Off The Cuff

When It’s Time To Rebuild The Car

Posted by: From Arkansas in Just Stuff, Odds And Ends on Mar 23 2008

Welcome back!

I think I was about 12 years old when I noticed the guy up the alley from us working on old cars. The person was the father of a friend of mine. I thought the guy was the Einstein of putting cars together, which goes to show you how naive I was at the time. He was just a guy working on a car to sell. Thing is, he was pretty good at it. Most of the time, what he put together was an especially old car like a 49 Hudson or a 51 Chevy. My friend and I loved to watch him work although I think we bothered him too much. He was too polite to tell us that though.

But the time I really took notice was when he did a rebuild on a Corvette. WOW! I know he loved sports cars. He had a bazillion pictures of them on the wall in his garage where he rebuilt each of the cars. But this was an incredible beauty. It was a 1957 Corvette. I guess it had been in a car accident and was really banged up. Looked bad. But with a whole lot of love, a whole rack of Corvette parts he bought specifically for that year, a lot of time (it took him about a year to finish it) and a whole lot of love, the car was absolutely beautiful when he was finished.

After that, he seemed to prefer to rebuild the Corvettes and occasionally other cars that came his way. While it took him quite a while to work on them since he had a regular job, I know that his passion was in the cars that he rebuilt in his garage.

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