63 Corvette resto

I'm helping a buddy fix up his 63 Corvette Convertible 327/300HP Automatic.

Couldn't have pulled if off so quickly without the help of Mike Dyer (Tracdogg), he's an awesome guy, collecting all those parts from various sources, never tired of answering a question. Mike's the best in my book.

It's an original German car (metric speedo)...



.... and used to belong to his father. This car was actually rescued from the junkyard many years ago. The original engine had seized in 87 or so and was replaced with a smogger 350 from a 80s G20 van/ambulance. Something had to be done about that. After tearing the motor apart it was sent off to the machine shop for rebuilding. We tore out the smogger motor and I persuaded him into doing a complete frame off on the car, hate to do things half assed.

Here's the old 327 after tearing it down...it's just a bit kaput that's what you get flogging it on the Autobahn and the oil pump drive shaft comes loose










Initially my bud figured he'd get this done with a little wire brushing, all that dirt and grime...what a mess



Turned out the car had been wrecked, just looking at the frame I noticed the pass side front susp. was off ...further inspection learned it was off by as much as 2cm and the fender had been repaired, the inner fender was pop riveted together and the rad frame was held in place with a sheet metal plate and kitty hair. The tire was rubbing on the shoddy repaired. Case closed, time to pull it apart. The most astonishing thing was the center link, it was bent, someone must have heated it and bent it to make the car track straight again.

Bent rad frame


Cracked battery box, have to fix that.


Old grimy parts





frame back from blasting after straightening (you can see where it was torched to heat it up)


repairing the dented frame

Frame all straightened, cracked welds and porous welds ground out and re-welded, flame zinc sprayed and expoxy painted:




Body on dolly



Freshly powdercoated parts:







Fresh motor


Freshly painted diff, there's just a wee bit of play in the stubs but there are no parts for this thing available


Brake booster for disc conv:


Rebuilt pedal box


All new parking brake equipment


Frame buildup, converted to front disc brakes. Retaining rear drums because of trailing arms and bump stop pads on frame. Also retaining stock Dana posi diff.





More work on chassis

:friends: I"ll buy you a few beers if you head west and fix MY car......:chinese::crutches:

powdercoated tank, refurbished sender & new straps and hardware



Found the oil separator, machine shop forgot to install it....time to pull the manifold off and install it, if you don't do something yourself......



brand new rad frame



Engine Back where it belongs... all brake lines are hand bent from cunifer tubing. The fuel lines are all stainless, home made.



new thermostatic clutch, powdercoated fan blades





All new hoses and misc. stuff



Time to press the u joints in the axles...hit a snag couldn't find the tool to keep the drive flanges from bending, this was my quickie solution...worked perfectly (one flange had already been replaced sometime, you can see there's a late and early one)



Worked just fine .. fresh shaft w/ solid spicers. Should be good for a loooong time.





Freshly rebuilt steering box & Chinese SS shorty headers. These things ain't even half bad (I did not buy them! I never buy China stuff) The box is the original 63 box w/ a used sector & worm from a 77 box, the original pieces were pitted & shot (kept them since the 63 worm has a completely splined end without a flat), the rag joint is the original one w. the coper wire (wire turned blue after zinc plating), the box lid is the cast iron original one too. Zinc plated for that little bit of detail. Couldn't bring myself to installing the alu cover of the 77 box I sacrificed for it.



We have a roller


DeWitts rad:



need some more pieces to get the engine running for one the AFB carb needs to be rebuilt.

Holy smoke.... he only wanted to fix the engine ???

Wow great job..I gotta ask you tho what do you do with your spare time all 30 seconds of it. Between this and the Camaro do you ever sleep?

I only help him in the evenings every now and then, been working on this one for quite a while though (since April I think it was) and since its mostly stock it's more bolt on than anything nothing to it really. Takes longer to wait for parts than to put it together.

Karsten, I helped him break his piggy bank

elevatordude said:

Wow great job..I gotta ask you tho what do you do with your spare time all 30 seconds of it. Between this and the Camaro do you ever sleep?

Click to expand...

:crutches:

HUmm....yeh, TT, how long from start to finish on that project??:bonkers:

What project? The camaro? It's almost done, waiting on some alu heads and some parts here and there, got a total of 21 days in it, haven't done much of anything last couple of weeks, waiting on parts. Eventually I'll be able to pull it off in 7 days like foose LOL

Well, I had an oil pressure problem in the engine, then had to clean the engine bay, then while I'm at it, the trans, oh, the diff needs some work, oh hell, just pull the body off, it's easeir to get at everything that way! This is a bad a case of "whileimatititis" I've seen in a long time!! But wow, it's really looking good now! Nice work on the frame too. Too bad the oringinal repair wasn't done right, but that seems more and more to be the norm doesn't it? Can't wait to find out what's under the paint on mine, I know it was hit in the left front. Whoever fixed it sanded the ridge line right outta the front of the fender, and I can see some welding on the bumper horn. We'll see when I get into that project!!

You guys must have balls to paint that body before the car is put together. I scratched my door bad putting them back on and I scratch my fenders every time I take the hood off.

It's an old paint job, painted over shoddy repairs. After dropping the body on the car is going to be driven for a while after fixing the inner fenders and all, if it develops cracks it's not a problem, it'll be painted in a year or so.

enkeivette said:

You guys must have balls to paint that body before the car is put together. I scratched my door bad putting them back on and I scratch my fenders every time I take the hood off.

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I use old blankets, or bed liners for stuffing under and tucking old towels in the hood edges...did it a bunch of times on the stock hinged setup on the '72...

a single bed blanket or a double bed liner and towels, did the trick....

I had a stick I would prop the hood with, then take off the catch two bolts, dropped it flat....then remove the two bottom hinge bolts on the hood....

then loosen each top bolt with rags/blankets in place....slowly drop hood down to headlights area on top of the blankets to take the weight....then hold the hood and remove stick...lower hood whild dragging to rear of car....

hood is now yours....IF you can lift it up and over....I had no trouble doing that....but I"m tall....

:drink:

Really nice work. Can't wait to see it all done.

Made quite a bit of progress on this car over the last few months.

Rolling chassis, mostly complete



Custom trans oil cooler & lines



Engine almost done, carb redone by Mike all resto hardware. I'm not a resto nut but my buddy wanted it like this, and it looks clean and functional





Clean spot for MSD 6AL2



repaired a severely cracked heater box:




Apart from the ugly front fenders with obvious hidden shoddy repairs the rear storage box was all mangled also.


Only remedy I saw was to cut out out, cut apart and removed it on a slab of wood to get it as straight as possible. I epoxied it together and then ground the seams down and laid glass in and then a lot of sanding and filling. I'll remove the majority of the epoxy later on

epoxied together


ground out


glassed


and semi finished


The pass side fender was missing a good bit of the front, and the entire area where the rad frame bolts down. I removed the fender and installed a new one my buddy got from some NCRS chapter here in the Netherlands. It's a piece of crap! there are bubbles and pockets everywhere. They must have stiffed him good


new fender




old expansion tank mount


after a lot of cleaning, sanding, filling...almost done

also repaired the front lower section, needs final sanding & filling









repaired this section also, have to repair all the grille mounting tabs, they are all broken off



firewall gets some paint and goodies installed


That damned fender started acting up, a crack was developing and I had to grind down the filler to get to the original fender emblem holes and glass up the new ones some tool drilled (and they were not in the right spot and not even in the same spot on both sides!) After sanding it down I noticed that there was a huge amount of filler. This also explained why the pass side water channel for the hood was half an inch deeper than the other side....there was that much filler on it. I also noticed all the brass rivets but figured they may have done a shoddy repair but I didn't anticipate what I found. The rivets are all that's holding it together. No bondo, no glass, only rivets and filler...tons and tons of filler. UH OH!!!!

See the ridiculous location for the badges:



The reddish part is hand laid glass, full of air pockets and loose fibers. They didn't even do the part below the belt line.... and after grinding on it I discovered that this was glassed over filler and the filler was applied over paint and sand WTF?

Separate panels, no bondo, no glassing..all filler


Some more grinding, more hand laid fiberglass, crappy work


The front section of the wheel arch is hand laid over a green repair panel, why? no idea...of course there is filler under the glass, what else would you expect




Repair panels are simply laid over torn off sections of the old quarter, requiring quite a bit of filler, in some spots an inch thick


left is how thick it was, right is ground away. Deepest spot is down to bare glass



This is going to be quite a bit of work to fix.



That's not even mentioning all the repairs I already did to the other inner fender, the firewall, the front bumper mount holes, the lower chin area and the badge holes drilled in the wrong spot.

The pass side headlight is all manged up also, the pocket is crooked, not even close to the other one. it's not sitting perpendicular to the car's axis, and some idiot trimmed the headlamp bucket to fit the skewed hole. Luckily we have a section of a wrecked car that we can cut most of what we need out and repair it. when standing off the side of the car you can clearly see the headlight pockets are not in line. What a bunch of shoddy repairs...it's just sickening. You can just see it in the last pic by the masking tape line, the line made by the tape is how the opening should be oriented, it's trimmed at an angle and too deep as it goes towards the inside of the car. The sides are at a crooked angle also, some major repair needed there.

I should send my 82 vette to you to finish. I don't see how you do so many projects at once LOL.

enkeivette said:

You guys must have balls to paint that body before the car is put together. I scratched my door bad putting them back on and I scratch my fenders every time I take the hood off.

Click to expand...

I took large bath towels, shop rags all balled up and also a tag end between the hood and fender.....I used to have a flat stick cut about a yard long, used to prop up the hood against the cowling, pop the support rod/hinge off, then remove hinge bolts, one each side, then loosen the top one, remove the other side, let it hand a tad crooked, if you have enough padding on each front edge, it will not damage a damn thing....

at that point, I would remove the support stick, lay it across the engine, and carefully pull the hood up and outta there, being tall, I could do it easy....

the reverse is obviously the way it went back on....even with the reverse hinge job I did on it now....it's the same procedure....

I even managed the hood on my A body that way, by myself, but the B body was NOT going to allow that shit, :banghead::mobeer:

A little more progress. Did the engine break in. My buddy was so nervous LOL, this was his 1st time and he was sure I was going to destroy it with all the revs, smoke, noise hehehe

Did it all on the rolling chassis, my buddy wanted the tarp under there, told him it wasn't needed and when it started smoking near the mufflers he quickly pulled it away Stubborn LOL





How about this super professional monitoring stand?


So much for that shine on the stainless headers, this looks much better


it's getting there


and found a black battery that looks more than half decent

TT, what do your neighbors think of your working on all these cars, running engines, etc?? looks like a nice upscale type hood, they don't mind the noise, welding, activity, people coming and going?? I purposely bought here in my type hood where there are no rules and regs over that, long as I don't set fire to the joint, or run open headers at 3am .....

but from the looks, they'd have my ASS over here over that kind of activity....

:drink::gurney:

That's not my place, it's my buddies. I don't work on cars at my house.