When the car is behaving, it goes: this 1970 Chevrolet Corvette Coupe now runs and drives under its own power, pushed along by a 350-cubic-inch V8 and shifted through a four-speed manual. Reidus and Cletus The Show took a wrecked example with a bent frame and had it running and moving within a single week, with a roadworthy trip to Chicago as the stated goal.
The logistics alone deserve credit. The car cost $6,500, another $1,500 US covered shipping from Fremont to Detroit, and paperwork ran $400 on top of a 13% purchase tax. It rode home on a dual-axle U-Haul trailer, landed in a residential garage, and was later driven across the Ambassador Bridge into Toronto.
Standout details for me: the side-exit exhaust headers, the round air filter housing in the engine bay, the red-painted components, hoses and wiring, and the exposed dual headlights in the front fascia. The troubleshooting approach looks refreshingly honest too. The crew worked from a printed wiring diagram manual, used masking tape labels and markers to keep track of everything, dug through the front wiring harness, worked over the vacuum actuators and their linkages behind the pop-up headlight doors, and confirmed the brake and reverse lights work.
Plenty is still rough around the edges. The fan clutches were missing, the seats sat unbolted with their bolts gone, and ground clearance gave the group real trouble. The maker also mentions driving the car to work often around Ossington, which strikes me as the best possible shakedown testing for a car in this state.
Project by Reidus and Cletus The Show. Watch it on their YouTube channel: