Market for survivors...

[RPOLS3]

Originally Posted by SBR

It already has, most of the Bloomington Gold Benchmark and NCRS bowtie Corvettes from the 50/60s have been so heavily fluffed that I would hardly call them survivors. As someone once told me, they are restored to look old. There are exceptions but they are very few and far between.

I remember a pretty nice silver/black 67, 435 coupe that we took the body off (did not touch the body, paint, glass, or interior) and fluffed the chassis to make it look "old". Someone who knew what they were looking at could tell it was not untouched, but most run of the mill car show people had no clue. This was back in the 1989-90 timeframe. At the time I was in awe how it turned out as 99% of the work being done then was overly perfect restorations.

[SBR]

Originally Posted by RPOLS3

I remember a pretty nice silver/black 67, 435 coupe that we took the body off (did not touch the body, paint, glass, or interior) and fluffed the chassis to make it look "old". Someone who knew what they were looking at could tell it was not untouched, but most run of the mill car show people had no clue. This was back in the 1989-90 timeframe. At the time I was in awe how it turned out as 99% of the work being done then was overly perfect restorations.

I think I know the car that you are referring to.

On another note, the pictures that Steve posted of his children is absolutely priceless!

[Big Block Bill]

Originally Posted by RPOLS3

I remember a pretty nice silver/black 67, 435 coupe that we took the body off (did not touch the body, paint, glass, or interior) and fluffed the chassis to make it look "old". Someone who knew what they were looking at could tell it was not untouched, but most run of the mill car show people had no clue. This was back in the 1989-90 timeframe. At the time I was in awe how it turned out as 99% of the work being done then was overly perfect restorations.

I believe the car you are talking about was owned by a Greg Donaldson. He found the car through David Burroughs. it went Survivor / Gold / Benchmark in 1992? If it was that car, I always remembered the de-lamination of the windshield, and thought to myself "Why don't they replace that?". Because it was "Original " to the car. It did have factory side pipes as well.

Bill

[RichSchmidt]

I am not sure if it could be something that would lead to "doin time". I was talking about real legit numbers matching cars that needed a full restoration,but rather than being given what could be considered a traditional "back to new" restoration,they were restored in an exacting way as to make everything look as if it has been sealed in a climate controlled vault for the last 50 years and never driven. Certainly such a car would attract huge money. Maybe aside from odometer fraud it would be hard to define where any other wrong doing took place. Every used car on the lot today was "owned by a little old lady who only drove it on Sundays" even if it was driven by a chain smoker who dribbled big mac sauce all over the interior and never changed the oil. Is there any legal difference between that lie and a lie about how a 50 year old car was taken care of? That is where things get fuzzy.

[Lee Stewart]

Originally Posted by RichSchmidt

I am not sure if it could be something that would lead to "doin time". I was talking about real legit numbers matching cars that needed a full restoration,but rather than being given what could be considered a traditional "back to new" restoration,they were restored in an exacting way as to make everything look as if it has been sealed in a climate controlled vault for the last 50 years and never driven. Certainly such a car would attract huge money. Maybe aside from odometer fraud it would be hard to define where any other wrong doing took place. Every used car on the lot today was "owned by a little old lady who only drove it on Sundays" even if it was driven by a chain smoker who dribbled big mac sauce all over the interior and never changed the oil. Is there any legal difference between that lie and a lie about how a 50 year old car was taken care of? That is where things get fuzzy.

It isn't what you do with the car . . . it's how you describe it in an effort to sell it. If you are committing fraud by misrepresenting the car - that's a felony. That's jail time.

[RichSchmidt]

Originally Posted by Lee Stewart

It isn't what you do with the car . . . it's how you describe it in an effort to sell it. If you are committing fraud by misrepresenting the car - that's a felony. That's jail time.

That is what I am talking about. If you go to a used car dealer and the dealer tells you that the car that you are looking at was owned by a little old lady who kept it in a garage and drove it across town and back only on sunny days and you buy the car and some young pun walks up to you and says that he used to own that car and can't believe what a great job the dealer did of getting the bodily fluid stains out of the interior,and fixing the knock in the engine that was caused by never changing the oil,do you have recourse for that? Or the dealer tells you that the car"has a clean car fax" but doesn't tell you that the car was wrapped around a pole but didn't get fixed by the insurance company etc.

BTW,what is with some of these "legal rebodies" these days?

[firstgenaddict]

The problem with most restorations is that everything is VERY deliberate and appears as such... the chalk marks the grease pencil marks the over spray etc. It takes a HELL of a lot of work to ACCURATELY replicate the marks created under the pressures of an assembly line environment...

Consider the amount of time that the person had to make the marks, they did not take 5 minutes or even 2 minutes to make them. They were scrawled across the firewall quickly, study the stroke marks and practice so that yours are quick and show the strokes, even if they are light or a little larger or a little smaller they are better than the choppy crusty DELIBERATE marks seen on most restorations.

How many people contemplate gun angle for over spray patterns?
or that the front ends at Norwood were sprayed set up on bucks whereas the bodies were sprayed with reciprocating guns and thus the over spray patterns will be different from the front end.
Because there was only an inch or two gap between the front end panels the over spray on the drops into the engine compartment are often light has primer showing through.

OR exactly how the engines were painted... The bar area which is not orange on the front of the engine was used to cover the stamp pad, bypass hose, and also so the painter could swivel the engine.

[njsteve]

Originally Posted by firstgenaddict

The problem with most restorations is that everything is VERY deliberate and appears as such... the chalk marks the grease pencil marks the over spray etc. It takes a HELL of a lot of work to ACCURATELY replicate the marks created under the pressures of an assembly line environment...

Consider the amount of time that the person had to make the marks, they did not take 5 minutes or even 2 minutes to make them. They were scrawled across the firewall quickly, study the stroke marks and practice so that yours are quick and show the strokes, even if they are light or a little larger or a little smaller they are better than the choppy crusty DELIBERATE marks seen on most restorations.

Oh yeah - my biggest pet peeve is how people spend hours trying to duplicate (with shaky hands) the marks that an assembly line person took half a second to originally produce.

This was my solution. I hired my 9 and 4 year-olds to duplicate the marks on the suspension pieces on my '72 Trans Am restoration over a decade ago. I told them as soon as they were done we could go get ice cream. Took them all of 30 seconds! They did a magnificent job! Man how time flies. She just graduated college and he is a junior in high school now.

[RichSchmidt]

I guess my point is that how long will it be until someone fools these top level judges and gets a top survivor score for what is really a pieced together restored car?

[Zedder]

I was getting involved in Survivor judging in the mid 90's via NCRS and I couldn't believe the stories about the lengths that people went to in an effort to 'age' NOS parts to use on their 'survivor'/'Bow Tie' cars...