Category: Background

Standard what?

Starting working on a plan of sorts for the build sequence.  Most steps involve wrenching on the car.  No problem, I’ve done a lot of work on cars over the years, and have a good assortment of ratchets, extensions, and wrenches, from 6mm all the way up to some 30+mm axle nut sockets.

Wait, mm?  This is an American car built in the ’60s.  Before we’d been to the moon.   Before we were using metric fasteners on our cars.  Stopped by Sears while out today for some good-old fraction-based sockets and wrenches.

The Craigslist ad to start it all…

1967 CAMARO….$X,000 OBO….CASH ONLY NO TRADES….NO E-MAILS…CALL XXX XXX XXXX…

V8 4-SPEED….RUNS GREAT…DAILY DRIVER….LOOKS NICE…RUST FREE CA. CAR…VERY SOLID CAR….

NEW GAS TANK, RADIATOR, EDLEBROCK CARB., HEADLINER, RON FRANCIS WIRING, ALTENATOR….

After scouring eBay, half a dozen online classifieds, and manually combing through every region’s Craiglist from Nebraska to San Diego, finally came across a decent looking car at a good price.

Some cute mis-spellings.  “Solid car” sounds good.  Rust free sounds optimistic, but I can check the carfax, and if the car really has lived its whole life in CA, it should at least be minimal.  Nice older gentleman owner says car was originally a 327 with 3-speed floor shift, but now has a V8 out of an ’84 Camaro, with a 4-speed Muncie.  Says it’s totally daily-driveable.  Looks like I may need to replace the wiring with a new factory harness, but that’s not too bad as there’s not much to these cars and it’ll be stripped down to the shell anyway.  He says it hasn’t been restored, hoping to find most of the original things like sound deadening, intact.

Going to get the VIN tomorrow and if it looks good, fly up to Sacramento next week and drive it home to San Diego.  Did a similar trip with my 240sx in 2005, though that trip took me to Portland!