By Tim Odell
Here at Hooniverse, we work hard to bring you the most absurd, most marriage-ending and homeowners-association-distressing project cars available. We won’t be happy until each and every Sunday night, each and every one of you inundates the tips line with tales from your weekend wrenching exploits. That said, we know we’re not on the only ones encouraging you to make unwise choices with your vehicle purchases. And we fear Bring a Trailer may have beaten us at our own game with this herd of Corvairs.
We’ve got one rampside pickup, one van, one wagon, two two-door hardtops, one four-door hardtop, and one 4-door sedan. Short of a convertible, someone’s nearly collected them all! In addition to the cars (which are in various states of disrepair and title complications) you get a big huge collection of parts. BAT typically offers their opinion as to what they’d do with any of the cars they feature, but this time they seem stumped. Let’s see if we can help…
There are a lot of ways one could play this, but here’s what we’d do: take the best drivetrain (that’d be a 140hp turbo + 4-speed) and put it in the ’66 two-door hardtop drive and enjoy. Next up, do the best with what’s left to get the wagon, rampside and van in halfway decent running condition. Sell ’em and use the cash to build up ’66 hardtop. Use the leftover parts and proceeds (ha!) to fund a three car LeMons Corvair squad with the remaining cars. Economies of agony scale will be working in your favor!
You know a collection’s serious business when they’ve got their own flickr account. Here are the cars:
And here are the engines:
See the Craigslist ad here. They’ll be taking the best offer received before February 7th. So far, they’ve already turned down an offer of $5k for everything.
Via Bring A Trailer
Jeff Glucker
Or you could drop a V8 in the bed of that pickup, creating a mid-engined tow vehicle for a Corvair flavored LeMons effort. Ah, the possibilities.
How about a BADASS 12-CYLINDER DUAL-ENGINED FIREBREATHING MONSTROSITY… putting out ~200 hp?
160, tops.
How perfectly ironic would it be that the mid-engine tow vehicle would likely handle better than the race cars? Downright brilliant!
Kind of like a rustier, more flimsy Little Red Wagon?
[img]http://www.dragracingonline.com/features/images/0…
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img src="http://www.dragracingonline.com/features/images/0606-rear/LittleRedWagon2.jpg" style="width: 400px" alt="imgTag"
What about a WRX setup on anyone of these? The pickups, the cars or….THE VAN? The mind bends at such lunacy.
Okay, I'm with ya on fixing up the 2 door hardtop, but sell the truck? Are you freaking insane? That thing looks to be in restorable shape, for at least use as a driver. If my daily driver's a 2 door hardtop, I've got to have a little pick 'em up truck to take to Lowe's on the weekend. That little blue and white beastie right there would do the trick just fine.
You're actively trying to destroy my sanity now, aren't you?
My Grandma hated Corvairs. She made me promise that I'd never get one. If I happened to buy this glorious mess, she'd haunt me. Believe me, you don't want Rita doing that. Ask my Mom.
$5,000 offer for the lot? That's $625 per car with all the parts and engines for free. In other words, an entire FLEET of LeMons cars! But given their apparent solidity and lack of rust, I'm sure the scarce van, truck, and wagon bodies alone are each worth 3 times that ($625) amount. I wonder how the seller really values this assortment.
Answer, build one Yenko Stinger tribute car.
<img src="http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3524/3715261408_70b0892d13_o.jpg">
Use remaining parts and vehicles to fund the above.
It really does kind of boggle the mind a bit just how fantastically unattractive the Corvair cars are, and how beautiful the vans and pickups are. They really should have never bothered with the cars and just brought out the forward-controllers. They'd probably still be making them today, if their reputation hadn't been wrecked by the cars.
The RVs are pretty fantastic, too.
Really?
I think the 2nd gen coupes are among the prettier cars to come out of the 60s.
Had I found a suitable example in the price range, they were in the running for the spot the Falcon occupies.
I dunno, you have one sweet Falcon. I can't think of a Corvair that I'd rather have. I think you did all right. Also, Corvans are pretty funky, but I'd rather have a Falcon Econoline. With three on the tree.
The Corvair direction was on days when I was valuing "different" over "good". Also, I'd have no problem going to aftermarket solutions for all of the well-known Corvair issues (step 1: electric fan). I think when I saw the what specialist shops were charging to rebuild the motors, I lost some enthusiasm. For the cash you could get a pretty bitchin' smallblock.
The dude I bought my wagon from had a project FC Econoline. It was in project-car-hell shape, as apparently it had previously had a 428 swapped in, but a fuel leak resulted in Falconoline Flambe.
I picture UDMan and all of Team Trailing Throttle Oversteer salivating at this. They could be the Hendrick Motorsports of LeMons. Although, I like UDMan more than Jimmie Johnson.
For now, 8 project cars is too much, although I love Corvairs. But that'd be just the ticket if I had a homeowner's association to deal with. Or I lived on a large enough piece of property to make them out of sight and out of mind for my fiancee.
How much for the rampside, and does it run?
Oh, and do you have any good spare engines
It would cost $5,000 just to remove all those Corvairs. The truck looks like the only one worth anything.
Putting a V8 in it would result in a hokey abomination. The others are too far gone and would take more to fix than you could sell them for anyhow. They should have jumped on the 5K offer to clean up their mess.