Keith, nice photo! Those are 1965 Rally 1 wheels, correct? It looks good with those. One thing people may not realize with the 61-63 Tempests is how small they really were. I remember the first time I sat in a 63 Lemans 326, it was like sitting in my old 65 GTO, but everything was just.....smaller. The 63 Lemans seemed to have the exact same bucket seats as the 64/65 GTO, but the seats in the 63 Lemans were nearly touching each other. No room for a console. From the driver's side, you could easily reach over and unlock the passenger door, whereas on the 64-up A-body you would have to lean way over and reach, probably unhooking your seat belt to do so. Under the hood was the same way. Look at the firewall, inner fender to engine clearance, etc of a 63 Lemans 326, then look at the 64 GTO 389. Same engine size externally, but with the 63 Lemans, the firewall was very cramped. Now imagine that little 63 Lemans with a massive 421SD under the hood. :shock:
Yes - those are Rally I's (repops from Coker). I like them too; sort of a "nod" to that common Pontiac performance heritage... Your observation about this being a small car is a good one. When I sit in the convertible it feels like the seat doesnt go back far enough and like my head is going to crash into the A pillar/sun visor. Much different than my '65 GTO or '63 Grand Prix. I thought it was just me...
I could be wrong on this, but I think all three of the BOP compacts were based off the Corvair body. Which would explain the size issue.
Pegleg: You said the secret word and killed a good thread.......:laugh: I like JEA's comment at the end of the post on ROP: .....and you can't even get $100k for a 66 442 W30 of which there were only 54 of them and few survived.
The gap between RARITY and DESIRABILITY sometimes is very large. Compare any fairly "rare" car (like mine: a 1 of 2623) to a multi million unit built 64-65-66-67 GTO or 64-65-66 Mustang. Compare resale values in today's market. Guess which one pulls in the bigger money?? It sure isn't the ol' Dodge!:dollar:
Actually, we had a coupla Corvairs and I loved them. The later ones(65-69). I drove one of them from Philadelphia over the mountains to Lansing with a locked up clutch. (happens when you put the flywheel on backwards....my "helper"). Doing OK starting in gear and shifting without the clutch, most of the time it was in 4th anyway...Hit a blizzard near Carlisle, Pa. that finally stopped me at Bedford for the night. That was not good. You could drive that thing is a foot of snow with a good set of snow tires. Would have been nice to have some heat, though. Carried a scraper in the front seat to scrape the inside of the windshield. Mt roommate at UM (LS6racer knows who) put a 350/350 in the back of his 67 with the Crown kit from California. THAT was an absolutely dynamite combination...(once you get the steering and front suspension straightened out). Ran the exhaust right through the rear compartment and through the inner taillight openings.
It's good to hear someone say they have no heat. Over on the Corvair boards the way they talk you'd think they had a great heater! On a 40 degree day I'm freezing my rear off in mine!
If you guys think the Corvairs are bad, try a VW Beetle for a while! I don't think any of the Eurpean cars of that era had much heat, except SAAB's and Volvos. If memory serves, Chevy offered a gasoline heater as an option, scares me. Can you say Carbon Monixide?:error:
Butane. Ours had a little supplemental butane heater in the rear floor. That baby put out some HEAT! K
I used to get a ride to high school with a buddy whose dad drove a VW. Ole dad bought a Studebaker blower fan and put it the air duct under the rear seat. Not only didn't they make any heat, they didn't even have a blower motor.
Exactly. I drove a '72 SuperBeetle (super in name only) for a couple years. I'm pretty sure that the engineer who thought an air-cooled, rear-engined car could bring heat up to the passenger compartment through natural convection alone must have attended the Engineering School of Wishful Thinking. Probably graduated at the top of his class. :Smarty: Of course, it didn't help that they used the rocker panels as the channel to do this -- the very first part of the car to rust out! I too carried an ice scraper for the inside of the windshield. One hand on the steering wheel, one hand on the gear shift, one hand with the ice scraper, .... um, wait a minute. The front window "defroster" was nothing but a blower motor which sucked air in from the base of the windshield outside and blew it up at the base of the window inside. No heat applied. Thus, if it was snowing outside, it was snowing inside. I guess VW did sell a heated defroster option. It used fire (gasoline? propane?) and sat right above the gas tank, which is right in your lap in a beetle. :eek2: They used a very innovative means of squirting washer fluid on the windshield. Instead of a pump, they used pressure from the spare tire mounted in the trunk up front. Not only did this novel approach ensure a clean windshield, it also ensured a flat spare tire due to the inevitable slow leak. ou: That Beetle sure could motor through snow. Unfortunately, it could do so in one direction only: straight. Without adequate weight up front, I was lucky if I could get the front tires to function as rudders. Steering in reverse in snow was absolutely impossible. Adding a hundred pounds of weight in the front trunk helped with the steering. Unfortunately, it also ruined the front struts. I never understood these cars' popularity. I probably would've liked a Corvair better, if only for the styling.
The only way you would get "heat" in a VW Bug was to pack it with about 12 people like the clown car at the circus. Used to do that in high school when we would go to lunch. The only "driver" with wheels was a girl with an orange Beetle. We used to pile about 6-8 students in there to go to Burger King. My cousin owned a 1960 Corvair with the gas heater. The inside of the car reeked of gasoline.
Did I mention the extremely vulnerable tailpipes which are actually integral to the transverse muffler? If you back into a curb you need a new muffler. Top speed was 85 mph -- more with a tailwind. It could lay rubber, but only by popping the clutch in reverse. Ooo, this is a good one: The battery is mounted under the back seat. Top posts, with mere inches separating it from the seat springs above. Better not let any fat girls sit in the back seat! (Probably good advice for most cars. :Brow: ) Makes for real convenient jump-starts, too. Of course, that's never necessary, since the car's so easy to push-start. I know this from months of experience when I was without a starter. I once drove 5 miles in a freezing, slushy rain with my head stuck out the driver's window. Without heated defrost, there was no way to keep the windshield from icing over. One good thing I could say about the car was that the gear shift and linkages were so incredibly sloppy that it was impossible to miss a gear. My dad bought the car one day for us teens and just left it in the driveway. As a 16-year old with only 6 months of driving experience, and having never driven a stick-shift before, I put the key in the ignition and taught myself how to drive a stick. Neither the stick nor the clutch required any finesse whatsoever. I'll never forgive my dad for not buying the Super Duty Tempest instead .....
After reading this, we wonder why Ralph Nader thought the Corvair was unsafe? uzzled: Oh well, there's no accounting for taste, but if you ask me, this fine example of the Corvair line is enough to make you wonder how GM had a 68% market share back in the 1960's. :Brow:
which probably explains GoGoMobiles, DKW's, and the ever infamous Audi (unintended acceleration) 4000's. Not to mention BMW R60's with sidecars.:TU:
Our media had a lot to do with "embellishing" that Audi problem back in the 80's. Pointless to fight back, so I think they took their lumps on it, and went back to their cave to fix it. We didn't see any of that in the fleet of Audi 6000's that we used as "best in class" benchmarks in the final development of the original Taurus. That 6000 was way ahead of its time........ It was there, no doubt about it, but they weren't the only ones with similar problems. I could name a dozen just as serious at Ford (where I worked at the time) that were covered up rather than take the hit, keep making them that way, and try to blame it on everybody else rather than fixing the problem (which they eventually had to do). From Pinto fuel tanks, to mysterious "jumping out of park", to sticking throttles, and topped by the grand daddy of all of them, Firestone tires as the root cause of the Exploders rolling over. Nuff said, time for a nap. :sleep:
