While my brother was away in the service, in 1965, I saved up enough money to buy my first car, a 1957 Chevy 210 2-door post, 283-2-bbl/powerglide, from my friend's mom. She had wrecked it in a fender-bender accident, damaging the front bumper, fender, and hood, and the engine was making odd noises, and she subsequently parked it in their garage, where it sat for over a year. I bought it for (IIRC) $200.00 cash, the going-rate for that car in that condition at that time. We towed it home with my friend's 55 Chevy (I could write a number of stories about him, that car, and another one---a '62 'feulie' Corvette---he owned later), and managed to get it pushed into my dad's garage. He (my dad) wasn't too pleased (an understatement) when he arrived home from work that evening to see that car in the garage. But to his credit, he didn't really give me much grief, since he already was used to my brother and I working on my brother's cars out there.

I bought a front bumper and fender from the local wrecking yard (very easy to get good junk yard parts for '57s back then) and was able to straighten the hood. I drove it just like that for a few months as the worn-out original motor got sicker and sicker. The last straw was when the rear main seal started leaking like a sieve (they were made of a material that looked like rope back then); oil would come out the bottom of the engine almost as fast as I could pour it in the top. The powerglide transmission was acting up as well.

I parked it, and my friend and I pulled the intake and cylinder heads to see if we could fix the motor enough to last while I saved up the $$$ to build a new engine. What we found was so much sludge that you couldn't even see the pushrods in the valley under the intake; they were completely covered. The cylinder walls were severely scored, the cam was going flat, and the pan was full of sludge and metal particles. There was no point in putting any money in this motor, so we rented a porta-crane and yanked it and the trans. We set them out in the alley behind the garage with the trash cans, where they sat for probably two years or more until a scavenger took them.

I went to see my buddy at the wrecking yard (Wirthman Brothers Auto Parts); IIRC it was Tom Wirthman, one of the owners. My brother and I had been buying parts from him for a couple of years. I pretty much had the run of the yard, probably because I was there almost as often as the guys who worked there. While customers were not allowed out there, he let me look around whenever I needed something. He told me they had recently towed in a wrecked Corvette, (a '58 or '59; I cant recall which year; the car didn't have a hood on it, the easiest way to identify a '58 from newer Vettes. Anyway, the car had been hit really hard on the passenger side, but the motor (a 283, 4 bbl, hydraulic cam) was okay. Tom sold it to me for $100.00 (IIRC), and he had it pulled and delivered to my house.

I also bought enough parts to convert the '57 over to standard shift (a 3-speed gearbox, flywheel, bellhousing, cluth/pressure plate, a clutch pedal and all the necessary clutch linkage). Not long after I bought the car, while it was still driveable, I had taken it to a local welding shop and had the frame-side clutch cross shaft mount welded to the frame in anticipation of getting rid of the slush box, so I was set.

That following weekend we dropped the motor and 3-speed trans into the car, hooked up the clutch pedal and linkage, and by Sunday afternoon, after several trips to the local, 24-hour auto parts store (Simplex Motor Parts in Columbus), I was back on the road again. That parts store was a story in itself. It was the only one around that never closed, but was in a really bad part of town. They had a guy placed up on the end of one of the rows of parts bins, in sight of the cash register, in a lawn chair with a double-barrel shotgun across his lap.


I drove the car in that configuration for several months while I saved up enough $$$ to build an engine. I got a factory 2x4 manifold complete with the Carter WCFB carbs and linkage from a friend of a friend in exchange for something I had that he needed (I can't remember what I swapped for the intake), and bolted that on the stock 'Vette motor. I spent the next couple of weeks screwing around with those finicky carbs to get them running right. I bought a set of Hedman headers from Jeg's ( at the time, a small storefront speed shop located on 11th Ave in Columbus; Jeg Coughlin himself worked behind the counter back then) and installed them, knowing they'd also fit the new engine I was planning to build.

I had been working at a local Oldsmobile dealership service department, and left there to take a similar job at a Chevy dealer on the other side of town. When I started there, they teamed me up with a much older mechanic with a definite Southern drawl from whom I was to learn a great deal about engines. We did our own in-house cylinder head work in that shop, and I remember him telling me, "Son, I'm gonna show you how to put hosspowr back into tard (tired) arn (iron)." That old guy knew far more about cylinder head modifications than anyone I was ever to meet in my lifetime. He had at one time run stock cars in North Carolina, back in the days of 'outlaw' racing. Among other things, he taught me the intricacies of multi-angle valve jobs, how and where to modify intake and exhaust ports for maximum flow, how to replace worn valve guides, how to grind valves, and much more. He also taught me about carburetor and ignition system repair and modification, two areas that would eventually become my specialties. I know you're long gone Jess, but I still remember you.


(to be continued)

ironwill

For my brother:

Part 2

Not long after going to work at the Chevy dealer, we had a fairly new truck come in for warranty work that eventually resulted in replacing the entire engine (a 327). I had the opportunity to buy the low-mileage empty block and the crankshaft. I got them for a song (I can't recall now for how much, but it was way below the going rate at that time) , so now I had the basis for my new engine. Over the next several months, as I got the $$$ to buy parts, and trade stuff I already had for other stuff I needed, I amassed enough parts to assemble my engine. Even though the block was nearly new and in perfect condition, I had the cylinders bored .030 so I could hand-fit new TRW forged 11.5 : 1 pistons, fitted to new Chevy 'pink' connecting rods. I had the assembly balanced to 0-grams at Wachholz Balancing Service, and assembled the short block in my garage. An Isky Z50 solid-lifter cam, lifters, and pushrods were bought at Jeg's when I bought the pistons and rings. Wachholz supplied the bearings. Roller rocker arms weren't in common use in street engines back then; I opted for Chevy hi-performance pieces, marked with an "0" on the top of each rocker arm.

I had obtained a set of 2.02/1.60 cylinder heads from Wirthman's, off of a Corvette motor that had what was left of a rod sticking out the side of the block. Jess and I worked those heads to perfection. My initial intake was an Edelbrock C4B (IIRC) with a 700 cfm Holley carb. I later replaced that intake with an Edelbrock XC8 crossram manifold with a pair of Holley 600 cfm carbs. A Mallory dual-point distributor and coil provided the spark.

While I was building the engine, I was also on the lookout for a 4-speed trans to replace the now-worn three speed and Foxcraft shifter. Tom Wirthman called me one evening and told me they had just brought in a '58 Impala 348/4 speed car that was wrecked, and had a cast iron case Borg-Warner 4-speed trans. I ran down there the next day right after work, popped the side cover off to take a look inside, and bought it (I don't remember how much I paid) on the spot. I also bought a Hurst shifter from the local Nationwise Auto Parts store, made for such a conversion in a '57 to clear the bench seat, so now I was set.

The following Friday evening, I worked all night long finishing the engine and trans install out in the garage, and fired that motor for the first time at about 9:00 AM Saturday morning. That sumbeech really sounded healthy, even before I had the carb and timing sorted out. I drove around all day long that day, breaking in the new motor, and that evening, changed the oil and filter, and called the break-in a success.

drknow90rs_ss@y

iTrader: (3)

Great story! Can't wait for more!
DR.K.

ironwill

Thnx.

I'm attempting to document mine and my brother's automotive past while it's still clear in my memory; I'm not getting any younger.

I've posted some old photos of some of the cars I've mentioned, and that I will eventually mention, in one of the albums in my site profile: https://www.thirdgen.org/g/album/13269032

ironwill

For my brother:

Part 3

I got drafted into the Army in 1969. My first year in, after Basic, I was stationed at Ft. Carson, in Colorado Springs. I took my '57 with me (I swapped out the 4.56 rear gears for a much-more-highway-friendly 3.08 gearset for the trip, and put the low gearset in the trunk. I made it to Carson in less than 19 hours, driving straight through, only stopping for gas and to take a leak. I got pulled over for speeding in Illinois, doing 90+ in a 70 zone. But the officer, upon seeing my military ID, told me he had a son currently in Viet Nam, and he let me go with just a warning. Later that night, I crossed Kansas at an average of 100 miles an hour, that engine just singing. Once I got settled at Carson, and found the base Auto Hobby Shop (you could use the shop bays, lifts, and tools for free), where I spent a lot of my free time, both working on my Chevy as well as helping some of the other guys work on their cars. Keith, from LA, had a nice '57 Chevy that we worked on, and another guy (Roper; can't remember his first name) had a '57 Chevy station wagon with a hi-po motor and 4-speed. I rebuilt the front-end on my car, replacing the worn ball joints, control-arm bushings, tie-rod ends, and idler arm. The little old guy who ran the shop and took your drivers license as collateral for tools borrowed (he was a civilian) showed me how to align the front end with little more than a level, a carpenter's square, some string, and a measuring tape. That guy was a real trip.

All that came to an end a few months later when I got orders to go to Viet Nam. I got 30 days leave before having to report to Ft. Lewis, Washington for processing, so I and a buddy, who also got overseas orders at the same time, loaded up into the '57 and we headed back East. I stayed overnight with him and his wife in Indiana, and we agreed to look each other up in Ft. Lewis (which we did; we were assigned to the same flight to Cam Ranh, where we were subsequently sent to different duty stations). I didn't hear from him again. I hope you made it home OK, Spence.

There was nowhere at home to store my Chevy for the year I'd be gone, so I reluctantly signed the title over to my brother with instructions to sell the car and bank the money. He sold it soon after to one of the guys he worked with. Not long after that, the car was stolen and was never recovered. I imagine it was stripped and the body either crushed or just abandoned. Losing that car that way has proven to be one of the bigger disappointments in my life.







During this time the sport of drag racing was fundamentally changing. Track owners and promoters began to realize that there was big $$$ to be made by bringing in and featuring nationally-famous (due to magazine and racing periodical coverage) drivers and teams. As a result, backyard racers like my brother and I, and all the guys we knew who also built and raced their own cars, were getting shoved further and further away from mainstream drag racing. Many of the classifications were being either dropped by NHRA or combined with others. My brother was faced with either making major and very expensive modifications to the Corvette to keep it competitive, or else racing in the 'bracket' classes, where, if you ran "too fast" for your declared bracket, you lost even though you got to the finish line first. Needless to say, this didn't sit well with him; he subsequently pulled the race engine and related equipment from the car, restored it back to stock, and sold it. I don't know what happened to that engine; I assume he sold it, too.


Drag racing continued to become a "sport" of sponsored, big-Big-BIG-MONEY racing teams. Nitro-burning rails and funny cars and very-high-dollar "Pro Stock" cars were pretty much all that was seen at NHRA and other drag strips. They brought in the spectators---and their money---while pushing us backyard guys right out the back door. My brother and I made one more attempt at organized drag racing. I'll get to that in a bit.








When I managed to get back home from Viet Nam, I felt like a stranger in a strange land. It seemed that the entire world (or at least, Central Ohio) had changed. The Outerbelt, 270, that circles Columbus, and that was under construction when I was drafted, and sections of which we used for impromptu Friday and Saturday night street racing, was mostly finished and open to traffic. Columbus was expanding eastward; shopping malls, housing developments, apartment complexes, and all that they bring with them, were spreading like wildfire. Many of my former friends had either moved away, were still in the military, or, in some cases, never made it back home.

I returned to my former auto parts store job, which was being held for me since I was a veteran, and I gradually settled in after a somewhat painful readjustment to civilian life (not going to go into details). One thing hadn't changed though, and that was my interest in all things performance-related. I had been sending the maximum allowable amount of money home from the Army every month, and combined with what my brother had received from the sale of my '57, I had a nice chunk of cash available. My brother had sold the '61 race Vette, and had bought a really nice 1967 big-block Corvette coupe, Marlboro Maroon with a saddle interior, 427/435-horse big-block engine, and factory side pipes. The only thing that car needed was a better ignition system, which he had installed.



My original plan, which I had turned over and over a million times in my mind while in 'Nam, was to buy a '65 or '66 Chevelle, a plain-Jane 2-door with a 6-cylinder engine, and build a monster big-block engine for it. It was gonna be a real street-sweeper......

.........until I saw my brother's '67 Coupe.




Geez; that car was beautiful, and it ran even better than it looked. So, he and I immediately started looking for a Corvette for me. Sunday mornings, I'd hop in my mom's 1961 (?) Falcon station wagon (oh, good grief; that car was slow), and head to my brother's apartment, where we'd pore over the car ads in the classifieds in the newspaper. We'd circle potential candidates, make a few phone calls, and then head out in search of my next car.




We looked at a lot of nice Corvettes; mid-year (1963-1967) was what I wanted, and a coupe rather than a roadster. That was in 1971, and there were plenty of them on the market. Some were really nice, some had been beat to death, some weren't optioned as I wanted. One car in particular, which I'll remember to my dying day, was a 1968 Corvette advertised for sale in Westerville (IIRC), Ohio. I wasn't looking for anything other than the aforementioned mid-year models; we only stopped to look at the '68 because it wasn't far from another Corvette I was interested in, but had subsequently passed on. Anyway, this '68 was an L88, factory-built for racing only; the engine had 12.5:1 compression ratio, aluminum heads, solid lifter cam, a huge Holley carburetor, and electronic ignition, all from the factory. It also had some of the stiffest springs and shocks known to man, and huge brakes. L88s had a small plaque on the center console stating that if any fuel with lesser than 103-octane premium was used, engine damage would occur. It wasn't available with a radio or heater or air conditioning, or any power or comfort accessories. Chevrolet's aim was to discourage casual buyers from buying one of these beasts and then trying to use it as a daily driver. They intentionally rated the L88 engine 5 horses less (@430 hp) than the much-more streetworthy 427/435, but it reportedly produced 500+ in "stock" trim.

The car had been drag raced; it had very low mileage, but all of it had obviously been put on a quarter-mile at a time. The rear wheel wells were all scarred up from rubbing on racing slicks, the paint was in terrible shape, the interior looked like a bag of rags, and the engine sounded like shaking a coffee can half-full of nuts and bolts (even noisier than the usual solid-lifter big-block Chevy engine), and it smoked out the tail pipes and breathers. IOW, it needed a full rebuild. We thanked the guy for his time, and left.




Chevrolet only built 80 L88 Corvettes in 1968, which stickered for around $6000.00 (the "430 horse" L88 engine alone was a nearly $1000.00 option, big money in 1968, especially considering that a 427/435 was only about $300.00 option). Today, a restored, numbers-matching L88 is worth several hundred thousand dollars.

Hindsight is 20-20.





So the search for a Corvette continued. My brother's big block Vette was a handful to keep running right. W were always fiddling with the carburetors (3x2 Holleys), and even with an aftermarket high-energy capacitor-discharge ignition system, was absolute hell on spark plugs; they needed changing every few thousand miles to keep the car running like he wanted/expected it to. I had already decided I would forego a big-block car in favor of a small-block, so that's what we concentrated on finding.

A few weeks later, I saw an ad in the classifieds for a " 1965 Corvette Coupe, blue with white interior, V8 engine, 365 horsepower, 4-speed trnsmission. Needs work." I called the guy and set up an appointment with him to see the car the next morning, a Monday. The guy lived in a nearby apartment complex, and I met him in the parking lot. The car was as-advertised; it had new tires on it, and he had receipts showing a repair shop had recently-installed a complete new exhaust system and a complete brake overhaul. The car had average mileage on it (about 50,000, IIRC), had an unblemished body and good, original paint. The dash and upholstery were in excellent condition. He immediately told me the engine had a miss in it, and he was selling it as-is since he was tired of putting money in it (Corvettes are expensive to have worked on if you can't do the work yourself, which this guy couldn't). He also said he needed something with a trunk and more than two seats; all of this indicated to me that he really wanted to sell this car. I asked to test drive it, and he repeated the "has a miss" caution as I got in and started the engine. It had a 365 horse/327 hi-perf engine with solid lifters; indeed, it had a big miss. I drove it down the road and floored the throttle a couple of times. It still had the miss, but no engine knocks or noises other than the solid lifters, had very good oil pressure, and normal operating temperature. All the gauges worked, as did the radio and heater, and the windows cranked up and down OK. Brakes and steering were perfect. I wasn't concerned about the condition of the engine; if anything, it would serve to be a good bargaining chip for me, expecially knowing that no matter whatever the problem was with the engine, I could fix it, no sweat. He wanted $1900.00 for it (the going rate at the time); I offered $1750.00 cash and he accepted. We shook hands, I went to the bank to get the $$$, and returned in a half hour with my mom to drive the Falcon home. The seller and I exchanged the $$$ for the title, I thanked him for the deal, jumped in the Vette and drove it home.

(to be continued)

DynoDave43

iTrader: (11)

Good writing ironwill. Makes for interesting reading. Thanks for sharing, and thanks for your service to our country.

chazman

iTrader: (4)

Great stories, ironwill!!!

ironwill

Thnx.

And thank you for your support. Those were very turbulent social times way back then, not unlike what this country is going through right now. Differences of opinion are OK, as are differences in ideals, but there is a right way and a wrong way to express them.





Thnx.

I think mine and my brother's story is a fairly common one among those of my generation; back then, it seemed like everyone my age was into cars. Some guys had factory-built muscle cars, but most in our circle of friends (mine and my brother's) built, drove, and raced cars we built in our back yards. It's just what everybody did back then.

The story simply writes itself as I recall the details, for some of which I've had to really dig back into my past to recall. I've long since lost contact with all but one of our hot rodding friends from back in the day; many of them I've found to have passed away.

More to come.

chazman

iTrader: (4)

I agree. Which reminds me of a story. I was at a cruise night about 10 or so years ago. One of my friends, a USMC Vietnam vet, ( we sadly lost him about a year ago), was talking to another Marine Vietnam vet who showed up in a gasser style '55 Chevy. Obviously, this car was far from the current safety standards of modern cars and the conversation turned to how dangerous these old hotrods are/were. The guy with the '55 leaned on his fender, cracked open a beer and said, between Vietnam and these cars, I honestly never expected to live this long.

Thanks for your service ironwill and keep the stories coming.....

ironwill

Sorry about your friend; there are not that many of us of that era still around. And some who are, still carry deep scars, both physical as well as psychological.

And it's true, some street machines back then were pretty sketchily-built. Part of that was due to lack of experience, part to lack of ready availability of information, and another part was questionable stick and/or gas welding. You'd occasionally see some pretty fouled-up 'chewing gum' welds on critical frame or suspension parts. The proliferation of relatively inexpensive MIG welding equipment over the past decade, and the ease with which good welds can be produced with just a bit of practice with it has made backyard fabrication much better/safer.


Thank you for your support. It's good to see that public opinion of soldiers made a 180-degree turnaround at some point between Vietnam and the Iraq war.


More to come.

DynoDave43

iTrader: (11)

As we sometimes see even today, an outspoken few can seem like the majority. My Dad was a Navy veteran of the Korean war, and my neighbor an Army vet of the same war. I can assure you that the three boys in each of our families were raised to have nothing but respect for our veterans.

chazman

iTrader: (4)

Thanks. He was a real character and I miss him. Not to hijack your thread, but I think he would have wanted me to share this story here.

He told me the story of a confused 18 year old landing in Da Nang. He got off the plane and was directed to get in line for his helmet and flak jacket. He tells them, "I just got here". They told him to get in line to be issued his ammunition. Gets his ammo and says, "I just got here" and is directed to get on a truck. There was a sergeant on the truck to which he said, "I just got here". The Sgt told him to shut up and load his newly issued rounds into his magazines. Next thing you you know he's on a helicopter landing in a hot LZ. He tells the Crew Chief, "I just got here!" The Crew Chief tells him, "Get off my Fu@#$ing helicopter!!!!!!!!!" And so was Morrie's first hour in Vietnam. From landing at Da Nang to firefight within one hour.

ironwill

Good deal; that's the way kids should be raised, including respect for all first responders as well.




The fog of war makes for strange circumstances.

ironwill

For my brother:

Part 4


So my 1965 Corvette Coupe with the engine issues went right back into my dad's garage, where I had pushed that '57 Chevy a couple of years earlier. This time, Dad didn't gripe about my being there. I called my brother and told him about the car, and he said he'd be over when he got off work to start tearing the engine down to see what was wrong with it. I found the problem just a few minutes after talking to my brother, and what I found made me just shake my head. The hi-perf small-block engine options in Corvettes (in 1965, the 350,365, and 375-horsepower options, apart from the 250- and 300-horse base engines) were equipped with finned, cast-aluminum valve covers with cast-in 'Corvette' script. They were somewhat fragile, and overtightening any of the 4 hold-down bolts could crack the bosses that located the bolts. And that's exactly what someone had done---overtightened the passenger-side lower-rear valve cover bolt, cracking the cover, and causing a substantial oil leak, which dripped down on the two rear spark plug boots. The two oily boots were dangling down off their respective spark plugs; the chrome-plated factory ignition system shielding hid them from casual sight. I wiped them off with a rag, snugged-up the metal connectors inside the boots with a pair of needle-nose pliers, re-connected them, and started the engine. It smoked a little out of that side's exhaust pipe for a few seconds, then it cleared, and the engine settled down into a nice, lopey, normal idle; the miss was gone. I called my brother back and asked him to stop at the Chevy dealership near where he worked and see if they had a new valve cover and some gaskets in stock, and to bring them over. He showed up later that afternoon; we pulled both valve covers, adjusted the valve lash while we were in there, re- installed the existing good valve cover and the new one to replace the cracked item. The car ran great; I was tempted to call the guy who sold it to me and tell him what I had found was the problem, but thought otherwise of it; he was obviously frustrated with dealing with the car's problems, and no good would have come from it.

I drove the car just as it was for a couple of months before I made any changes to it. It was a blast to drive; solid-lifter small blocks made a lot of power back then. I had called my buddy in the parts department of the Chevy dealership where I had worked, and he decoded the rear-axle tag for me; it had a 4:11 Posi rear end in it from the factory. Not real great for long highway cruises, but a heck of a lot of fun from stoplight to stoplight. Sunoco 280 (sold at select Sunoco stations) was somewhere around 50 cents a gallon at the time, so gas mileage (or lack of same thereof) was of no concern.



Like all other high-compression engines at the time, spark plug life was pretty short. The problem was with the stock ignition systems in general use back then, dependent on a mechanical switch (the points) to turn the coil on and off. Chevy addressed the problem in a way by offering an optional transistorized ignition on most hi-po engines, but they were problematic, and when they failed, you were dead in the water. I bought an Accel dual-point, full-centrifugal-advance distributor and their high-output coil, and that helped greatly; spark plug life was almost doubled. At least all the plugs were relatively easy to get to on that car, so changing them was a fairly painless process.

The factory Holley carb was a 600 cfm unit; I replaced it with with a 780 cfm piece from the same manufacturer. A day's worth of changing jets and power valves in the new, larger carb, and working with the distributor's mechanical advance really brought an already good-running engine to life. The car also had the through-the rear-valance dual exhaust, still fairly new, and the 2 1/2" hi-po pipe size. But the cool setup was factory side exhaust, so I again called my friend at the Rodenfels Chevrolet parts department, and he had both chambered exhaust pipes for the 2 1/2" manifolds, both side exhaust covers, and all the mounting hardware, all in stock. The chambered pipes cost me $120.00 each; the covers, about $80.00 each, and the hardware kit was maybe $20.00 (he billed me as an employee, so I got a pretty good deal).

Today, those same pieces, from a reproduction manufacturer, would cost on the order of at least $2,000.00. NOS parts, far scarcer than hens' teeth---and practically impossible to find---would be priced astronomically higher.


With the side exhausts installed, I had two large empty holes in the rear valance panel of my Corvette where the under-chassis exhaust system previously exited. Chevrolet wanted a lot of money for a side-exhaust valance (without the holes). A friend of mine, who had a '64 Corvette (and auto body and painting skills), needed a distributor for his car, and just happened to have a plain valance panel for a mid-year Vette. Older Corvettes had mechanical tachometers, driven by a cable, similar to the cable that drives the speedometer off the transmission, and driven off the distributor. Only a Corvette distributor (or an aftermarket unit specifically for Corvettes) had that tach drive. I told him I'd trade him my factory distributor for that valance panel if he'd paint it to match my car. He jumped at the deal, and I had my valance.

It was time to get rid of the skinny factory wheels and bias-ply tires, so I called my parts department buddy and ordered a set of 8" rally wheels. I mounted up a set of 60-series (the hot setup at the time) Dayton tires and squeezed them under the fenders. When I got some more $$$, I replaced the painted steel rally wheels with a set of Ansen Sprint aluminum rims. I also replaced the rattling, imprecise factory lockout shifter with a Hurst unit, making gear changes short-throw and precise.




My brother received an offer he couldn't refuse for his Maroon '67 Corvette Coupe from one of the country's top Corvette collectors at the time, Bob McDorman, who had a Chevy dealership in Canal Winchester, Ohio for many years. My brother had been at one of McDorman's annual Corvette shows, and Mr. McDorman was taken with my brother's Corvette, and made him an offer on the spot, which my brother accepted. The next week, that car was in McDorman's collection. This left my brother carless other than his work car, and I can't recall exactly what it was (an El Camino, maybe?). But that money from the sale of the '67 Coupe was burning a hole in his pocket, and before long, he called me with news that he had bought a 1970 Olds 442, with the 455 engine, 4-speed trans, and a 4:33 posi rear end, all factory-stock. He said he wanted to race it in SuperStock class as soon as we could get it ready. With NHRA rule book in hand, we pulled the heads and port-matched them to a new Edelbrock manifold. In SS class at the time, you could run any camshaft, and any intake manifold as long as it was 'similar' to the factory piece and used the stock carburetor. Headers were allowed as well. We put in a radical Lunati cam and kit with heavy-duty valve springs, retainers and locks, and Lunati rocker arms and pushrods. The stock flywheel and clutch were replaced with Zoom parts. We also installed, with a great deal of gnashing of teeth and curses, the most difficult-to-install set of headers I'd ever had the bad luck to get involved with. They were large-tube Hooker competition models, and had three tubes inside the chassis and one over it on each side (to keep them equal-length), all dumping into 3 1/2" collectors. We opened the box at the garage (by now we were renting a garage in which to build cars), and dumped out a pile of pipes that looked like a bunch of snakes. Slip-fit joints out the yin-yang, these sumbeeches nearly whupped us, but we eventually got them on there. IIRC, we ran the factory distributor (with an Accel cap, rotor, and plug wires) which I recurved, connected to an aftermarket electronic ignition box.

That quadrajet carburetor was something else. While I had a mountain of experience with Holleys, and knew them inside and out, the only work I had done on Q-Jets was stock rebuilds. They were plenty complicated, with a million parts, but that wasn't the problem; getting one to work properly at WOT all the way through the gears without bogging or hesitating was another. I eventually got the hang of them, and the car ran well. While my brother always did the driving, I'd occasionally take it down the strip after a carb and/or ignition timing change in order to evaluate the change(s). Good grief; that car was the hardest-accelerating of any I'd ever driven. Dropping the hammer at 4500 RPM was absolutely brutal; it would push you so far back into the seat that it felt like you were going straight out the back winshield. It's not likely that I'll ever drive anything like that again in my lifetime. It was class-competitive right away....................

......until Jegs put a car in the same class, SS/F. They beat us consistently, week after week. And then another interloper appeared, the then-recently-formed Rod Shop Racing Team (a speed shop not a 5-minute walk from my parents' house), and who were in direct competition with Jegs, selling speed equipment and full-service performance machine shop work. There's an old saying among hot rodders; "You can't beat cubic money." As far as we were concerned, it rang painfully true. My brother sold the car before the season ended. He bought a used stock '69 Corvette big block with an automatic trans, and neither of us ever looked back.



Winter was coming; I had bought a 'flood car' (not really from a flood, but it looked like it could have been) to drive in foul weather so I didn't have to subject my Corvette to snow, road salt and rain. It was a 1961 Chevy Biscayne, bought from a friend's retiring father, who no longer had need for a work car. I can't recall how much I gave him for it, but it couldn't have been more than $100.00. It had almost 200K miles on it; it had been driven about 100 miles a day taking my friend's dad to and from work from Columbus to Circleville every day for years. Of course, it had been subjected to all the Winter-time road salt and slush that Central Ohio roads had to offer, and boy, did it show it. It was originally painted 'Fawn Beige, ' but you'd have never known it. It had that 'patina'd' look that some people find attractive these days; back then, it was just considered a rust bucket. The quarter panels and lower front fenders were eaten away with rust, and the driver's door had a rust hole in it so big you almost didn't have to open the door to get in; you could just climb through that hole. The interior was almost as bad; the cheapest vinyl "upholstery" Chevy offered, and a tattered rubber mat instead of carpet. But the heater worked like a champ, as did the AM radio and the wipers. The old, 230 cube 6-cylinder engine used some oil, but ran smooth, and would start right up even at 10 below zero. The powerglide tranny worked ok too. I did change out the old generator for a new alternator and regulator, which kept the battery charged much better, and the headlights no longer dimmed at idle speed.

But dang, that car was crusty underneath; the floor boards were rusted out, and the trunk floor was almost completely gone. One evening, coming home from work across town on the Innerbelt, the gas tank fell out. Fortunately, I was able to get right off the road quickly, so the tank was still intact, held onto the car by only the filler neck and steel fuel line running up to the motor; the tank straps had rusted through and broke. I walked to a nearby store, asked to use their phone, and called my brother. Again, fortunately, he answered, and I filled him in on what had happened. He rounded up a couple of 2x4s long enough to span the frame rails and a roll of "Plumber's tape," that metal strip with holes in it every half-inch or so. We strapped the lumber across the frame, and strapped the gas tank to the 2x4s. We fixed the filler neck, and the car started right back up. How I avoided a fire, I'll never know; stuff happens, and then, sometimes, stuff doesn't happen. I drove that car for another couple of months until one evening, going to a friend's house to help work on his car, as I turned the wheel left to turn into his driveway, the car kept going straight. Upon inspection, the frame where the steering box was supposed to be mounted had rusted completely through, and the steering box twisted right off of it. He had welding equipment; we managed to get the car into his garage, and he welded a piece of 1/4" plate over the rusted-out frame section, and we drilled it with holes so we could mount the steering box to it.




(to be continued)

ironwill

dmccain

iTrader: (2)

Ive enjoyed reading these stories and I thank you for your service to our great country sir.

ironwill

For my brother:

Part 5

A week or two later, I was headed somewhere on N. High Street in the Biscayne when I passed a used car lot with a really clean-looking 1964 Chevelle 2-door station wagon on the front row. I pulled in there, and lo and behold, the salesman who approached me was a guy I had previously known from the Olds dealership when I worked there. The wagon was really straight, another 6-cylinder/powerglide combo, and he made me a great deal on the spot. He gave me $100.00 trade-in for the Biscayne ( I was just happy he'd take it off my hands), and I wrote him a check for the $300.00 difference for the wagon. We changed the tags over, and I went on my way. No more flood car.

I only had that Chevelle wagon for a month when some knucklehead rear-ended me as I was turning into a burger joint parking lot. Nobody was hurt, but the rear quarters, bumper, and tailgate on the wagon were damaged. I got a really good settlement check from the guy's insurance company, and was even able to sell the car, as-is, for what I had in it. The guy who bought it was a regular parts-store customer of mine, a body man, and he had it repaired and repainted in a few days. At the parts store, I sold him a set of ET mags for it. That was a nice-looking car, a good daily driver. And being a 2-door wagon, just different enough to make it interesting.


So once again, I was without a daily driver, instead, driving my Corvette back and forth to work. That wasn't so bad, but my apartment at that time was on the back-side of the building, and I couldn't see the parking lot from there; I was paranoid that someone would steal ithe car or at least steal the tires and wheels off of it. My dilemma was solved shortly thereafter when one of the guys working at the parts store with me bought a big old Pontiac Bonneville, and was talking it up about how nice a car it was. I drove it, and he was right; it was nice. That evening, at his suggestion, I took a trip to the nearby Pontiac dealer's used car lot, to look at a really nice 1971 Catalina hardtop he had told me about, with a 350 V8, auto trans, and power-everything. It only had 40 or so thousand miles on it, and ran like a top. It was silver with a black vinyl top and a nice black interior. I haggled with the salesman for a while, made a deal, and bought the big Indian. I had one of the guys from the store run me up there the next day after work to pick it up. I didn't care for the narrow whitewall tires and stock hubcaps that were on the car, so I deep-sixed them in favor of a new set of 15x7 Cragar SS mags and blackwall tires, bought from my own store with my employee discount. That was a sharp car, and it looked and ran so nice I didnt really care that it was a big, slow slug; it must have weighed at least two tons. As a bonus, my girlfriend at the time liked it too; she didn't like the Corvette at all. She said it was too noisy (I had to agree that the car was pretty loud; those factory side pipes would really bark). She also didn't care for fast driving; she said she never felt safe in it. She also didn't see the humor in the fact that the 'passenger assist bar' (as Chevrolet named the grab handle on the dash right in front of the passenger) was affectionately known as the "chicken bar" by Corvette owners. As I look back on that time, I wonder how we stayed together for as long as we did.



By now, I owned two cars and a motorcycle (a '71 Honda 4-cylinder street bike). Nationwise offered me a manager's position in an existing store in Indianapolis, and I jumped at the opportunity. Not only would it mean a lot more money, but I'd be able to run a store the way I wanted it to be run. Upper management had been grooming me for the promotion for about 6 months, moving me from one store to another for a few weeks at a time so I could get an opportunity to see how other successful managers ran their stores. I knew why they were doing this, so the offer of a store of my own wasn't any surprise. My one big problem was what to do with the Corvette. I had been renting a garage for it at a very reasonable rate, and I knew I'd never be able to find a similar deal in Indy. And there was no way I was going to park it outdoors on a parking lot. A good friend who also owned a Corvette (the guy who did the frame repair on my '61 Biscayne) offered to buy it for $3600, considerably more than I had in it, and well-above the current market value. After thinking about it for a day, I sold the Vette to him. He kept it for a couple of years, then eventually sold it to a lady who worked with him. Kind of an unusual buyer for such a car, but she had owned a number of muscle cars, and had been looking for a Corvette. The last I heard, about 10 years ago, she still had the car, and drove it regularly around the East end of Columbus. I'd like to see it again, just for old time's sake.

I moved to Indy, took over the store, and within a month, fired two people, hired three new ones, and before long, doubled the store's business. I was there for about a year when the company offered me a much bigger, busier, established store in West Virginia (the then-manager had been fired for stealing parts for his own car), or at my choice, a brand new, as-yet unopened store in Miami. And while the thought of setting up a brand new store from an empty building, hiring my entire crew myself, and living in Miami was enticing, I looked at the previous three year's sales records of the WV store, and compared them to what I thought the chances were of a do-it-yourself auto parts store in Miami---the land of the rich retiree---doing even just the same amount of business, and the choice was a no-brainer. Within the week, I was headed for WV, and my assistant manager in Indy was, at my recommendation, promoted to manager of that store.

(to be continued)

ironwill

Thnx. And thanks for your support.

ironwill

For my brother:

Part 6

I landed in West Virginia in 1974, in March, IIRC. I had left my bike in the back room of my former store in Indy, and as soon as the weather broke, I took a Greyhound bus back to get it. It was colder than a brass monkey that day, and I nearly froze on the ride back, but I made it. At least now I had something to piddle around with, but I missed still not having a garage or a car that could get out of it's own way. The Catalina looked really nice with the Cragars, but the small V8 was pretty gutless. That wouldn't last too long though; fate caused a head gasket to start leaking, and I wasn't going to put a nickel into the Poncho 350 to repair it. Instead, I scrounged up a worn-out 455 motor from one of my store customers for minimal $$$, and sent it to one of the local machine shops to get the short block rebuilt, minus the cam. I had them do the heads too, but planned to install them and the cam and valvetrain myself at the garage of a local VW repair shop. I had become friends with the owner of that shop through my parts store; he was a biker too, and we'd get together on weekends and ride through the mountains. He invited me to drop the new motor into my car at his place, and he even had one of his mechanics help me, and at no charge. We pulled the old motor and trans and I replaced the 350 trans with a used turbo 400 I bought from another parts store customer. The swap went without a hitch, and after getting the new motor broken-in, it ran pretty good for a 2-ton land barge.

That big motor was fed through an Edelbrock intake and an 800 CFM Holley carb. Once I got it dialed-in, as above, it ran really well, but geez, it was a gas hog. Flooring the gas pedal, besides lighting up the back tires, was like flushing a toilet; I could swear I could actually see the needle on the gas gauge dropping. That proved to become a big issue not too much later when the Great 1970s OPEC Oil Embargo hit, and hit hard. Not only was the price of gas spiraling upward, the supply was diminishing. It got to a point where the last number of your license plate, whether it was an odd or an even number, determined which days of the week you could buy gas. And sometimes, on those days, all the local stations would be completely out of gas. Fortunately, I lived fairly close to work, and could ride my bike when the weather was good, but it still put a big crimp in being able to come and go as I pleased. The crisis eventually eased up, but I still was pretty gun-shy, and traded the gas-guzzling Big Indian in on a new 1978 Honda Civic. Two years prior to that, my wife's (I was married by then) 1971 Pinto (which she owned when we got married) was constantly breaking down ( what a POS that thing was), to a point where I couldn't keep up with all the repairs. We had traded it in on a new 1976 Civic.


So here I was, former hot rodder/drag racer/engine builder/Corvette owner, reduced to driving around in a little tiny car with about 60 horsepower. But both cars always started even in the coldest weather, ran well (albeit not very fast), required practically zero maintenance (oil and filter changes, plugs/points every 10-15K) and used hardly any gas at all. My wife had put over 100K on hers when we traded it for a new Civic Wagon in 1984. In the meantime, the US auto industry as well as the general public had fallen out of love with high-performance cars. Constantly increasing emissions restrictions placed on auto makers by the EPA, ridiculously high insurance surcharges on anything claiming any amount of horsepower by the car insurance companies, increasing fuel costs, and the constant threat of another fuel crisis all contributed to stabbing a dagger into the heart of the high performance segment of the US auto industry. The new 1977 Corvette featured a whopping 210 horsepower engine. At that time, I looked back on some of the cars I had owned, and had to smh at where things had come to.


During the latter part of the 70's and into the '80s, Detroit made a few half-hearted stabs at producing some 'high performance' models such as the Mustang II, the Shelby edition of the Dodge Charger, and the Camaro with the same lame engine as the Corvette. These cars attempted to make up for their nearly-complete lack of 'go' with a bunch of added-on 'show' in the form of stripes, badges, spoilers and the like. Just about all of them ran as bad as they looked. GM during this time, like the other manufacturers, was trying to market engines with some horsepower that would still pass EPA regulations and also provide some measure of economy, and was doing so by using carburetors. GM went to an oddball computer-controlled carb that was just a nightmare; the other companies didn't fare much better during this time. But technology was starting to catch up with the demands of the times, and soon, throttle-body fuel injection showed up on everything, and carburetors, finally, were out.

TBI systems were okay, and were reasonably reliable, but still didn't have the capacity to run really efficiently under all driving and weather conditions. They were soon to be replaced by Port Fuel Injection, along with the much higher computer power required to run them, and now we were starting to get somewhere. Before long, the Z28 Camaro and the 5.0 Mustang were sporting pretty good fuel systems, and the ability to produce respectable horsepower and torque across a broad rpm range, all the while keeping emissions to a minimum, and gas mileage surprisingly high.



This was in about '85; some semblance of actual performance was about to make it's return.

(to be continued)

ironwill

For my brother:

part 7

I had left the auto parts business in about 1977; Nation Wise Auto Parts was rapidly expanding, and they were planning to change from 6-days a week to 7. As soon as I got wind of this, I started looking at my options; I certainly wasn't going to work 7 days a week, so I gave 2 weeks' notice, and went to work for the Telephone Company, which happened to have a hiring blitz going on right at that time. That proved to be one of the very best business moves/decisions I was ever to make; while I learned an entirely new---and well-paying---trade with Bell Atlantic, Nation Wise became a mis-managed, bloated shadow of it's former self. That's an entirely different, long, and sad story---what happened to a once well-run company. It finally folded into bankruptcy in the Fall of 1995, IIRC. Advance Auto Parts eventually bought many of the former Nation Wise locations, and are still in business today.

One of my TELCO co-workers, a much younger guy who was interested in hot rods but who didn't have any practical experience under the hood, got me back into building engines when the "high performance" engine he had paid someone to build for him for his '82 Corvette began running very poorly and making lots of valve train noise shortly after it was installed. At first, I was a bit reluctant to get involved, since, by this time, it had been almost 10 years since I had done any such work, and wasn't all that interested in getting involved again. But he persisted, and I agreed to help him. It turned out to be fun (for me at least; for him, it was another big outlay of $$$ to re-rebuild his engine), recalling skills long-unused (cylinder head work, measuring clearances, and cam degreeing especially), and it relit a flame in me that had gone out over the past few years. The thrill of hearing an engine I built from an empty block starting up for the first time was still there; I don't think I'll ever get over that, or at least I hope I dont.



In the mid-'80s, both Chevrolet and Ford were working hard to bring cars to market that had some actual punch. Ford, with the 5.0 Mustang, and Chevy with the new Tuned-Port engine in the Z28 and Corvette. One of them caught my eye in a Chevy showroom one day, and after looking over the options available, I started looking for a Z28 that had all the options I wanted on it. Back in the day when I worked for GM, you could 'order' a car, one line-item at a time, to get exactly the car you wanted. That had all changed by the 1980s though; you were pretty much limited to what you could find already built. You could order a car with certain groupings, or packages, of options, but that was about it. Anyway, after a month or so of calling dealers, hoofing it from one dealership to another, getting jerked around by salesmen who knew nothing about the options available (I could relate a couple of funny stories about dealing with salesmen), I found the car I wanted at one of the local dealerships; it was sitting in the showroom amidst a dozen other new Chevrolets. I made a deal with the salesman, signed the papers, exchanged the keys to my Civic for the keys to the Z28, and after they moved a half-dozen other cars and opened a pair of large glass doors, drove my new Camaro off the showroom floor.


During this time, my brother back in Ohio had built a large, 4-bay stand-alone garage (in addition to the attached, 2-car garage he already had) complete with an overhead lift on a track that ran the length of the garage, a commercial TIG welding outfit (he was a pipefitter by trade, and a very highly-skilled welder), sand blasting and steam-cleaning equipment, and the usual assortment of automotive hand tools. By now, he had also grown tired of sitting around, and was back into performance cars as was I; he got into restoring Corvettes in his spare time. The first one he completed was a Rally Red 1966 Corvette Coupe. It had the numbers-matching 327/350 engine (which I built for him over a couple weekend visits), 4-speed, factory-air/side pipes/knockoff wheels. Beautiful, tight, great-running car. He had it on the market for about a year before finding a buyer willing to meet his asking price.



The proceeds from that car went right into his next project---a basket-case 1967 roadster. A long story behind his buying that car from a very reluctant seller, who, over a period of about 2 years, finally realized, after disassembling the car, that he had neither the $$$ nor the necessary skills and facilities to restore it himself, and agreed to sell it. My brother told me it took three trips to get all of it home to his shop; the body was partially disassembled but still sitting on the frame, which had been hacked-up at some point to clear a set of obviously-incorrect headers. There was no engine (another story involved in how he found and recovered the original, numbers-matching engine block from one of the many previous owners of the car after spending many evenings making phone calls all over the country), and everything else was in a dozen boxes sitting out under the guy's carport. That car took him almost 8 years to restore, working weekends and occasionally evenings. As I mentioned, he was a union pipefitter, and was at that time working 60-70-80 hours a week building the Honda plant in Marysville, Ohio, and the-then-rapidly-expanding Anheuser-Busch brewery in Columbus. In addition to those two 'regular' jobs, he was also on-call, 24-7/365, for any emergency work through his union local. I recall one Christmas Eve around that time that he worked all night long in one of the tall office buildings in downtown Columbus when a drain line under an upper-floor swimming pool sprang a leak. I also recall him stating that he made a pile of $$$ from that call-out.

Additionally, around this time, the company he was working for had a contract with NASA to build some of the cryogenic equipment they used to handle liquid oxygen. He personally built one such piece of equipment, about 6 feet tall, equally as wide, full of all kinds of pipes, regulators, valving, etc., all tig-welded out of stainless steel. He was really proud of that thing, and rightfully so; the craftsmanship was flawless, as was everything else he ever worked on.



He finished the '67 just one day before the then-annual NCRS Corvette Meet at McDorman Chevrolet in Canal Winchester, Ohio (the same dealership owner who bought my brother's '67 big-block Corvette several years before), and hurriedly entered it for judging; driving to that meet was the car's maiden voyage. It received the Top Flight Award, meaning it was judged to be exactly as Chevrolet had built it back in 1967. He subsequently entered it in two other NCRS meets (one in Cincinatti, the other, I can't recall where), and picked up two more Top Flight Awards. He was planning to sell this car, and was considering his next project---possibly a 1962 Feulie restoration, and he had already begun a search for a likely candidate.


During all this time, I kept my '86 IROC Z, driving it during nice weather, keeping it out of rain and snow. I had bought a 1968 Impala to drive in bad weather, and like all the other cars I owned in my lifetime, there were a couple of stories that came with this one too. Like the first week I owned, it, driving home from working 50 miles out of town, coming down a mountain road, and the brake pedal went right to the floor. I somehow managed to get home without further incident by using the 'emergency brake.' I completely rebuilt the entire brake system that weekend after making a dozen phone calls to locate a non-power-assist master cylinder (pretty odd for such a large car, as I found out), and scrounging local junk yards for a usable brake drum. The original master cylinder, upon disassembly, was so worn you could see, by eye, that the bore was egg-shaped rather than round; apparently, the only thing that had kept it working at all before it failed was the large amount of sludge sealing the cylinder. The brake drum that needed replacing had a big crack in it across the friction surface. I took the junk yard drum along with the other three originals to a friend's shop where he turned them all for me.

Or a few months later, the time my wife and I decided to drive it to Columbus (about 400 miles round trip) even though it had 200,000+ miles on the engine/trans, the original 307/powerglide combo. We made the trip with no problem, arriving back home late that Sunday night with no issues. The next morning, however, on the way to work, the engine started to lose power, miss, some smoke coming out the tailpipe, and a faint knock from under the hood.

That evening after work, I drove it to my friend's (the '82 Corvette owner) garage, and we pulled the intake and heads to see what was wrong. What it was, was a completely tired, worn-out motor; the further into it we went, the worse it looked. The timing chain was so worn you could almost make the two sides of the chain touch by squeezing them together between the cam and crank sprockets. It had a half-dozen worn cam lobes, two burned valves, and one piston had a small chunk missing out of it's top. The cylinder walls were all deeply scored, especially the one with the bad slug. We never even bothered to look at any of the main or rod bearings or crank journals. Why that thing didn't break down on the highway the day before and leave us stranded, I'll never know.

By now, I had made acquaintance with a few other hot-rodders, one of whom had several engines available for sale, one of which was a .030-over 327 long-block with a mild cam and about 20K miles on it. I can't recall how much I paid for it, but it was very reasonable. We dropped it in the car the next evening, and I drove it to work the next morning; this was less than a week since the old motor gave up the ghost.

I drove the '68 for another couple of years before that engine began to have problems (a small crack in one cylinder wall leaking coolant into the cylinder, probably due to the .030 overbore in a shifted-core block), so I traded it on a used, high-mileage '88 Olds Cutlass. I drove that car until I was able to trade it and pay cash for a new 2000 Chevy ZR2 S10 4wd pickup truck, and just three years later, traded it on another new 2003 ZR2 due to a salesman's offer so good I just could not refuse.




I was now back into hot rodding, and was planning to build a radical '32 Ford 3 window coupe. It was to have a blown big-block engine/turbo 400 trans/Ford 9" rear. My brother and I talked about this project, and we agreed that I'd get the car to the 'rolling chassis with powertrain installed' status, then trailer it up to his shop in Columbus to do all the remaining work---fuel, cooling, and braking systems, the complete interior, and at least a primer paint job. I spent the next year or so working as much overtime as possible, saving my $$$, and researching chassis and body manufacturers (I planned to buy a fiberglass repro '32 body) as well as companies that built suspension and drivetrain parts. I had a good 427 block and crank that I had bought many years ago from a friend who was clearing out his garage, and planned to build my own engine. It was going to have a full-roller valve train and an 8-71 blower fed with a pair of Holleys. I had been doing some business with a local machine shop that did circle-track engines, so that aspect was good to go as well.













It was around this time that we began to notice that my brother was occasionally having difficulty keeping his balance while walking. This condition got progressively worse over time, and he sought medical help. Over the next couple of years, he was shuffled from one specialist to another, none of them ever being able to specifically diagnose his neurological problem.

His condition grew worse and worse; no treatment nor drug helped. He eventually became totally incapacitated, and on January 22, 2015, he passed away............................















(to be continued)