LouieM

I've finally cut a deal for the 67 of my dreams, after 1.5 years and two trips to the East Coast worth of searching. :D A Goodwood Green roadster with a 327/350, 4-speed and factory air! Yahoo! I fly off Wednesday and drive my newest love interest 2,500 miles or so home to northern California. :crazy: Transporter? Transporter? I don't need no stinkin' transporter! :eek: Should be fun, and definitely interesting, whatever happens. I might be the only driver with a broken down car and a smile on the side of the road. :) :yesnod: :lol: I'll take some NCRS regional phone numbers with me just in case. With those, a AAA card and a cell phone, what can possibly go wrong? :confused: I hope to post some pics when I return. :seeya

HoCoDave

Wonderful news. Congrats. :cheers:

Take lots of pictures & drive safely!

00fxd

Way to go Louie! Congrat's! Can't wait to see the pics.

67's

Louie,

Thats Great that you finally found a car! Keep a log of a trip I for one would like to hear the storey of the ride home. You finding a car gives me some hope that one of theese days I will find the car I have been looking for.

Congrats :cheers:

Tom


[Modified by Tom McCabe, 2:06 PM 11/12/2002]

polyrocks

Louie,
This is great news I can't wait to see it at the next meeting :D

LouieM

=========================
Tom,
I definitely will keep a log and take photos along the way; I just bought some film, along with an alternator belt and windshield wiper refills, and a Route 66 guide book. I'll pack a bunch of hand tools in my check-thru bag too.

Remind me/us what kind of car you are looking for. For some reason, I happened to run across several nice small block 67s all at once and maybe one will fit your bill.

By chance my NCRS chapter meeting is tonight. It will be SOOOOO nice to say "I FOUND A 67 ROADSTER," instead of "I'm still looking endlessly for a 67 roadster..." :yesnod:

Louie

Hitch

Louie,
It's great to hear that you found the one that you've been looking for.. I hear the echo in my head though of I'm still looking lol....
Dave...

67's

Louie,

I am looking for a bigblock unfortunatly, due to the increased secutity, you might be happier if you buy the tools on the east coast.

Tom

tuxedo

Louie, You need to feed us Forum members with picures ASAP. FEED US,FEED US, FEED US, FEED US PICTURES not of you but of the CAR!!!!!!!!!!!

Herb396

Louie,,
You didn't buy that one in bridgewater, NJ did you? Cause I've had my eye on that one.
:boxing :boxing

Good luck to you. You inspire me that my day will come too.


:flag :chevy :flag :chevy

polyrocks

Were are the Pics?????????

LouieM

I had a just wonderful 2,785 miles and 4+ days of cruising my new 67 ragtop home to Calif., arriving this past Monday evening. Smiling almost literally all the way. Fellow drivers sure do love this car. No problems, except for the brakes fading away and the throttle sticking open at just the wrong time, which I'll get to later. Unfortunately, as soon as I got home I had to pack and fly off early the next morning on a business trip, which I just got back from. I had just enough time this afternoon to get the car registered at DMV. No rest for the weary.

Tom and Jason, I did keep a log and took regular film pics along the way, and I'm STILL waiting for them to get developed before I describe the trip in detail. I hope to have them tomorrow. I wish the lens on my digital camera had not died just before the trip. I'll take some car pics here at home, after I have time to wash the car!

Herb, nope, I didn?t buy the car in New Jersey but in the Midwest, so I hope that one is still waiting for you.

Hope to get back to this thread tomorrow.

Louie

Doughan

Glad to hear you had a safe trip on congrats on the Vette! :cheers: Post some pics! :yesnod:

Herb396

Your The Man Lou ! :thumbs: :thumbs: :thumbs:
Sounds like an adventure of a life time. True passion driven, you got stones of steel to go out there and bring that car home!!
When you get a chance to slown down long enough you need to stop,,pull out a cold one :cheers: , go out the the garage, lean back & take a good long look at that new Vet, (with that big cheezie grin on your face :D) and know that were all there grinning with ya!! - Nice Job!

:D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D :D

HoCoDave

Happy to hear about the safe trip home! :cheers: Takes guts and the right attitude to bravely decide to drive a car like that 2500 miles home. :cool:

Eagerly awaiting the pictures.

Dave

Plastic Pig

:cool: :cheers: :cool: I delivered the 67 I traded for the 57 to Utah.

My father and I had a great trip out in the 67. The trip back in the Penske truck with the 57 in the back, however was not so much fun :D

Good luck with the car!!

67's

Louie, Glad to hear you and the car got back safe and sound :D

Tom

polyrocks

Louie,
Congrats again, I know first hand how much fun it must of been as Rosa and I had a blast driving ours home from Washington state. :D Can't wait to see the pics and I'm glad to say our search is over.....for now that is :chevy

LouieM

Due to technical difficulties, it will be a few days before I can post pics of my cross-country drive. Until then, I wrote up a description that will hopefully be interesting.

Driving my new 67 327/350 4-speed factory-air roadster 2,785 miles from Michigan to California was the experience of a lifetime. I bought the car on a Thursday and got home on Monday night. I pretty much stayed on the interstates, since I had to be home in time for a business trip. In a perfect world I would have taken two weeks for the same drive and skipped the superslab.

It's been 11 years since I owned my last midyear, and I haven?t spent much seat time in them since. My initial impressions on the first day driving home were: A) What a skinny steering wheel, like a linguini hoop with finger indents, B) The power steering is really light, like it was made for undersized girls to use ? I wandered all over the road for the first couple of hours, C) The car almost turns left when I hit the brakes ?- later tracked down to low tire pressure, D) The sidepipes are really loud; on the highway it seems like I can hear each cylinder firing, 1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2/1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2/1-8-4-3-6-5-7-2 repeated over and over; still, it's a good sound, really rich, deep and throaty, E) There's a lot of wind noise at 70-80 mph, F) I can feel the chassis flex on uneven surfaces, which modern cars don't do, G) Where's the right outside mirror? H) Where's the shoulder harness?, I) I love it!

Initial problems were that the hand brake didn't work, wasn't adjusted right, and the dash lights are incredibly dim. When it got completely dark outside I could finally see the dash lights brighten as I twisted the rheostat back and forth to wear some corrosion off the switch. The lights stayed very dim at best, as if they are powered by a hamster wheel and the hamster is on strike. I had brought along an extra alternator belt, windshield wipers, duct tape, bailing wire, and lots of tools, which I checked through as baggage, just in case, but I never used them.

Many drivers honked and waved on the road and gave me the thumbs up. One guy said it all through the back window of his pickup while I was waiting at a light in Fort Wayne, IN ? "That's when they were pretty!" Every gas stop along the whole drive was a small convention of guys asking me about the car, reminiscing about Vettes they used to have, friends with Vettes, Vettes they wanted to buy. A female tool booth attendant in Oklahoma asked me what my car was and said it was pretty even if she didn't recognize it. At one gas stop in Texas a tanker trucker followed me off to a gas station because my "pretty little Vette" reminded him of one he used to own. What a kick. This never happens when I gas up my Acura TL.

It was rainy at times in the Midwest, but the car surprisingly did not leak anywhere. Snow was predicted when I bought the car, so I headed south as fast as traffic allowed. In the days to come, I actually watched the Weather Channel for an hour at a time, to see what the next day's drive would bring. That first night, and every night afterward, I searched for a motel where I could park near my ground floor room and where I could get the end spot in a parking row. I installed one of those battery disconnect things where you unscrew the green plastic **** to cut off power. To sleep even better, I removed the coil to distributor wire then put back the shielding with a bolt, not a wing nut. It was still hard to fall asleep, especially the first night, from the excitement of having a midyear again and from fear that someone would steal it. All those happy honkers on the highway suddenly morphed, in my mind, into potential thieves who had probably followed me to my motel and were waiting for me to fall asleep!

Whenever I neared a big city such as St. Louis or Oklahoma City I'd ask a big rig driver at a rest stop about the best way through town. Often the way I had guessed from the map was the wrong way, and the truckers saved me a lot of time. I made a point of getting through big cities and being gassed up at the end of each day, so I could start cleanly on the open road in the morning. I wired my foot-long American flag to the antenna on the morning of the second day. Unfortunately, that big a flag bent the antenna horizontal at highway speeds, so I took it down early on and looked for a smaller flag at a rest stop.

I drove 13 hours the second day, Fort Wayne IN to Tulsa OK, and knew it was time to stop when I missed a transition to I44. Ate a huge steak dinner, since I'd been having light breakfasts and lunches so I wouldn?t get sleepy from hash-brown-and-burger saturation.

On the morning of day 3 I bought a set of earmuff style ear protectors at a WalMart. Sidepipes are great, but only for the first 1,000 highway miles; too much of a good thing is still too much! Also, now I could start to listen to the CDs on the portable player with ear bud speakers that I'd brought along. Was finally able to play the 60s Hits CD and other road songs. Now and then I would be singing along with gusto, oblivious to the world, and suddenly notice people in the next car over staring and smiling. We were all having a good time! BTW I will be selling the sidepipes, which supposedly were put on the car about 1000 miles before I bought it. My house is close to others, and the neighbors would not appreciate the sound. I'll also sell the repro bolt-ons with the Coker redline radials, since I like rally wheels better. One of the center caps took a different route than the rest of the car when I hit a pothole somewhere in AZ or CA, so I only have three of those.

I stopped in Miami, OK, because the brake pedal was getting very soft. A mechanic stopped what he was doing and bled each wheel a bit, but no air came out. He wouldn't take any money for his work, just said he was happy to help someone driving an old Vette cross country. The brakes stayed real soft, and probably do need bleeding. As a precaution, I used the tranny to do a lot of the braking for the rest of the trip.

The only other mechanical problem was while passing a semi somewhere in Oklahoma. I'd been stuck beside him for a while, then got the opportunity to power ahead. Just for fun, I floored the throttle to show off that side pipe sound. That part worked, but the throttle stuck open and now I was closing in fast on the back of another big rig! I automatically downshifted to second to keep my top speed down, then put my foot under the throttle rod behind the gas pedal and popped the throttle closed. Whew! Some WD-40 on the carb linkage, reapplied often, solved the problem. The feeble brakes sure didn't do much for me. I think I said a bad word somewhere in there.

When I went out to the car in the morning in Tulsa there were four guys looking it over. They all used to own solid axles or midyears. The exception was a guy with a slight accent who was from the Netherlands. He belonged to a Corvette club there, and actually knew a fair amount about midyears, but had not yet found one to buy so had to drive a Porsche in the meantime. After we chatted about my car for a while he asked me if it was for sale. I told him I'd been Vette-less for 11 years, and had only had the car for two days (0.0054 year), so wasn't ready to sell just yet. He asked me how much I'd take for the car, so just to scare him away I said "$60,000." He walked around the car some more, looked it over, and then he said, "OK, I'll buy it for that." Huh? I mean, uh, what? He said his company would wire the money to him right there in Tulsa. I could have made over $20K on the spot. That would have been nice, but then I'd have to begin all over again to look for an unmolested 67 350 hp 4-speed roadster with AC while the rest of my life went to hell. Nope. He gave me his number in case I changed my mind, but I won't. Wow, what a compliment to the car, and it made me feel even better about my purchase!

It's pretty flat across the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, and it was a relief to see the low mesas and mountains of the Southwest as I entered New Mexico. I thought about driving about 4 hours more to Albuquerque, at night. But, just before Tucumcari, I ran into snow that the Weather Channel forgot to predict! I asked a cop at a gas stop about the road conditions ahead, and he suggested I park my 35-yar-old car (which he liked a lot) for the night. Entering New Mexico turned out to be a real high point. The sun was setting just as the first snow showed up beside the road. The snow lay on top of black volcanic rock in patches and made for a sort of surreal zebra-skin landscape. Then there was a world-class sunset that I could see not only in the sky, but reflected along the luscious fender peaks and hood of my block-sanded and clear-coated 67's body. The car's finish added a sort of Art Deco softness to the sunset colors and the view from the cockpit was beautiful enough to make me nearly swoon with pleasure. As if on cue, in my earphones The Seekers began crooning "I'll Never Find Another You": "There's a new world somewhere they call the Promised Land?.." I felt on such an incredible high, entering beautiful New Mexico and the Promised Land of midyear ownership once again. Whoever first called NM the Land of Enchantment got it right! As a geologist I enjoyed the red mesas with rock layers named Coconino, Supai, Moenkopi, Red Wall, etc., that I learned in school long ago. It made entering New Mexico feel sort of like a homecoming.

At the gas stop after I checked into a Tucumcari motel, the attendant chewed my ear off about Vettes he used to race (on dirt tracks and drag strips in OK). He also mentioned he was trying to buy a friend's unrestored 53 Vette and maybe drop a V8 into it. Urk! Gack! I gave him my number and said I could put him in touch with Noland Adams for tips on "modifying" the car. On the other hand, an LS1-powered 53 would draw a lot of attention at the NCRS national next summer!

It was 28 degrees with snow all over the ground when I got going the next morning. I followed a semi for the first hour at 90 mph, so made the best time of the whole 2,785-mile trip. New Mexico was the first state where the highway patrol was obviously on a search-and-destroy mission. Thank goodness for my Valentine V1 radar detector. After one cop went flying by me, the V1's red arrow pointed ahead at him, as expected, but the back arrow ALSO was lit up. Sure enough, another doughnut-eater was a mile behind, hoping to scarf up traffic that had sped up when the first "bait" cop went by. None of the truckers sped up either, and I always took my speed cues from them. There was a stiff crosswind across most of New Mexico. It got spooky at times when passing a semi at 75-85 mph, with the wind from the left, the back end of the big rig sucking the car to the right, the Vette slaloming along the length of the rig, then getting pushed left by air from the front of the cab. I reached my personal limits with 1960s power steering technology. Gotta look into that Steeroids thing.

BTW I bolted my Acura's CA license plate to the rear of the Vette, since it made my car less interesting to any highway cop out there, compared to an empty rear license frame. I did this on the advice of a veteran NCRS guy, who shall go unnamed. Also BTW much of my drive was along old route 66, so I saw lots of tourist trinkets. Exercising restraint, I bought just a shirt. And a hat. And a mug.

My mileage ranged from a low of 14.1 to a high of 18.4, with most fill ups in the 16-17mpg area while cruising along at 75 mph. (I don't know what the rear end ratio is, but the car tachs at 2900 rpm at 70 mph, if anyone knows what ratio that equates to.) The price range was even greater, from $1.40/gallon in OK to $2.15/gallon in CA. I added a quart of oil about every 1,000 miles, but when I got home I found out it was leaking from the spin-on oil filter adapter, not getting burned, which is good. At each gas stop I reset the trip odometer. This raised the question, what sadist invented this arthritic device? Mine lacks the rubber ****, so I had to wear leather gloves to save the skin on my fingers. Does anyone ever land on 0000, or does this devilish device always jump from 1111 to 9999? Bet Chevy saved $0.35 by making the odometer that way.

Entering California the speed limit dropped from 75 in NM and AZ to 70, the signs said it was "Enforced by radar" and the gas jumped to $2.15/gallon. Welcome to the Golden State! The CHP were also in a feeding frenzy, like in NM, generally acting as if a Krispy Kremes truck had upended somewhere near me.

I was surprised and disappointed to not see a single other Vette on the road during the whole trip. No C5s, no C4s no nuthin'. Maybe the C1s and C2s were being transported in all those semis I passed? Didn't get to use The Wave I'd practiced: wrist-arm, wrist-arm, wrist-arm, wrist-arm.

I discovered that the stock seats are comfortable for about 10 hours, then my butt started going numb, which is a tribute to the seat's upholstery or mine. My last day was a 15-hour slog from Flagstaff to just south of San Francisco, 777 miles in all, but I should have called it quits 100 miles before that. After all that open-road driving, arriving in the Bay Area traffic mess at night, tired and bleary eyed, was no fun. When I pulled into my garage I shut 'er off and just listened to the exhaust pipes ticking as they cooled for several minutes as they cooled. It had been quite a drive.

Sorry this write-up has been so long, but hopefully it will inspire others to get out there and drive.

Louie :flag

tuxedo

Louie, Quite a cool story. I wish I had been along for the ride!. I'm glad you made it home safe and sound. You have done something that most of us only wish we could. You enjoyed a true american experience courtesy of chevy, and the highway system of this great country.