Is Karl Kustom Corvettes' C2 Replica Better than the Real Thing?

The Customer is Always Right

Necessity isn't always the mother of invention, sometimes simple dissatisfaction will do. Such was the case when Karl Kustom Corvettes' customer Jarred Johnson had trouble finding a C2 that was juuuust right. Johnson had reportedly owned several Corvettes in the past, and when he was in the market for a Midyear (apparently that's what we're calling C2s now) he ran into a roadblock. "He decided that he wanted a Midyear, and he went and bought a nice '63, drove it, and was terribly disappointed with it," Dave Carnock from Karl's told Super Chevy. "He thought he'd bought a bad car, so he bought a '67, but it wasn't any better. His son said, 'You're not buying bad cars, you're buying old cars!'" You see, Johnson's son was a C6 owner, and after Johnson came back from a test drive in his kid's car he decided what he wanted wasn't a C2 after all. What he really wanted a C6 that looked like a C2 on the outside.

Mash Up

Everyone knows a C6 will outhandle a stock C2 any day of the week, so it's a natural, though not universal, impulse to want a Midyear that performs like a modern 'Vette. Upgrading a C2 to current-Corvette standards is a big job, and opinions are split on whether we should be cutting up classics to make them into something they are not, so building an earlier Sting Ray body to fit over at-that-time-new C6 running gear seems like a fantastic solution if it could be pulled off. Armed with this better idea, Karl Kustom Corvettes got to work in their 12,000 sq ft shop just outside of Des Moines, Iowa, to make it happen.

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New Glass

Of course, it wasn't as easy as just taking molds off of a '67 and lowering them over a C6 chassis, almost every panel needed to be redesigned. "On a roadster, the only original body panels on the car are the trunk lid, the two mirrors, the gas door, and the rocker panels," Carnock explains. Karl's used current-tech vinyl ester resin in hand-laying the fiberglass for the new panels, and every one of the new panels used stock C6 fasteners and mounting locations. "Every door hinge and latch, every hood hinge and latch, and every weather seal is the factory C6 part," Carnock said.
 

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You're Covered

And, because it was the whole point, every chassis, powertrain, and interior part was pure C6. Because of this Karl's was able to offer the factory warranty on the retro-revised C6. A side benefit of the conversion was that the liberated panels could be reused to repair crumpled C6s.

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What About Bob

The car you see here came from long-time Corvette owner, and Karl Chevrolet (the dealership that shares ownership with Karl Kustom Corvettes) customer, Bob Young. A veteran racer, Young was looking for a Midyear, specifically a '67,—the year of his high school graduation wouldn't you know. "About every 5-6 years, I find a good '67 convertible, and after I drove it for ten minutes, I knew why I wouldn't buy it," Young admits. "They squeak, they rattle, and the high-performance clutch makes your left leg tired. I could never bring myself to own one because I wanted it as a driver."

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Sold

Karl's told Young they had just the car for him. It was love at first sight. "Those guys did it right. They have all the right dimensions, they use the original taillights, and the headlights are hidden in the grille," Young said. He has high praise for Karl's work, and he's not the only one, as Karl Kustom Corvettes have taken both the Ridler Award at Detroit Autorama and the Grand National Roadster Show's America's Most Beautiful Roadster title.

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The Experience

Since taking delivery, Young couldn't be more pleased. "People look at it twice," he told Super Chevy. "All of the panels fit in the same places-at first you look at it and say, 'That's an interesting '67' . . . And then when they start looking closer, they say, 'This isn't a '67! This isn't a Midyear-what's going on?'" he related. Young said more often those reactions come when the top's down, that it's a little easier to notice deviations from the original with the top up.  

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Final Analysis

At the time the Super Chevy article was written, Karl's had delivered 12 of their C6 '67s to happy customers, and had five more in the process of being built. As Young pointed out, the windshield angle is a giveaway that something's up, and also, aside from the waterfall-style convertible cover panel, the interior is pure 2000s. From all the angles and close-ups in these photos, it's a bit hard to tell what the car looks like from the perspective of a human being standing and taking in its proportions, though it appears to be flattened out compared to the original's curvy shape. What's harder to say is whether some day C6s will become the premier Corvette objects of desire and folks will be adapting their 2040 'Vettes to circa-2010 shapes.

>>Join the conversation about this Replica C2 from Karl Kustom right here in Corvette Forum.

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