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Say you have a 1979 L82 Auto, which you have owned for about 2.5 years. The car is completely original, has 40,000 miles, and was garaged for 18 years. The vette in question was started only once during that 18 year period. You fixed the brakes, greased everything, and started driving the car in its original form.
You suddenly find that you have upwards of $1,000 to spend on the car. What do you buy for the car, and what work do you do to it?
Probably needs all new (rubber) everything.
All new suspension bushings/ball joints/tie rods/idler arm/body mounts/adj
strut rods. All this should be within your budget, if you do most of the work.
You can have a shop press in the A-arm bushings for cheap. The hardest
part will be the initial disassembly of all the suspension. Going together
should be a breeze.
My point: build a good foundation for years to come. Then next year, the
new shiny wheels and tires won't break the underlying (old) suspension
components. Plus, you'll then have a car that handles like a NEW 79 vette.
If you do enough work yourself, you might have enough left over for a
fiberglass spring - or other goody.
Good luck deciding. the shiny stuff is so hard to resist.
:seeya
Probably needs all new (rubber) everything.
All new suspension bushings/ball joints/tie rods/idler arm/body mounts/adj
strut rods. All this should be within your budget, if you do most of the work.
You can have a shop press in the A-arm bushings for cheap. The hardest
part will be the initial disassembly of all the suspension. Going together
should be a breeze.
My point: build a good foundation for years to come. Then next year, the
new shiny wheels and tires won't break the underlying (old) suspension
components. Plus, you'll then have a car that handles like a NEW 79 vette.
If you do enough work yourself, you might have enough left over for a
fiberglass spring - or other goody.
Good luck deciding. the shiny stuff is so hard to resist.
:seeya
Thats pretty much the way I am leaning. Take care of suspension and hoses first. I'm going to replace the fuel "S" hoses first thing. Then power steering hoses. After that its probably new shocks, strut rods, and a few bushings here and there. :)
Valve job, then suspension restoration. this, of course, is if you have no plans to mod it. otherwise i would buy heads, or some other performance part. :cheers:
Hmmmm I would DRIVE IT and then fix what broke first :p:
I have been driving it. Nothing is really broke right now, except for the drivers side outer door handle rod assembly. My fat hands wont fit in there to fix it either!
Designer Imagines A Corvette That Looks More Like a Corvette Than the Corvette
Slideshow: A Jaguar designer's personal project imagines what a modern front-engined Corvette might look like if Chevrolet revisited the golden age of the Stingray.