joe_padavano

No one reproduces these. Good used from a desert car or hand-fabricated are your only options.

Not a fan of belly button Chebby motors. The aesthetics are a matter of personal taste. I can appreciate the workmanship.

I used a Helicoil in one of the head bolt holes on the first 215 I built decades ago. Timeserts didn’t exist then. No issues at all.

I wish…

The green wagon is the one I got from Overton, NV. The yellow wagon is the one I got from CA.

“Talk is pulling eng, i assume you all mean dropping the front susp with eng/trans right?”

Not really. There isn’t room to separate the engine from the trans in the car, but pulling engine and trans together isn’t that difficult.

So basically, doing this in the car means you have to pretty much everything necessary to pull the engine, but then you want to be laying under the car with oil dripping in your face to change the pan gasket.

Just pull the motor. It will be just a much work, and you’ll do a much better job of installing the new gasket. Life would really suck if…[Read more]

I’ll second Eric’s estimate. I bought a 62 Jetfire parts car (with turbo long gone) for $900. It also had Flintstone floors.

That wasn’t me.

Define “major mods”.

Will it bolt up to the block? Yes. That’s about the only thing that does.

The Rover motor has a different crank flange “stick-out” distance. The Olds doesn’t use a conventional flexplate, it uses a flywheel with a spring hub and spline drive like a manual trans. The Buick flexplate bolts up but will not work with the…[Read more]

The stock intake uses the small (Holley) bolt pattern. The only issue is, are the bores in the intake large enough to clear the throttle blades as they open.

My E-brock 1403 bolts directly to the stock intake manifold. I had to fabricate linkages for the accelerator and transmission TV rods.

The 62 Jetfire parts car that I have also has a plastic plug there. I have not had the fenders off of my two wagons to see what those have.

Kanter sells new Chinesium drums for these cars.

Read the option list. You could separately order all the trim pieces used on the Cutlass models when you bought a base F-85.

You do realize that the side trim was factory-available on the F-85 convertible under option K-8, right? As the car in the ebay ad Jim linked shows – an F-85 convertible could have been ordered from the factory with the same chrome side trim as a Cutlass (or F-85 Deluxe), but it would have had F-85 emblems, not Cutlass emblems.

Yeah, every one-of-none car has a “special order” story…

The F-85 convertible did not have the Cutlass emblems nor did it have the stainless “spear” down the side. This photo is an F-85 convertible. Note the small chrome piece at the front of the front fender as the only side trim. This car also has a bench seat. My friend Scott also has an…[Read more]

And THIS is why you never want to rent your old car out for movie or TV use. When I lived in SoCal, I knew a number of people who did this. It rarely ended well.

The 1962 Chassis Service Manual tells you exactly what you have. Series 3067 is an F85 Sports Convertible. Series 3167 would be a Cutlass Convertible. It’s entirely possible that at some time in the last SIXTY years, someone replaced the front sheet metal (likely due to an accident) and the fenders they got were from a Cutlass.

That Jetfire hood was still on the wagon when I bought it, but he told me he was going to keep it and swap a normal hood back onto the wagon. I was OK with that.