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laid eye on a beautiful med. blue 85. 10k original miles makes me nervous. original owner had a collection with inside storage. question is what usually is the repercussion mechanically? tires are original and owner admitted that the flatness went away when driven, Im a stickler on rubber so i got a line on tires at tire rack (BFG 255/50zr16 gforcecomp2 for 135 per tire)..not familiar with the c4 i could use the advice of someone whos been there. Seems to idle and test drive well but its a 100 miles away from home. whats the inns and outs of sitting so long? costly repairs on the road home or around the corner? basically is this nightmare? hope its the dream thanks for advice
Certainly change all your filters and drain the gas tank..Put in fresh fuel, new belt as well. I had some valve cover gaskets go on a car that sat. Might want to rent a trailer unless you can borrow one and trailer it back so if something goes wrong your closer to home.
It could be a nightmare but I doubt it. If it was me I would take the chance. Sounds like you have a good chance of coming out with something really nice. I know a guy in Illinois that has an 86 that has 36k original miles. I am going to try to make a play on it.
Certainly new tires. The originals are probably dry-rotted to the point they are unsafe even driving in city traffic. Nothing at all wrong with those Tire Rack tires.
Replacing all of the coolant hoses is another thing to do. And a complete coolant flush using a 50-50 mix of a good ethylene glycol (green) coolant and distilled water.
Even if the gas in the tank is fresh, replace the fuel filter. You may see some oil leaks as the various seals may have dried up and will let oil leak out until such time as they re-seal.
Check the brakes for the amount of pad material remaining and also do a fluid flush. Use a good quality DOT3 fluid. Is the car an auto trans or the 4+3? For an A4, maybe just drop the pan, change the filter and re-fill. A 4+3 shouldn't need any service for now. Check the power steering fluid too.
dont hold back on the pictures. lloottsss of pictures.
if u have an iphone the pics can be taken and then uploaded straight from the phone skipping the computer nuisance.
also, if you start replacing seals yourself, i can help if you hit a stumbling block having just done mine.
to be honest, and i hope i dont lose brownie points with the boys for this, but the head gasket had a leak somewhere, at least this is what i suspected because of the white smoke on startup and it burnt my eyes and left my clothes stinking horribly) and with so many other seals to replace (felt overwhelming at the time, it was my first time doing anything at all on a car) i used this stuff called IRONTITE and it actually worked!! it took about 10 driving sessions but it actually worked! before i get shredded, research how it actually works, the gelling chemical only gels at areas of depressurization. so its not like you are plugging up other the passageways. wherever the leak is, it will have gelled over the leaksite s the coolant was squiging through the crack in the original gasket. im so happy it worked. i had a leak in the rad cap too, on the underside of the radcap, right where the pressure was leaking out the centre pin in the cap, the stuff was gelling and closing over that hole. i replaced the cap.
if you do your own work, i have found that ebay is realllly cheap compared to the part stores and zero quality issues so far. and ebay vendors tend to sell kits as a whole which is nice. for example our tailshaft oring was leaking, we got a kit that had everything for the tailshaft for 1/5th the autovalue partstore amount.
dont hold back on the pictures. lloottsss of pictures.
if u have an iphone the pics can be taken and then uploaded straight from the phone skipping the computer nuisance.
also, if you start replacing seals yourself, i can help if you hit a stumbling block having just done mine.
to be honest, and i hope i dont lose brownie points with the boys for this, but the head gasket had a leak somewhere, at least this is what i suspected because of the white smoke on startup and it burnt my eyes and left my clothes stinking horribly) and with so many other seals to replace (felt overwhelming at the time, it was my first time doing anything at all on a car) i used this stuff called IRONTITE and it actually worked!! it took about 10 driving sessions but it actually worked! before i get shredded, research how it actually works, the gelling chemical only gels at areas of depressurization. so its not like you are plugging up other the passageways. wherever the leak is, it will have gelled over the leaksite s the coolant was squiging through the crack in the original gasket. im so happy it worked. i had a leak in the rad cap too, on the underside of the radcap, right where the pressure was leaking out the centre pin in the cap, the stuff was gelling and closing over that hole. i replaced the cap.
if you do your own work, i have found that ebay is realllly cheap compared to the part stores and zero quality issues so far. and ebay vendors tend to sell kits as a whole which is nice. for example our tailshaft oring was leaking, we got a kit that had everything for the tailshaft for 1/5th the autovalue partstore amount.
cheers. hopefully she is dry anyway!!
thanks partner..it is good people like you that gets me back into the Vette world
I'll also repeat, replace the fuel filter. If you can run, non-ethanol gas in it, I don't know if the issue is specific to the '85 but I've lost several fuel pumps due to them overheating in the summer when using E-10 blend. Next time it happens I'm upgrading to a newer style pump.
Also keep an eye on the fuel gauge, just because of the age and it sitting around there's a decent chance the sending unit won't work right and show the same fuel level regardless of how much fuel is in your tank.
I like my '85, I generally encourage people to buy an '89 if they're looking at an early C4 but if it's well taken care of that's worth a lot of peace of mind.
Had another thought, the '85 was originally specced with a conventional oil, not a synthetic. It has a two piece rear main seal that might leak (half of them probably leaked from the factory).
The car also uses a flat tappet cam so you might look for an oil with a higher zddp concentration.
I also have an '85 that I bought new in 1984. It currently has just over 8k miles on it. I actually had it stored for 9 years at one point (overseas assignment) and when I took it out of storage all I had to do was replace the fuel pump and rebuild the clutch slave cylinder. Car started right up and ran just fine. The original Gatorbacks tires were a bit flat spotted, but within a few hundred miles it was unnoticeable. What I did notice was that the tires were very hard and with the least application of power, the car would lose traction badly. By then Goodyear had abandoned the original 16" tires for these cars, so I picked up a set of 17" GS wheels fitted with the correct offset for the '85 and put a set of Goodyear GS-D3's on it. Problem was solved and the car handles like it did when new.
Since I had never gotten around to flushing the brake fluid, in 2005 I decided to do a little PM on my brakes. With just 8k on them, I didn't want to wait for a seal to start leaking and ruin the original pads so I decided to disassemble and rebuilt the calipers along with flushing all of the old fluid from the system. Since the calipers and rotors had corroded somewhat over the years, I bead-blasted the calipers while they were disassembled along with the rotors and caliper brackets and painted them with hi-temp paint before reassembling everything. They now look better than they did the day I picked the car up when new.
Overall, the '85 has been the most trouble free Corvette I have ever owned. I don't believe this is just because I haven't driven it very much either. It does however allow me more time to spend maintaining my other not-so-trouble-free Corvettes. Since I don't drive it very much, every time I do, I get to relive the original thrill of driving it that very first day.
I did switch to Mobil-1 oil in 1987 when it had about 5k on it and I do believe the change was noticeable. Since I planned to keep the car a very long time I felt it would be worth while. Of course I also planned to drive it more than I have, but that's another story.
Good luck with you acquisition... GUSTO
I do believe that these cars left Bowling Green with out valve-cover gaskets, I know mine did. Within 6-months, I was having oil leak onto the exhaust manifolds. I decided to change out the "gaskets" for new ones only to discover the factory "oversight"! They had just smeared a bit of RTV on the cover and slapped them on. I went to my local dealer to ask about this and he said "oh, sure we have gaskets for your car and they're just a few bucks!" Unfortunately that was the easy part. Changing the gaskets on the TPI is not like changing gaskets on your Father's SBC!
laid eye on a beautiful med. blue 85. 10k original miles makes me nervous. original owner had a collection with inside storage. question is what usually is the repercussion mechanically?
I'll ditto most of what was said here as well. I bought my '85 with just under 11K miles on it about 2 years ago and have not had any real issues beyond oil leaking from the valve covers, and replacing the tires since they were really hard. I do have a minor oil leak remaining, but believe it's the oil pan (hoping it's not the rear seal). Examine all the rubber, replace fluids and you should be pretty good. Just keep an eye on her the first few miles.
1985
