Muscle/classic cars

[Biggins]

It never seems to come up on here, but how many have experience with muscle cars or classic cars?

I'm always scanning craigslist for random stuff, but I feel like you can make a muscle/classic car handle a lot better with all the newer technologies that exist. I know my dad still wants an early Mustang convertible and I always loved the 64-66 Barracudas, but has anyone else owned, tried to own, or is searching for a classic car? Do they really take THAT much time to maintain and keep on the road?

[bren]

Does a twenty-some year old corvette count?

Older muscle cars have carburetors - other than that what could go wrong.

[lupinsea]

I had a '77 Corvette back in grad school.

It was ~26 years old at the time and I got it pretty cheap. It had 128k on the motor and there was about 26 years of wear and tear on it but it wasn't horrible. . . . at first.

I bought it for $7300. It was a CA emissions Corvette with a hobbled V8 putting out a wopping 180 hp (and ~255 lb-ft ) when new. Came with a 3 spd automatic and an LSD. Had the t-tops.

In a certain respect I really liked the car. It was cool to just cruise around in and had a great V8 burble at sub 1500 rpm speeds. And the driving position was unlike anything I've ever experieced, being seated so far back in the chassis with such a long hood and the pronounced fender flares. And the C3 generation has always been my favorite styling despite being a rebody job riding on the ~1958 chassis of the C2 (or whenever it came out) with minimal improvements.

But there was no doubt it was "old".

I had ok luck with it for about a year and then all the maintenance hit like a ton of bricks. The last straw was getting the car out of the shop for $2900 worth of repairs, and then driving for about 200 mile and having an electrical fire when the blower motor seized up and burned half the wiring harness in the car. Granted, 1977 automobiles didn't have as many wires as a modern car but it was still another $900 at the shop.

After the fix my friend got me to test drive a Miata and . . . that was it for the Corvette. The Miata just blew me away. After the Maita test drive I put the Corvette up for sale and didn't drive it anymore, despite taking several months to sell the car.

By the time I sold the 'Vette about 18-ish months after buying it I put in $46 more dollars fixing it than I did buying it in the first place. And I wasn't doing any crazy restoration work either . . . just trying to keep it running.

For me, getting the old Corvette wasn't so much a desire to have an OLD Corvette as it was a desire to have A Corvette. That was the only one I could (kinda) afford at the time. I wish I had known about Miatas before the Corvette but they just weren't on my radar. And the old school muscle cars never really tickled my fancy.

My 1977 Corvette was also my first taste of any kind of decent handling performance car. Up to that point it was my family's Ford cars and trucks..... whoopteedoo.

If you're going the classic / muscle car route I'd save have a good war chest and expect to drop boat loads of cash.

It's not that any one thing will be expensive. . . it's that (depending on condition) it's more a death-by-a-thousand-cuts situation where there will probably be a lot of little things that need fixing and they'll nickle-and-dime you.

[lupinsea]

Oh, and in the Jeep / offroad world. . . the guys with the older rigs (there are a lot of OLD Jeeps and 4x4s out on the trails) are always farting around with the carburetors. Finiky things with run-ability problems.

Give me an EFI any day, even if I have to deal with a sensor that crapped out. They tend to be much more reliable.

I have zero interest in having another carbureted engine.

[clyde]

Originally Posted by Biggins

It never seems to come up on here, but how many have experience with muscle cars or classic cars?

I'm always scanning craigslist for random stuff, but I feel like you can make a muscle/classic car handle a lot better with all the newer technologies that exist. I know my dad still wants an early Mustang convertible and I always loved the 64-66 Barracudas, but has anyone else owned, tried to own, or is searching for a classic car? Do they really take THAT much time to maintain and keep on the road?

Originally Posted by lupinsea

I had a '77 Corvette back in grad school.

No offense, but you had a piece of shit that said "Corvette" on it.

Anyway... Corvette's aren't "muscle cars," in the classic sense of the term, nor are Mustangs. The Barracuda, though, yeah, very much. Still, the Vettes, the pony cars, and the muscle carsfrom the late early 60s through the early 70s are functionally the same and use a lot of the same mechanical parts. The difference is just in size, platform and such.

I had a 1970 Olds Cutlass Supreme Convertible with a Rocket 350. That's the same GM A Body platform that the Chevelle, Skylark and LeMans rode on. All four were offered with big blocks in classic muscle car packages like the 442, SS, GS and GTO respectively. I also had a 1969 Corvette roadster with sidepipes that, while the same C3 series Corvette as the one Lup had, was nothing at all like Lup's car.

Many of my friends had muscle and pony cars of all types through the 1980s. My generation hit the sweet spot of depreciation on those cars that were roughly 15 years old, give or take that made them affordable to high schoolers while they were still new enough to masquerade as reasonable daily drivers. Between us all, we probably had at least one of everything...or knew someone that did.

At that time, the cars were cheap, the parts were cheap, insurance was cheap and gas was cheap. On top of that, the cars, especially the pre-emissions cars (1970 and earlier for the most part), were dead nuts simple mechanically.

They handled like shit. They braked worse. They weren't even really that fast, but they sounded awesome and laid great black patches up and down the block (whether it was 1 or 2 patches depended on what kind of rear you had). And the they looked bad ass...just as they do today.

Back then, it was common to buy whatever you could find, and then try turning it into the hotter versions. Mostly, we had small blocks and we'd dress them up, have them rebuilt with hotter parts...but they still weren't het big blocks. The big blocks did not make very good driver cars. They didn't run well in traffic, they overheated, they were a lot more tempermental, often had funky carb setups that made a finicky process even more difficult. In the mid 80s, we were also on the edge of the end of leaded gas and high octane ratings.

Towards the end of the 1980s and into the 90s, all the guys that couldn't afford these cars as new in high school started finding disposable income in their pockets. They bought these up by the truckload and the prices shot skyward. Then, people started investing in them and the really hot tickets were the ultra rare super hi-po versions. For various reasons, it was (and still is) incredibly easy to fake those cars, so a lot of pedestrian, low end versions were rebuilt as the high powered muscle car versions. And starting with my generation, many of the low end cars got turned into something in between.

What's it like to own one today? If you can do some of the work yourself, they are pretty cheap to maintain. There's a huge collector market, so there are plenty of parts and they aren't too expensive. Because of their era, you have to fiddle with them more often than a modern car...but they're much simpler to troubleshoot and fix when something goes wrong.

There are better suspension pieces you can install that will improve handling, but these are huge, heavy vehicles with poor geometryand balance so there's only so much you can do. It's really lipstick on a pig. You can upgrade the brakes to discs and with modern rubber, braking is a lot better and more reliable than it was when new, but you can't get past the weight. How fast you want your car to be depends on how much you want to spend.

All told, I think the cars make great cruisers for sunday drives, but they aren't anything I'd want to drive hard with a turned wheel or sit in traffic with. As a cruiser, there's a lot you can do with engines today that will give you better than old style big block power with modern small block reliability. There are so many choices.

If you want to stay true to being original, or at least what was originally offered, which is a big deal in some parts, you're limited...and you pay.

Dunno if any of that was helpful, but writing it reminded me of so much...I miss the smell.

[Theo]

Originally Posted by clyde

Many of my friends had muscle and pony cars of all types through the 1980s. My generation hit the sweet spot of depreciation on those cars that were roughly 15 years old, give or take that made them affordable to high schoolers while they were still new enough to masquerade as reasonable daily drivers. Between us all, we probably had at least one of everything...or knew someone that did.

At that time, the cars were cheap, the parts were cheap, insurance was cheap and gas was cheap. On top of that, the cars, especially the pre-emissions cars (1970 and earlier for the most part), were dead nuts simple mechanically.

They handled like shit. They braked worse. They weren't even really that fast, but they sounded awesome and laid great black patches up and down the block (whether it was 1 or 2 patches depended on what kind of rear you had). And the they looked bad ass...just as they do today.

Back then, it was common to buy whatever you could find, and then try turning it into the hotter versions. Mostly, we had small blocks and we'd dress them up, have them rebuilt with hotter parts...but they still weren't het big blocks. The big blocks did not make very good driver cars. They didn't run well in traffic, they overheated, they were a lot more tempermental, often had funky carb setups that made a finicky process even more difficult. In the mid 80s, we were also on the edge of the end of leaded gas and high octane ratings.

I was reading this just thinking that was exactly my high school experaince. So similar growing up in the midwest. Muscle Cars, Bush Beer and Hair Bands.

My cars from the 80's in that category in order of ownership:

70 Dodge Charger 383 Magnum/TorqueFlight trans - DOH Orange/Black - Sat in the driveway mostly making oil stains
71 Pontiac GTO 400/400 Turbo trans - Red/Black - Not as good looking as the 70 model because of its new front bumper design
69 Plymouth Road Runner 383 Magnum/4spd - Green/Tan - So began my manual trans fascination that still exists to this day.

Fun cars but huge as whales. Would not own any of them now. If anything I would take a small block vintage 67-69 Camero SS convert with a manual tranny to bomb around in on sunny days.

[Plaz]

Originally Posted by clyde

{a lot of really awesome shit}

I miss the smell.

Yeah. I miss that IQ-degrading smell of leaded gas burning, too.

[Terri Kennedy]

Originally Posted by Theo

Fun cars but huge as whales. Would not own any of them now.

Agreed.

In the 70's I had a '65 Impala with a 'vette 427 engine transplant. As the B-52's said, " it's as big as a whale and it's about to set sail". A lot of fun for a teenager, though.

I then switched to a '66 Charger (I forget what engine it had in it - definitely not the original one as I had to replace the bell housing bolts on a regular basis).

[lupinsea]

Originally Posted by clyde

No offense, but you had a piece of shit that said "Corvette" on it.

No offense taken . . . it WAS a piece of shit with "Corvette" on it.

I think the mid-late '70s were some of the least desirable Corvettes of all times.

First it was all the emissions control crap that really brought down the power on the engines.

Then the switch to plastic bumpers (instead of all that beautiful chrome).

They got rid of the side pipes earlier in the decade, too.

And I think this era was at the pinical of weight for the Corvettes. IIRC, I think my '77 had a curb weight of around 3,700+ lb.

Then to top it off my particular specimen was a tan-on-tan color scheme, or as my dad called it: "Camelshit Brown". Oh, and it had the even worse california emissions AND a automatic transmission.


All I saying was that it was "my" first taste of anything resembling a performance car. Not that my Corvette was anything close to being hot shit. But it had a reasonably low COG, a V8, and better suspension geometry than anything I had ridden in up to that point.

Prior to that my automotive experience largely entailed my dad's F250 he had since before I was born. My mom's Mercury Grand Marquis, my grandparents Ford station wagon and chryslers, mom's later Continental, a Plymouth Colt Vista and . . . stuff like that.


So..... it's all relative.

[lupinsea]

AS for stuff that was hot when in highschool . . .

I just missed out on the lowered compact truck craze of the late 80's / early 90's. For my cohorts it was the lowered and pimped out rice rockets. Honda civics and stuff.

The muscle cars weren't that big, though they got some kids attention. There just wasn't that many of them out there at the time.