OT: My 1966 Corvair Project

[Mr Project]

Hey, I remembered that a while back some of you guys were asking for some info on my Corvair project. I wrote up some stuff this weekend, so I thought I'd share with you guys. If you don't care, just say so.

Hey all, thought I'd post up a little info on my 10-year-long project. Hopefully I'll actually have it done by next spring.

The car is a 1966 Chevy Corvair 4-door sedan. The 4-doors are somewhat rare, and even more rare with the manual 4-speed transmission. Mine has that, and I've always been a fan of the pillarless hardtop design of the sedan. I bought this car when I was 17, my second car.

After driving it daily for about a year, I had the engine out and the car up on jackstands in the driveway for a clutch change. One fateful Sunday morning, dad loaded up the family in the Suburban and backed up....right into my car. The front was smashed pretty good, as he hit it above the bumper. Since then I've been working on it, very slowly, off and on, to fix the collision damage and do some rust repair. Of course, this turned into a full restoration, complete repaint, suspension rebuild, re-doing much of the interior, etc. You know how it goes. =)

Here's a picture as I was getting the car stripped down:


Here's one after I got most of the bodywork done, and got the car in the first few coats of primer:


After getting it in primer, I decided to turn the car over to the real experts.. KR Performance and Restoration. These guys do great work, and they are nearly done with the paintwork. I should have the car back early next week, and I was down at the shop working on a different project today so I took a couple of crappy pics:





This is where the car is at now, I'll post some more pics of the process and some of the welding I had to do.

[Mr Project]

It was a great learning experience for me on this car. I've turned a lot of wrenches over the years, but most of the body work was a first-time experience for me on this car.

Several years ago, I hired a body guy to weld on several panels for me. The driver's rear quarter panel, the front panel that was hit by the 'burban, and the passenger's lower rear quarter. After that, though, I still had several things that needed replacing. The worst one was the floorboard under the driver's feet:



I started with a replacement floor panel from Clark's Corvair Parts. There are two nationwide Corvair-only parts vendors, if you can believe it. =) Basically this was my method:

1 - Cut out original floor, including drilling out spot welds with spot weld cutter on my electric drill

[Mr Project]

2 - Carefully cut and fit replacement panel, then basically spot-weld over, and over, and over again with my Hobart Handler 135 MIG welder. I used 75/25 shielding gas and was very happy with the quality and ease of use of my welder....for a total welding newbie, it was pretty manageable.



3 - I fabbed up a couple of custom pieces of steel to fit in the area where the replacement panel didn't reach, and then followed the same welding method.



After getting everything tacked in place, I just kept going back and spot-welding all the seams (moving around to limit heat buildup) until the end result was a constant seam of weld all the way around. If I thought I had it all done, I sat in a dark garage with a light under the car and looked for pinholes of light coming through, then welded them closed.

[Mr Project]

This was pretty much the result of once I had the floor welded in, including re-welding the OEM spot welds from the brace underneath, plus grinding things down.

[Mr Project]

Here's another panel I welded in. the bottom front corner on the driver's side. I did the passenger's side the same way, but this one looked a little better. =)

1 - Cut and tacked:


2 - More spot welds (ok, some are a little more than spot welds):


3 - Ground down and ready for action:

[Mr Project]

One of the biggest annoyances of 40-year-old cars is the crappy electrical and lighting systems. I want this to be a car I can drive and enjoy every day, so I've taken some steps to 'modernize' the car a little.

Modern touch #1 - LED Taillights

Lucky for me, the Corvair lights are just over 4" in diameter. I took some 4" LED taillight assemblies for semi trucks and cut them apart.



I then cut the back ends off and wrapped up the drivers so that I could get the LED assemblies as-is into the stock housings.



You can see the pieces here that comprise my assembly:
1 - Metal backing plate
2 - LED assembly
3 - OEM Lens



And here's the final result. I couldn't get a good picture, but rest assured that it's a LOT brighter than the stock bulb assembly, and more importantly, it's going to have its own ground wire rather than relying on grounding through the housing to the body, which was never very reliable.

[Mr Project]

Modern touch #2 - Trunk-mounted Battery

Let's face it, rear-engined cars are great and all, but there's something to be said for slightly more even weight distribution. A few years with BMWs has taught me that. =) I wanted to mount the battery in the trunk for a couple reasons:

1 - Move weight to the front
2 - Less wire to feed my 400W of headlights
3 - Future engine plans include big oil coolers and intercoolers...I need the room back there!

So here was my method:

1 - Build battery tray from welded angle iron. Here you can see it built and coated with POR-15, plus the hold-down hardware I fabbed up.



2 - Make a ground lug to the body and brackets for the battery box



3 - Weld in bracket level on trunk floor

[Mr Project]

4 - Build wooden battery box (this will be carpeted later)

[Mr Project]

Modern touch #3 - Trunk

Hmm... 40 years later, we can do better than primer-like splatter paint, can't we? I wanted something I could be a little 'rough' with in the trunk that would hold up well. Herculiner seemed to fit the bill nicely. =)

Before:


After:

[Mr Project]

Modern touch #4 - DIN headunit slot

Well, I wanted to replace the dual-post headunit. So, I cut down a DIN cage from a Mercury Villager (of all things) and fabbed up a little metal to 'smooth' it into the dash somewhat. Yeah, it sticks out due to the angle of the dash, but I think it will work out ok in the end. It looks good in the paint now, and hopefully with the dash and glovebox installed it will blend in ok.

I'm still thinking about either a vent or some extra gauges above the HU, so we'll see how that develops.

I think the pics speak for themselves: