C5 and C6 parts galore!

Was at an Orlando swap meet today sponsored by a Corvette organization whose name shall not be spoken, and there was tons of used C5 and C6 parts there. Apparently there's a lot of well-heeled types who can't drive buying these cars. I saw all the suspensions and stuff, and thought to myself that if I had to do it over again (on my '69), I'd put a C5/C6 suspension up front rather than the C4 stuff. I could have saved myself a lot of fabrication time by just narrowing the aluminum front crossmember rather than welding up my own. Oh well.
Curious, Why are the upper balljoints reversed on the C5/C6 suspension? (The balljoints are on the knuckle, rather than the upper A-arm.)

Just curious, what were they going for? I just picked up an '85 front IFS/rear IRS, complete, at a swap meet, for less than half of what I typically see them going for ($475 for both). I'm thinking seriously about using the front in my '81. How bad was the swap, and how do you like it?

1981Z06Vette said:

Just curious, what were they going for? I just picked up an '85 front IFS/rear IRS, complete, at a swap meet, for less than half of what I typically see them going for ($475 for both). I'm thinking seriously about using the front in my '81. How bad was the swap, and how do you like it?

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I didn't ask about the prices as I wasn't in the market for parts for another project quite yet. To be honest, I was afraid the prices would be reasonable, and then I'd have a hard time talking myself out of buying a bunch of stuff.
Looks like you got a damn decent deal on that suspension. Way less than I paid for mine several years ago. I initially started with a '96 front and a '92 rear, but I found that the rear knuckles didn't package very well given the space constraints of a narrowed trackwidth, so I put '84 rear knuckles in it. Those gave me a touch more room.
I love the handling of the car now. The typical C3 rear twitchiness is gone. The conversion was a lot of work, primarily because I went with the stock C3 suspension width rather than the stock C4 width. This allowed me to keep a stock look with C3 wheels, rather than requiring the odd offset C4 wheels to keep the tires inside the fenders. The choice of wheels is a key question you have to ask yourself before you start the project.