Visiting the Ranch

Saturday morning I thought I was getting up before anyone in the house when I drug myself out of bed at 7:30. I was wrong. Brianna and Nicholas had already been up and running (literally), and they arrived back home as I was fixing myself breakfast. I had resigned myself to leaving Glinda’s front bench seat out of the load of parts going up to the Corvair Ranch, but Nicholas was kind enough to help me carry it out of the temporary garage and place it atop the pile in the back of the truck.

I arrived at the Ranch shortly after their 9 AM opening, and snapped a few photos of the bed-full before Jeff and I unloaded it onto a pallet. While he gathered the new parts to fill my shopping list, I chatted with a couple ‘vair guys about their projects. Jeb has dropped a 140HP with a modified Powerglide into his Greenbrier and is in the process of putting in aftermarket A/C . Tom pulled a turbo Corsa convertible out of Jeff’s collection of restorables and gave me a tour of what it’s been through. I told him I had some serious rotisserie envy as he spun the bare body around on its axis showing me the results of the body being acid dipped (to remove the paint and body putty) and dipped e-coated. The trick, he shared, was minimzing the air pockets that prevent the coating from getting to nooks and crannies. Looked like his coater was about ninety-nine percent successful.

Back to see how Jeff was doing. He’d pulled together the fuzzies, weatherstripping, and air cleaner brackets for Scarlett and the steering box for Glinda, but couldn’t come up with a 500 fender badge for a ’68. I quickly offered to go walk the yard with a borrowed putty knife. I relished the excuse to wander amongst the dozens of parts cars. Model 500s are much rarer than Monzas, so I had to pass by quite a few LMs until I came across the first 500, and quite a few more before I found a 500 with a badge still in place. Fortunately, it was the stick-on ’68 style I needed for Glinda and it was in the same slightly worn condition as Glinda’s existing one.

While the pile of parts I was to take home was significantly smaller than the one I’d brought Jeff, I knew that they were worth some serious money (the fuzzies and weatherstrip pieces alone have a Clark’s list price of nearly $300). Expecting to write him a check, I was thrilled when Jeff told me since I’d given him some good stuff (mainly the bench seat and a EM posi-traction differential), he’d call it even. What a guy!!!!!