Well it's been awhile, not that alot has gotten done but we had to share the best thing we've heard about the Vette so far...mostly been bad news everytime we dug a little deeper. Which one of those was the fact that the #4 body mount and rear tub had some previous crash damage. After a few guys looked at they recommended a professional fiberglass guy fix it. One recommendation led us to Paragon Corvette in Swartz Creek, MI about 1/2 hour from our place.
Two and a half months later, they had an opening for us to take the car to get some structural work done. Great guys there, very knowledgeable and made us feel very confident. After the head guy, Ken, looked it over good he found some things that also needed attention so we agreed to fix them while it was there.
Ken has been doing Vettes only since the early 80's so he's seen it all. He was telling us how its so rare to see an untouched car, especially a C2, that has been that way for going on 40 years. He mentioned the 80s and 90s were all about undoing all the custom 70s stuff and going back to original. Now, it's been changing and guys are wanting the "day 2" or period custom looks. What's old is new again theme I guess. Anyway he has a friend that he though might like to see our car so he sent him a pic and asked if he knew anything about it...the friend replied, your joking right? I built that car he said! I guess he was amazed that a car he built and painted in '75/'76 is first of all still around, and second still wearing the paint he laid on it. So he proceeded over to Paragon yesterday and had a reunion with the car. Best part is he brought pictures of when he was building the car, and from the Detroit Autorama in 1976! He left his contact info and wants to meet us to talk about it some more. He said he even has the 3rd (iirc) place plaque that he got at the show and if he could find it would give it to us.
So, on to some pictures. He gave us several, but I cherry picked a few that I thought were cool. Even the Parnelli Joes tires are on it in the pictures, amazing.
Before the graphics were on:
Looks just like this now (well before we took it apart lol) except the picture is dated '76.
Autorama 1976 pictures:
And it had a cross ram intake on it for awhile..also amazing as it came with the Winters aluminum intake and Holley card both date coded to the car when we bought it.
So that was a refreshing experience for us. Ken did an awesome job on the repairs and I would highly recommend them for Corvette work. We dropped the car off at 6:30 Tuesday night, picked it up 5:30 Friday evening, done. No complaints there.
So we've got a new factory replacement frame on order...since mid-November last year...that's not going so great. Hope to get it in 4 weeks, probably another 8 at the rate its going. But we did get a bunch of parts from VanSteel, some new stainless headers and side pipes and some other items. Not as much progress as I'd like, but we're hope to get going on it again soon.
Hope everyone likes the vintage pics as much as we do.