CorvairJim

The #37 K-Mart/Little Caesar's Ford team actually built either a Mark VII or VIII-bodied Winston Cup car in the 1990's to experiment with the aerodynamics of the body and see if it might work better than the Thunderbird they were using at the time John Andretti was the driver for the team at the time, and it was shown on a pre-race show where it had been tested earlier in the week. The body style was never approved by NASCAR, but could you imagine a Lincoln running on the high banks? Personally, I wouldn't have minded seeing it happen, maybe going up against another very aero-looking, high-line coupe of the era, the Riviera!

I think Harry did some of his famous Photoshop work to try to throw us by replacing the background of the photo of a very nice, very REAL car.

Lookin' GREAT so far! It looks like what the "futurists" back in the 1940's claimed we'd all be driving by now. (... But Ralph Nader claimed that the rear ends of the STOCK 1959 and '60 Chevys would fly at 70 mph anyhow, in his infamous work of fiction, "Unsafe At Any Speed"! )

Destroying a Charger 500 isn't any better than ruining a Daytona, as far as rarity goes. I was just reading in the January issue of Hemmings Muscle Machines that there were somewhere between 350-550 Charger 500s built in 1969, depending on who you ask. The Daytona gets all the press due to it's over the top aero add-ons, but the 500 was the first aero car built specifically for NASCAR homologation. Even it's model designation stems from the fact that NASCAR mandated that ChryCo build at least 500 of them for them to be accepted by NASCAR as a production model and therefore legal to race.

I knew I liked you, John! I'll ditto your number's 1 through 4, but I REALLY want to see a NEW 1965-69 Corvair, made to modern standards.

In responsw to John Landgraver's (dimaxion) comment above: First off, thanks for the compliment on my model. Now to the gist of your comment... ~I did read the book - I own two copies (an autographed hardcover and a paperback). ~Ernie Kovacs blood alcohol content was found to be well over twice the legal limit after the fatal accident (.21%). He was known as a drunk, and it finally caught up with him Driving in that condition, it would have happened in whatever vehicle he was driving at the time. Don't blame the car for the driver's stupidity! ~Tossing the fan belt wasn't a major problem if the belt was adjusted properly in the first place and the engine wasn't overrevved. I've thrown a grand total of THREE Corvair fan belts in 31 years of Corvair ownership. One after someone else had adjusted it (the previous owner), and twice during autocross events where I spiked the revs around 6,000 rpms. NEVER on the street when I had adjusted the belt myself. ~GM never forced Corvairs on their dealers - I have no idea where you came up with that! This is the first time I've ever heard something that crazy! Sales dropped off as a direct result of the Ford Mustang. The American car buying public wanted a boring, conventional sporty car instead of an unconventional SPORTS car that could seat as many people comfortably, handle better, and acheive better mileage all at the same time. Still, Chevy managed to sell 109,800 of these supposedly hard to sell cars that had to be forced on the dealers (according to you) in the 1966 model year. I can still find some Corvair parts at two local Chevrolet dealers (in Plymouth Meeting and Phoenixville, PA), and bought out a couple of station wagon loads of Corvair parts from another Chevy agency where I worked in the 1980's. I guess they didn't get the memo about having to return the parts, huh? ~"GM subsisdied Chevy Dealers to offer large bountys for Trade for other Models"? GM offered $500 trade in bonus for any 1969 Corvair through the end of 1973. Car manufacturers offer bonusus like that all the time, especially on last year of production models. ~"Maligned"? Unjustly by people who only believe one side of the story, yes. "Unloved"? Not art all! The Corvair Society of America has nearly 5,000 members - Hardly unloved! ~I too had a 1960 700-Series 4-door sedan, and not once was the car anyhting but the picture of stability. If it weren't, I wouldn't have given it to the person who helped me restore it - my eldest daughter - for her 16th birthday. She was the only kid in her high school class to drive to school in a car 20 years older than she was!

Bruce, if you want or need any info on the actual 1:1 car for your project, you know where to find me! Only bad thing about the Prestige release is that the tires are too wide. They are roughly 55-series when they should be 80-series in today's measurement system. You'll need to remember to shave the side marker lights. The kit steering wheel is the 1967-69 style, but the correct wheel is available in any of the 1965-66 Chevelle kits out there. Thanks, Ronnie! I really enjoy rebuilding "Glue Bombs". Also, I find it's the most economical way to fill out holes in my Corvair model collection. These old built-ups can be found for the cost of a new kit in the LHS, if not less sometimes. Factory correct was the only way I was going to do this one because my actual 1:1 car was pretty much factory correct. I noted the few mods I made to the model, and they were the same ones I had made to my car when I owned it back in 1980-83. This is actually the 3rd built up Corvair I've rebuilt, but the other two were modified. I did a '66 Corsa as a weathered, worn-out car like you might find in a front yard along a back road with a "For Sale" sign in the windshield. My '67 Monza coupe was redone as a "Phantom" Yenko Stinger convertible. Don Yenko built 4-10 convertibles (the number is open for debate, even among people who really know their Stingers!), after the initial run of 100 Corsa coupes in 1966, and he built 10 more coupes in 1967, but no convertibles. The body had some damage at the base of the rear window that would have been tough to fix, but the convertible top boot from the 1969 reissue from about 2005 covered the damaged area just fine!

I don't know if I ever had one up to 110 in the rain, but I had my most recent one, a '66 Monza coupe (mechanically modified to roughly Yenko Stinger Stage III-specs) up over 90 for extended stretches in the rain a number of times. I also had the right front tire blow out in the rain at over 70, and I had absolutely no control issues. That was on the trip home to where we live in suburban Philly from Denver, having just bought the car. I had bought it on eBay and had a local club member check it out for me. Let me tell you, there's nothing like a 1,750 mile cross country trip in a new-to-you classic car! My wife and I love long road trips, and that one was our all-time favorite.

Shoot, looking at all of these great Corvairs coming out of the woodwork, I'm thinking a Corvair CBP might be in order somewhere along the line! I have a couple of those '63s sitting around waiting their turn. One had it's vent window posts cut to lay the windshield back a bit and had the little lizard that came with the kit glued to it's trunk lid! The other one is an old toy store friction model. Both are molded in a light pastel green. Seems to me that I've already seen your cars somewhere along the line, Walt. If you ever decide to sell off those two unpainted ones, you know who to ask!

Tool cool for words! The working lights and the fan turning just amaze me. All I noticed that it might need is paint detailing of the hubcaps. I'm sure it just slipped your mind with all the other details you put into this little beauty!

You and Emily did a great job on this Camaro. She has a bright future in the hobby.

The "Camber Compensator" sold for Volkswagens was basically a transverse leaf spring which bolted tothe transaxle in the middle and outboard at the control arms. This is the same thing that Chevrolet itself did on all 1964 model Corvairs across the board. I've always been kind of skeptical about this supposed "Tuck Under" because 1) centripital force causes a car to lean OUT of a corner, compressing the outside spring and 2) even if the car did lean into the corner to allow this condition to exist. the suspension only has so much travel - there's no way the car could jack itself up and over the axle! (A quick P.S. to our newest member, "Vairnut": I like you already! Anyone with a screen name like that is OK in my book! Why not post some of your buildsfor us to check out?)

I hadn't considered Chuck's suggestion of red primer. That makes sense to me. Looked at that way, it's just a phenominal job, especially for a first attempt! I saw a nicely weathered Cameo in "that other magazine" a few years ago where the builder clearly hadn't done the research. Plenty of well-executed rust-out in all the right places - over the headlight brows, in the front fender doglegs, the lower corners of the doors... and all along the bottom edges of those fiberglass bed sides and around the rear wheel wells!

Great job. Mike! I'm a huge fan of the "Bat Wing" Chevys, and you really captured this one.

First off, thanks for the compliment! If anyone has any questions about my favorite 1:1 car, you know where to find me! And Bill, there are plenty of Corvairs for sale out there at any given time. They are among the most reasonably priced hobby/collectors cars available, due in no small part to people's misconceptions brought about by Ralph Nader's inaccuracies (my polite way of saying "Lies"). Ralph Nader titled his famous book "Unsafe At Any Speed", claiming it was aimed at the American auto industry in general. The Corvair was pilloried in the first chapter. The second chapter was devoted to telling how the horizontal tailfins of the 1959 and 1960 full-size Chevrolets caused the cars' rear ends to lift off the road at 70 mph, causing a very unsafe condition. He might have asked Junior Johnson before trying to pass that one off! Johnson won the 1960 Daytona 500 in a '59 Impala at an AVERAGE speed of nearly 140 mph. Think about it for a second: If the drive wheels leave the ground at 70 mph, how could Johnson maintained an average speed nearly TWICE that figure? He must have caught one heck of a draft for the whole race and pulled the perfect slingshot at the last moment to win! Meanwhile, the only mention of a Ford product in the entire book was to say that the knobs on the dashboard of the then new Mustang protruded too far, making them likely to cause injury in the event of a crash. It was brought to light in 1970 that Nader was on the payroll of the Ford Motor Company while he was writing his screed.

Thanks for seeing things (sort of) my way... I think... maybe... kinda... Or not?

I know it's real... as in real good looking! Whether it's a model of a real good looking car or a real real good looking car, well, I'm still up in the air...

An acquaintance of mine from another website wants to build a replica of his '74 Nova, but the closest he's been able to find is the AMT 1970 kit. Is there a resin transkit to build a '73/'74 out there somewhere?

Let's see if this works, Niko. Here's a link to another website that I'm on (Motortopia.com) where I've posted a complete photo album of this model's build: http://www.motortopi...to-finish-30031 I know I should have posted a thread on this very intense rebuilding project in the "Under Glass" forum, but I never really got around to it! Besides, I'm really bad at downloading my photos from my camera card into my computer. The captions with the photos in the Motortopia album were written with an eye toward talking a person who might not necesssarily appreciate what goes into building or restoring a car model through the process. (If anyone here on the MCM website is interested in the 1:1 car hobby too, www.motortopia.com is, by far, my favorite 1:1 car website. Check it out if you have the time. If nothing else, it's a great resource for photos of all sorts of cars and trucks that you might some day want to build in scale. I have pictures of many of my builds posted alongside many of the 1:1 cars I either own now or have owned in the past. My screen name on Motortopia is the same as on here, CorvairJim.) (EDIT: I just checked both of the links above and they work just fine. Happy viewing!)

Technically, this car couldn't have been a Stinger, since the first ones were built in 1966. I've built a couple of Stingers in the past, including a "Phantom" '67 Stinger convertible that I did earlier this year. Like this one, it came to me as a Glue Bomb, in this case a 1967 Monza coupe Annual. I have some shots of it posted on here somewhere. Yenko built a few ragtops in the original 1966 run, but none of the 10 cars he produced in '67 were convertibles. I also havea '66 Corsa bomb restoration project in the works that will become a Stinger. Stay tuned - I'll be posting that one too once it's finished...

May I point out one minor detail? Not meaning to pick apart a fine model, but it looks like the paint along the tops of the bed sides is wearing through and the metal beneath is beginning to show rust. The bed sides of the Cameo were fiberglass, so they wouldn't rust. Crack, yes, but not rust. Maybe it's just dirty and/or greasy, since the wear pattern isn't the same as the front fenders and I'm just looking at it wrong. That's my ONLY kvetch about this otherwise fantastic model. It definitely looks better than my first attempt at weathering (or my second - I've only done two!). Where did you find that chain? I need to find a whole bunch of it for a 60's-style car carrier semi I'm building.

This is a replica of my first 1:1 Corvair (of roughly a dozen to date). It started out as a very rough "Glue Bomb", but when the "Glue Bomb CBP" came up a few months back, I decided to go for it. This is the result. I had to convert it to a Monza from the Corsa version that it was originally and really get crazy on the body. The hid that built it the first time around butchered the back of the body to make a big V-8 fit. I admit I cheated a bit and used and/or modified a bunch of parts from a donor reissue kit. For more on it, see my write-up in the CBP Forum.

That Thunderbird looks great so far! Keep up the great work. ( I just have to get me an airbrush some day... )

Is this going to be a Community Build Project or a "Show us your model" post? If it's a Community Build, I have a Corvair coupe I'm converting into an Elky-like trucklet that I'd like to get into it with. If it's a "Show us your model" sort of thing, it should probably be re-posted in the "Under Glass" section of the forums.

Thanks for the props, guys. This one was a labor of love, as you could probably tell from what I said about the car I owned 30 years ago. I had to build the model from memory because, unfortunately, I don't know where any photos of it are anymore. To the best of my recollection, I got it right with the exception of the "Auto Flite Avenger 60" bias ply white letter tires the car had on it. They didn't last too long anyhow. I replaced them with standard size bias ply whitewalls, reverse mounted so the blackwall side showed. Much sportier that way - no sissy whitewalls for me! When I built the model, I decided that the whitewalls would look better after all. I guess I could have gone all the way and reverse mounted the rare original whitewall kit tires, but I did what I did because it's what I wanted to do on the model. I guess I'm just more mature now and have seen enough Corvairs with whitewalls to know that, hey, they really DO look better than plain blackwalls! To answer the engine questions above, the Corvair was only available with an air-cooled flat-6. No "Base Model" 4-cylinder was ever available, contrary to what many people believe (and have even told me they specifically remember a Corvair they used to own as having!) There were two popular mid-engine V-8 conversion kits available in the mid 60's through the mid 80's, and some of the major components of these kits are available again in repro from one of the major Corvair parts houses. These kits were made by Kelmark (the company better known for their VW hop-up parts) and Crown Engineering. These cars are a real blast to drive! With a centrally located, low center of gravity, they handle like slot cars when the suspension is set up right. If the engine is even moderately hot, you can just imagine the straight-line performance in a car that weighs roughly 2,750 lbs wet. None of the power goes up in tire smoke when weight transfer shifts the engine's weight almost directly over the drive wheels on a hard launch! I once drove one where the owner showed me a timing slip from Maple Grove Dragway... How does 11.57 seconds strike you for a small block powered Corvair running on street tires and pump gas? The guy was also pretty proud of the "Fastest Time of the Day" trophy from a friend's Corvette club's Autocross event! Bandit 1: I have several of my other Corvair builds posted on here. I think the photos can be accessed from my page.