RAIV and RAV more continuation....

[ponchomike]

By the way, how do you get your photo to display in the forum reply rather than show up as an attachment?

Mike

[Mr70]

Right click on the Images code,then click "COPY" & when typing text later,click the "IMAGE" in UBB box.Now right click again to post that Image code back in the code box.
Click "PASTE" then "OK" & it will be done.

[ponchomike]

It didn't work.

I hit reply, and I'm starting a new post. If I click image, there is no "COPY" selection highlighted. How do I get the image from my hard drive to a point where I can copy it?

Mike

[Mr70]

Click on your new picture Attachment.
See the code in the box above it??
Right click on that.That is the code I was referring to.
Click "copy" on that & then proceed as I said earlier.
Sorry,didn't mean to get off topic here.This should be practiced in the Comments/Suggestions/Problems forum.

[ponchomike]

I give.

[69El Camino]

Has anyone heard of a Jerry Mintz, I think he worked under Tom Nell on the V's in the Nascar realm?

[Steve_Hoog]

Tom

You ever see this GM drawing?

[Steve_Hoog]

I have been after Gary (owner of the Silver Knafel Judge) to explain in detail how he came about owning the car and his relationship with Bill Knafel, and numerous other questions about his history in Pontiac dealings. He has touched on some of that in this letter he is allowing me to post on his behalf.

[ QUOTE ]
Steve



Sorry I haven’t been able to answer some of your questions. I will try to answer some.

The story of the Knafel car goes back to 1980 or 1981. I was in the motel business and was traveling a lot looking for sites to build motels on. in my travels, I almost always had a trailer behind my truck (and even pulled some behind my Cadillac Eldorado) to haul all kinds of musclecars home that I would find. (Which wasn’t hard to do back then). Needless to say, I accumulated quite a large collection of cars mainly rare Pontiacs. Well one day I decided that I had way too many judges and decided to sell off several of them (sixteen to be exact over a period of less than a year). Anyway, I got back in town around 10:00 pm one night and right when I walked in the door my phone rang and a guy asked about a judge for sale. He had just moved here from out of state and actually was only about 2 miles from where I lived. He was a nice guy and pretty much begging to come over and look at the car. I reluctantly agreed and about 5 minutes later my house started rattling to the sound of one bad boy Pontiac engine. When I went outside I saw a beautiful 69 judge that was literally shaking the ground. Well screw the car I had for sale, I was all over this car wanting it badly. Anyway the guy and I became really good friends and come to find out he had just moved here from a town that I had just purchased a motel site in. So over the next several months we made several trips there and I was always bringing ram air cars, ho cars and SD cars home that he had known of. Now it gets interesting, he had always told me of this guy he knew that had a really special 69 judge RA 4 car with a wild paint scheme on it. The guy had bought it new and it was painted that way when he bought it. Well after several months, I finally got to meet the guy and this Judge; it was a royal bobcat car that had the same paint scheme as the turquoise car of the Schultz car. It was a carousel red car however. He had all the paperwork with it. I got him the microfiche invoice (these were on the old slick roll copy paper) from Pontiac from an inside connection that I had from the late 70's. This was a true royal car that he bought new when he lived in Detroit. I wanted this car so bad it hurt. back then you could buy a virtually no mileage judge in absolute pristine condition for 3500.00 (I bought my 70 black with red interior 4 speed car with 35k on it about a year earlier for 3500.00 and felt that I paid way too much for it). I offered this guy money and more money and finally offered him 10k for the car and when he said no way and he wouldn’t take 50k for it, I knew then it wasn’t for sale. Well I was bent on buying one of these cars. However; back then your resources for finding cars was very limited to Hemmings and other magazines or contacts. I talked with many people and did a lot of research on these and then realized that another dealer that was actually as performance oriented and was a lot less known was the Knafel (which also owned Anderson Pontiac). Well I had a friend that lived in Ohio and I had offered him a substantial finder’s fee for any of the Tin Indian, magnum or Sabre cars. Needless to say, he seemed to strike out on any of them. he would chase leads only to find out the car had been totaled out and parted out. (Probably by Glasgo's dad). He mentioned one day that I should just call Mr. Knafel myself and talk with him and then got me his phone number. I called him and was expecting a drop dead don’t bother me attitude. Much to my surprise I reached a completely different type of person. You would have thought this guy and I had been friends for years. he was very eager to tell me anything I wanted to know and actually tell me stuff I wouldn’t have had a clue to ask about. He told me stories that I have to admit now that at the time I thought this guy was really making stuff up. Some examples are having airplanes that he would fly all over the place to his races and fly to Detroit to meet with john Delorean and go to pick up engines from the engineering hobby shop. Setting world records after world records, John Delorean gave him a special present for his appreciation which was a 63 grand prix convertible. The stories of selling several RA 2 cars new (I had been looking for one and at the time had not even located anyone that had one). the big one, the RA 5 stories, he told me how that he would order ram air 4 cars and then swap the engines out and put in RA 5 's in them and then put the RA 4 engines in some other car or sell them over the counter. he told me all about the magnum cars and the golden sabres with RA 5's and then he mentioned getting a few GTO's and a couple of judges delivered to him with RA 5 engines in them from engineering on john Delorean request that he test them. He mentioned that he had john Delorean special order two judges that had RA 5 engines in them. One he said was a white one and one was a silver car. He told me that the white one became a tin Indian and had numerous engine treatments of all types and had set several world records. The silver car he said they made it the street sleeper that they put some big meats on 5 spoke mags and skinnys up front. He said they would drive this car to the race track and literally clean house with it. He said they also would street race it around town and that that car sold them a lot of cars. He had no idea what had happened to the cars. He said he had heard the guy who bought the silver car had blown it up and it was still somewhere in Akron sitting in his garage with supposedly very low miles on it. Well, I have to admit that I was a little overwhelmed with all the stories he had told me and really didn’t know what to believe. However over time, as I collected more and more cars and parts and anything that said Pontiac, I came across an advertisement that was from Knafel’s dealership advertising that they had the new RA 2 cars in stock. That brought back memories from my conversation with bill and I thought wow I have only found two RA 2 cars in my life (which I bought and still have) and this guy actually ran advertisements for them. Then I wandered about other stories while still looking for a Royal Judge or a Knafel car, with no luck. Years pass to around 1996 or 1997 and I buy a silver Judge from Akron Ohio from a guy who I had talked to many years before and had told me stories about bad boy Pontiacs coming out of the dealerships in Akron (one being his 66 ram air GTO) but he had moved to California. He tells me the story is that this car has 19k original miles on it. It was blown up in 1971 and had been sitting in the guy’s garage all these years. Well he had died in an accident a few years before and his widow worked with this guy’s fiancée’s mother. The widow mentioned to the fiancées mother that she was going to sell the GTO because she had caught some Mexicans doing yard work for her trying to get in the garage and somehow the engine had disappeared after her husband’s death. So he buys the car from her and I buy it from him sight unseen. He is in California and I am in Oklahoma and it is Christmas Eve. Ohio is getting buried in snow and I am not about to let this car sit there for any length of time. So I call a really good friend of mine who has hauled countless cars for me and ask a big favor, brave the storm and go get this car. The guy in California calls a favor from a friend of his in Akron and has him meet my friend over there at the widow’s house. They have to call a wrecker service to dig the car out of the garage because of the blizzard. well, I get the car and see on the hood it says RAM AIR V and it also had a set of headers that after looking twice I thought no way, those are RA 5 headers. I quickly measured them against a set of RA 5 heads that I had and then called Jim Mattison and asked him to pull a PHS on it. He said he would and mail it to me. He then called me and wanted to know what I was going to do with the car. He offered to buy it from me, which I had no interest in selling it. I got the PHS and really freaked some more and asked Jim what that could be. He said honestly there was not a way of telling for sure unless you could locate the memo itself and that was probably an impossible task. We both agreed that it had to be something fairly significant because 105.00 was a lot of money back in 1970 if you compared it to today’s dollars. This was driving me crazy and then I thought about Mr. Knafel and the story he had told me about the silver judge many years ago. So I called him and again we talked for around 2 hours or more. He was convinced that this was the car from engineering that was delivered to him with a RA 5 engine. He asked me many questions about the car from the wheels to the options, if it had seam sealer etc... I call numerous people "in the know" trying to locate anything on this car. I told them of several of bills stories which seemed to draw a big laugh. I realized that for some reason all these people wanted to dispute all of his stories and then the more I dug into it, I realized that all of these people were good buddies with Jim Wangers and then found out from a few sources that it seemed there was no love lost between Bill Knafel and Jim Wangers. They all were telling me that Bill was getting his facts confused and he was really getting up in years and wants to remember things that weren’t. It seemed that they all loved to use the story of the 63 grand prix convertible as their convincing weapon of him not having his memory. WOW what a shock when the actual pictures of the car were brought out. That is when I realized the people telling me their "opinions" of Mr. Knafel was dead wrong. It was funny how after that, none of them wanted to give me any more of their ”opinions" about his memory. Well now fast forward to the present when the thread in Yenko came out. I had no knowledge of the whereabouts or anything to do about the 70 tin Indian and when I saw the billing manifest that had back to back orders, it was one more item that backed up exactly what Bill Knafel had told me many years before (remember this was several years before I ever acquired the silver car) about the two Judges from engineering dept. Whether there will ever be any proof of the car leaving Detroit with the RA 5 in it, I really don’t know and it really doesn’t matter to me. I am happy with the car whether it is proved or not. I have no intentions on selling it. And I find it funny that all the people who are "stating with a fact" the car isn’t that, how many people have called me and tried to buy the car. it is also amusing to me to see so many experts about what went on behind closed doors and then find out they weren’t even born until the late 70's and even into the 80's. I learned back in the 70's to never say never which brings me to answer your next question. I met a guy at a small auto repair shop in Kansas in the late 70's and I was asking if anyone knew of any judges or Trans Ams sitting around. He told me that there was a kid next door whose dad owned a maroon 70 judge. I went over and asked if it was for sale and he proceeded to tell me that it was and that his dad had a lot of early super duty stuff that he had got from his cousin who was Mickey Thompson. I laughed to myself and said lets go see it and I will buy it. Well, he was actually staying with his grandmother and his dad was out of town etc.... I thought yea yea yea but gave him my phone number anyway. Well about a week later they called and said I could come up and we could make a deal on everything. I asked how much money should I bring and they said bring a few thousand dollars with you. So taking a chance I loaded my trailer hit the bank and took off for Kansas. When I got there I was shocked. Here sat this nice maroon 70 judge 4 speed loaded car, and lots of early super duty stuff. several sets of heads, cranks, a complete 421 SD with the two fours he told me this was Mickey Thompson’s engine that he was testing for Pontiac and that when he was done they wanted the car back and he kept the engine, rear end, and other misc. pieces of the car and that they crushed the car. Fast forward to the late 80's or early 90's when Pete McCarthy’s book came out and wow the VIN on that engine shows it to be a Swiss cheese car just like they said and also it is one of the unknown delivery cars. I got the 4 cylinder super duty that Mickey ran like 9 second quarters with. Several experimental items, some which say Thompson cast in them. Fuel injection units, Etc... He proceeded to tell me that he was an engineer at Pontiac and he showed me pay stubs with his name on them and they were from the engineering dept of Pontiac motor division. He had pictures of himself with Mickey Thompson and Iskenderian (did I spell that anywhere close) grinding camshafts. He told me several stories about how Mickey Thompson and other famous people who were racing Pontiacs could get anything they wanted from the engineering dept. he said that the engineering dept would ship out all kinds of experimental items to these guys across the country to try them in real life applications. WOW THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT MR KNAFEL HAS SAID HMMMM COULD WE HAVE TWO PEOPLE NOW THAT HAVE MEMORY PROBLEMS (and so early in life remember, this is in the late 70's and early 80's) OR ACTUALLY IT SEEMS THAT EVERYONE HAS A MEMORY PROBLEM EXCEPT FOR JIM WANGERS according to how people want to believe anything he says but not anyone else.. This guy (who’s last name was Thompson also) showed me several pictures of him and Mickey Thompson at races and one picture that he showed me was Mickey Thompson pulling an altered wheel base 67 GTO with a 68 Bonneville convertible 428 car with a hood tach. I was way more interested in the Bonneville than the GTO. He thought this was really weird and I told him that my dad had bought a new 68 Bonneville with the 428 HO and I always loved that car. I asked him what ever happened to that Bonneville and he said that the car was originally given to Mickey as a rosewood red color and Mickey had them change it to blue and when he was done with it, this guy bought it and then had sold it to a guy in Wichita Kansas. I was able to track down the guy he sold it to and eventually found the car sitting in a storage building in McCook Nebraska. It was a really extremely nice car and I was able to buy it for 1350.00 (it’s not for sale either). Again, everything this guy told me panned out when in all reality I doubted most everything he said at first.



Well it is getting really late and I have to be up around 5:00 tomorrow. I will try to answer some more later.



REMEMBER NOBODY HAS THE RIGHT TO PRINT ANYTHING I SAY WITHOUT MY EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION.



Let’s go do Hooligans soon. Gary







[/ QUOTE ]

[budnate]

Cool stuff Steve!!, keep digging and buying him hot wings!!

Bud.

[DaJudge]

This is what Jim M said in a previous posting regarding this topic.

"Guys,
Pontiac "never" built a Ram Air V GTO at the factory!!!

Jim Mattison
Pontiac Historic Services