First Car Stories!

[camarojoe]

A week later i bought another Nova for 150.00 that I had looked at earlier for a possible parts car when building the first one, and within a year I had built this "twin" to the car I totalled, using many of the salvagable parts from the wreck. I had alot of fun with that car too, but you only get one "first car".

[Belair62]

[ QUOTE ]
While all my friends blew their cash on minibikes, motorcycles, drugs, beer, women (not necessarily in that order) I ended up saving $2700 by my 14th birthday.

[/ QUOTE ]Well...after I pissed away all my money on a JC Penney Golden Pinto mini-bike,some pot and Ripple wine with my very first girl friend (priorities)I bought a 1965 Impala SS...327/300 powerglide for 325 bucks...drove it until my lady friend distracted me and I drove over a parking block in the local forest preserve completely tearing out the lower right control arm of the car. I went to a boneyard and got a used A arm and installed it...did some "bodywork" on the car and had it painted at APCOA...I sold it a month later after going thru at least a tire a week....guess I didn't fix it too well...it sounded like it had the brakes locked while driving down the road...the alignment and the frame were just a BIT tweaked !!...........Hey Ed....glad to see you made it out of that one....usually a tarp over the car means there was a fatality !

[Supercar_Kid]

Well here's mine...when I turned 14 my Dad handed me an envelope with a distinct lump in it. Inside the usual birthday card was a pair of very worn GM keys. He led me outside where I found the car you'll see in the attached pics. It was actually one of the rarest Chevelles made in 1970, no not an L-78 or LS-6 convertible, or anything of such high performance pedigree, but rather a lowly Canadian built 1970 Chevelle 300 sport coupe. A thrice repainted, severely neglected, 307 two barrel 3 speed auto on the column. Black bench interior and an option list you could tally on one hand. Didn't bother me a bit though, as I'd always took a liking to the '70 bodystyle and I could see a diamond in the rough. During the next year and a half I spent every weekend and free moment I could spare working on the car with the help of my Dad, older brother and a few friends of the family. The car needed extensive rust repair including quarters, doors, fenders, decklid, hood, floorpan, and even a roof skin from a '72 Malibu parts car I bought for $150 and robbed of all it's valuable parts. I used the bucket seat cores, console, power brake setup, floorpan, doors, roof skin, and numerous other parts from the '72 to bring my '70 back to life. Looking back on it I probably should have saved the '72 and scrapped the '70, but I had my heart set on bringing this first car of mine back to life. It was lots of work and lots of scavenging swap meets and bone yards, but by the time I turned 16 and got my driver's permit the car was complete, at least for the time being. Needless to say as a 14 year old gearhead the original Champagne on black bench seat 300 trim didn't really do it for me, so I took the artistic license to create the SS454 clone you see in the next attachment.

[Supercar_Kid]

I trimmed the car out in full SS454 garb and continued driving it around with the 307 and a rebuilt quadrajet on a freebie iron intake. The cowl induction air cleaner was cool enough to make most people at my high school drop their jaws in awe, and it ran well enough to be fun yet keep me out of trouble, so at 16 I was happy.

[Supercar_Kid]

A few years down the road, I got the bug for more power, as is usually the case with the maturing gearhead, and sometime around the winter of my senior year I had saved enough money to buy a 454 longblock from a friend of my Dad's for $800, but it turned out to be blown, and not the good kind of blown. Unfortunately I didn't know it was blown until I had done the full 'Krylon rebuild" on it and had it sitting between the fenderwells ready to drive. A few seconds at idle and it was apparent something was drastically wrong. Back out it came and a friend offered to open it up for me and inspect the damage. It was determined that the bearings were chewed up so he offered to put new rod and mains in it and help me put it back in to have another go at it. I was on a shoestring budget and was already in deeper than I had anticipated, beginning to regret yanking the perfectly good running original 307. After the second installation, and a half day spent trying to get all the bolts in the automatic tranny housing while laying on the firewall, she was in and ready to fire. Again it blew in less than a minute. It seems the crank was way out of round an dthe new bearings only lasted a few hundred RPMs. I saved my money and took the engine to a reputable machine shop and had it completely redone. Pistons, crank cut, heads done, the whole nine, some $3200 later she was back between the federwells and looking like you see here. All in all, the car has been a terrific learning experience and I still own it today, some ten years after getting as a 14th birthday present. I know it's not a "real" anything, but I wouldn't trade it for the world, as you only ever get one 'first" car.