Hot Rods 54 Corvette Gasser Barn-find(kinda)

WOW! My 54 is featured in the latest issue of Traditional Rod and Kulture Magazine. 6 page spread. It sure looks better in pictures than in person. I guess that's the magic of Photography. Anyway, I'm very honored.

 

We need a picture or two of your Vette junkyard......
Hopefully, you get a bunch of people with stories
about when they saw your car years ago... maybe
some more pix, too!

 

I opened that mag up and saw your Vette. Hey, I Know that guy (well, not really)!! Congrats, it definitely belongs there, Carp.

 

Congratulations! It looks great! Joe

 

That`s great.Keep up the good work.
Good luck.Have fun.Be safe.
Leo

 

I thought the same thing, haha. Super neat car, congrats

 

The second owner that I'm aware of came by and left me the original bill of sale from 1967 when he bought the Corvette from Rick. The top receipt shows the actual sale price of $525 and the second bill of sale shows $50, that one was to show to the DMV. Armed with this new information I went to the newspaper archives and found the Saturday Dec 3 1967 paper and located the add for the car. Kinda cool, I thought .

 

That is very cool, your lucky to have been able to have found some more history on it.

 

For those of you that wonder what my car would look like "Beautified" , here's a twin that just sold at a Me*** auction that is damn near a dead ringer to mine. It's gorgeous but I think I'll leave mine how it is.

 

In my youth I took a 53 pulled the engine and trans and installed a 389 Pontiac with a B & M hydromatic and went drag racing

 

And in 1967 that was at least 16 weeks pay.

 

I got to drive one of those at Me*** Monterey once. It was surprisingly wide.

 

Hot Rod Magazine did a feature on the car for their Roadkill page. It didn't make the printed edition but was on the internet.

 

What a great read! I just found it and read it all. Great car. Do your rear tires rub the body? I just got my 59' on the road and with the deep dish rims it had on it the tires rub when I hit a good bump. I just ordered some narrower rear Cragars but I would like to keep the old originals that were on it but I don't want to crack the body either.

 

Can someone post a link please? Or does one need to be a subscriber?

 

Love the mooneyes peaking through the scoop.

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It would be a crime to restore that car, perfect as is. I love a restored Vette but also love the hot rod Vettes just as much or more. Same with Mopars, some need to be restored to the nth degree some just need to be hot rods. Enjoy.

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I lengthened the bump stops so the tires can't hit.

 

Tease.

 

Great story, love the history, awesome vette! Good call on installing the red rear window and keeping the hood scoop. I love that last shot from Hot Rod of you cruising. Perfect stance!

 

Shot this the other night. Thought it looked cool.

 

Looks like an entry for the Friday Art Show, Great shot!

 

I've begun to notice a strange phenomenon. I had the 54 at a large car show this last weekend(989 cars). The car seems very popular with most of the male spectators and even a limited number of the female persuasion. But a few times now, it has almost brought some women to , well , for lack of a better term, what appears to be a near ******! Really! Saturday, I watched this middle aged(50ish) woman approach my car and she was literally out of breath and trying to fan herself. She was muttering" Oh my, Oh my goodness!, Oh, Oh, Oh my goodness." From my chair I inquired "Are you going to be alright?'. She said:"It's just so BEAUTIFUL!" Taken aback, I tried to correct her "No, I think you're using the wrong word. It's not beautiful. It may be cool, or *****en, or maybe bad***. But it's not beautiful." She replied" Oh but it is! Just look at the styling, it's beautiful!". Like I said before, this wasn't the first time a female has had this reaction, although it is very rare. I'll be the first to admit that I don't know a lot about women, but from my limited experience the "mature" ones don't typically like ratty cars. Some of the younger ones, maybe. But not the older ones. And especially not to this degree! God bless em, but I'll never figure them out.

 

I drove the 54 to the Ed Roth Reunion last year. It's about 140 miles each way. The trip went well, but I finally got a good opportunity to check gas mileage. I was disappointed to find out I only got 13mpg. I was hoping for closer to 20. Yeah, it's got a 400 with a medium cam but this things got 3.08 gears and overdrive. It should get better than 13.
A friend recently bought a 1963 Corvette project, and it came with a fairly fresh 327 short block. It did have a couple of small issues, though. The first was that it had water sitting in one of the cylinders for quite a while, and it had rusted the bore pretty severely. It had deep pitting about halfway down the bore, in a half-moon shape. I ran a rigid hone through it, and the pits were still pretty deep. I figured the cylinder pressure would be fairly low by the time the piston got down that far, and it's only a relatively small area for blow-by to escape. To lessen the chance even more, I wire-wheeled the pits and cleaned the area with laqr thinner. Then I filled them with a product that Manley Performance used to sell. It's kinda like JB Weld but is supposed to withstand high temps like 1500 degrees or something like that. They say it will stay in an exhaust port. Anyway, I mixed some up and spread it over the pits, let it harden, then ran the hone over it. Man it looked good! If it stays, I'm sure it'll be fine. If it falls out it. might have a small amount of blow-by.
Why didn't I just bore it out? This thing had a beautiful .030 bore, and TRW forged 11-1 pistons! I put the rings on that piston and slid it down the questionable bore, and it was perfectly smooth, so I think I'm good to go. The next problem reared its head when I put the crank in. I got to the center main cap and when I tightened it down the crank locked up! Close inspection showed the cap was mismatched! Seriously, I can't catch a break. Removing the cap I can see it's offset to one side. I decide the solution is to carefully file the end of the cap and move it over until the crank turns freely with the cap tightened down. Once done, now I need to get the cap to fit tightly in the block so it doesn't walk side to side. I used a center punch and swedged the block material next to the cap over to the cap. Nice tight fit.
Next were heads. With 11-1 pistons, I wanted large combustion chamber heads to get the compression down a bit. One reason is to run cheaper gas, and the other is that with the small cam this engine is getting, I didn't want to run into detonation problems. I had a nice set of smog heads that I had lightly ported. For the intake manifold I got , for free, from the same guy as the short block, an aluminum Chevy high-rise from the 63 Corvette. It was polished and, therefore, junk in their eyes. I gotta say, I love Corvette restorers! "If it's not perfect, it's not good enough."
The cam came out of a truck engine I picked up somewhere. I'm too gun-shy to use a new cam because I'm afraid it'll go flat. So I went looking in the inventory and found a mild RV type cam with the lifters in order, already broken in. Perfect. For the carb this time around, I'm going with a 600 cfm Edelbrock AFB type. Jetted down, I think it will be much more efficient than the Holley ever thought of being.
Some chrome 327 valve covers and the package looks appropriate.
I converted my engine stand so I could run the engine first to make sure there were no funny noises( A distinct possibility) and it sounded great!

 

Pulling the 400 out.

 

327 going in. Check out that chrome pan!

 

me (and squirrel) are very proud of your methods!

 

I'm hoping there's a chance this 327 will run cooler also. The 400 ran a bit warm on a hot summer day. I've driven this up and down the street a few times, and I gotta say it runs pretty strong for having 70 fewer cubes. Power doesn't really matter too much on this car anyway. I've probably only floored it 5 times with the 400. I just don't drive it hard, so why pay for all those cubic inches? Time will tell if it's going to get better mileage. How could it not?

 

Mileage be damned, It's a hot rod! The 327 makes it cooler. It wasn't long ago that I wondered what happened to this car.