Hasn't Run for 30 Years! '66 Corvette Restoration and Road Trip | Roadkill | MotorTrend

[Music] you gotta see the photos of this thing before mike bought it it's absurd yeah um so the story is owner number one sold it to oh number two owner number two cut all of the c2 body off of it and made it a c3 corvette which is just wrong and then the last owner converted it back to a c2 and then abandoned the project halfway through an ls swap so this hasn't moved in decades and we have five days to do wiring plumbing brakes tires everything making this car run and drive after sitting for more than 30 years let's wrench we got this i have no fear it'll get done so here's my plan for this car someday this corvette is gonna go in the sevens at a dragon drive event like hot rod drag week in the meantime i just needed to run and drive i bought it because it was the cheapest car i could find these things are stupid expensive and i needed one with a title with a vin number i needed an actual corvette to build and uh stumbled upon this it had been in the midst of a rotisserie restoration all right i think i can get it i am feeling so much better about this whole deal already because owner number three david hernandez not only did he fix the body work but he restored the chassis this corvette has 20-inch wheels and tires on it which obviously is way bigger than what would have come from the factory so the tires are really close to the fiberglass valance here and when you try to make left-hand turns this tire hits this so you can't make a u-turn in the car it's not going to be good so we need to downsize the wheel however the tie rod is really close to the wheel here so if you downsize the wheel without changing the back spacing and offset you're gonna have a clearance problem here so to make sure we don't screw this up when we buy new wheels we're going to steal a wheel off of that camaro over there which is a much nicer car and test fitted on that car so we had 20 by nines and these are 2 35 40 18. so we have a 255 20. so this should be smaller sits out further which means this might be a problem if the car sat lower but does it clear the tie rod it's pretty darn close so let's measure this one okay so that's a five inch backspace wheel and you said it was eight and a half wide yep backspacing is a measurement from the inner lip to the wheel mounting surface the deeper the back spacing the more inboard the tire moves the shallower the back spacing the more outward it moves let me look up on his work order what the exact measurements on this are so that we're not guessing all right i've broken the seal digging into the wiring harness that was already in the car for the ecm and everything fortunately it's a aftermarket deal and most of the wires are labeled i think what we're going to do is just sort of hotwire the whole thing we're gonna put the ignition wire over there maybe we're gonna even run a wire to the fuel pump and see if we can make it just [Music] have some sense of if it runs or not before we go into the full on wiring [Music] this is gonna be trying to crank it for the very first time here we go whoa that's similar to life wow go again okay it's not seized up [Music] not bad let's put gas in it if you just want to hold the top bolt right now we're ready go for it i'm going to put my plate through it so right now we're installing the gas pedal and thanks to jeff because he just hurried up and whipped out two doubler plates and that's a plate that goes on each side of the firewall sandwiches it together so that when you install bolts through something like a gas pedal and you tighten them really tight the bolts don't try to pull through the firewall which is fiberglass the uh metal plates just distribute the force across a wider area i like that [Music] [Music] that was full i'd say that's over full so the corvette doesn't want to move we have tried putting more fluid in it we have tried moving the shifter to every gear all we have are four forward neutrals and so now cars up in the air we are now pulling the pan off to see is there something physically wrong with this thing because it's not pumping fluid it's a new day and therefore we have a new list and first thing on that list is trade david's that's right freiburg is gone he is actually on vacation which blows my mind because he never takes vacations and so newbern is here because he knows a lot about 4l60s allegedly and clearly we had big problems with ours yesterday because no matter what we did no matter how much fluid we put in it i still had four neutrals so uh today first thing we're gonna do lift the car back up pull the trans find out is the torque converter not actually all the way seated in there and um did that destroy all the clutch packs because we let it run for half an hour trying to make it move damn this thing's nice so right now what we're doing is we're gonna attempt to slide the transmission backwards just a little bit rather than remove it all the way this might give us just enough room so we can put our hands on the torque converter and see if we can spin it and shove it further in the transmission engaging the fluid pump if we can do that cool we can put it all back together and see if it works the danger here is that we we ran the car for like half an hour burping the cooling system and trying to find a gear that actually worked and when you run a trans for that long without the pump moving there's a good chance we've smoked the clutches and the transmission which means it needs to either be repaired or replaced yeah i think we're gonna have to pull the tram yeah okay man that's already out well that did not work we couldn't get a good enough grip on the converter to shove it in the trans so trans is now coming all the way out so that we can see if we can get it to shove all the way back in it does feel like there's a load on it i mean maybe that's all it really needed was just a little push and a wiggle so right now we've pulled the converter out to see if we can see how many times it actually you know clicks into position we think it's just not going far enough but um we're about to find out i guess and we can't get the transmission down any further because the driveshaft is stuck in the car we could probably undo this u-joint if we need to oh you might pull the enjoy loose yeah like just take these caps off and okay [Music] there you go now go up all right go go oh got it sweet how to take out a corvette transmission be really sketchy about it [Music] we know our transmission is completely smoked i called the folks at gearstar and said hey what happens when you run an engine for 20 30 minutes without the torque converter all the way installed and they said you you smoked the pump in the trans and i said okay and i looked at jeff and i said jeff we need a transmission like now jeff said you can have mine so we're taking his and if i'm going to borrow or steal someone's transmission it might as well be a gear star because that's what he's got sitting right over here we have a level 4 4l60 we're going to verify this because there's a couple of variants of that trans but i'm pretty sure it will fit in our car and when it does we will be doing burnouts this is the moment all the work all the thrashing all the unknown because it's a corvette and we don't know what we're doing comes down to this does our new transmission move let's find out let's try reverse all right neutral all right now drive we have drive dude let's just warm up the trans and shift it through a few gears so we can check the level okay reverse neutral drive i think it's working we're gonna go do burnouts [Music] oh that sounds good reverse neutral drive this is cool i love the dash in these cars oh dude the dash is incredible oh it's spunky it's very spunky [Music] yeah you got to warm it up i can't see it i can't see i can't see nothing oh i got to stop quick open the doors i can't see oh [Laughter] might as well go to a drag strip now hey we made it 200 miles from the coast all the way to formoso drag strip we're not actually in bakersfield we're in mcfarland but everybody calls this bakers close enough huh right next door dude then again that thing's a beauty man i brought the smoke for you oh nice does this kind of make us vet bros now oh dude we're just missing the new balances and the jorts oh yeah well i've got them at home oh sweet c5 like yeah this is i haven't seen this this is new right yeah i just got it a while ago six speed nice convertible classy yeah yeah this looks like a race car to me well it's not really a drag car you have a c5 i have a c2 they have virtually identical motors i see no reason why we shouldn't race them down the drag strip well i'm even hesitant to do a burnout in this thing because if i break it it's going to be a lot of dough i'll do enough burnouts for both of us don't worry okay well i'll give it a shot maybe maybe just a little one yeah it's just a little smoke a little bit like a peel out maybe one cloud peel out i like that so excited about this steve dosage is one of my favorite humans on the planet and the guy's a legend and if i lose here today well it'll be two of legends so i'm okay with that [Music] oh he's still going that's why he's a legend ladies and gentlemen he went 300 feet he went to the first timing block that is why he is steve dolcich well dulces just did a dang john force burnout and he said he wasn't going to do any kind of burnout so he lied right off the bat i told my man i said look don't let him show you up we got to burn out to at least the 3 30 mark so [Music] [Music] i can't see i have to stop because i can't see the only reason he stopped right there is because he can't see that entire car right now is full of smoke there's a design flow with the c2 13-5 for the c2 14-2 for the vet there's more to come out of that c5 so man not bad play time's over they're taking it more serious this time around so it's gonna be a much tighter race i'm predicting 13 four out of both of these cars this is round two dulce versus finnegan [Music] they both had really good lights that's good oh the c2 is on the rev limiter yeah i think dulce has left on me a little bit but i got him man i definitely beat him to the finish line 13-1 to a 13-7 105 to 105. so they're close oh man beautiful sunset drag racing classic corvettes in southern california doesn't get any better than this it's been an epic road trip sweet this is the place you know what we need everything gas masks killing suit like legit gas masks grenades we don't need grenades yes we do we're just going to vegas dude we're not going to war i want you to walk out of here in this and i want you to wear it until we're in vegas no but it would be so much fun for me gas masks found them gas masks yeah oh so we can breathe while doing a burnout that's right oh genius smells like freedom let's go [Music] [Music] i can breathe yeah i can breathe i just can't see this smells great [Laughter] okay okay ready it's a beautiful day for a burnout vegas baby vegas [Music] all right las vegas we are here man this car did great oh dude we just drove from oakland down the coast all the way to vegas i think we did about 800 miles epic trip and now it is time for phase two of our plan all right never numb why don't you show the folks at home what phase two of the plan is here we go our gas mask are in position let's do this dude all right last burnout of our vacation so [Music] stop [Music] oh my god it totally worked there's smoke pouring out of the car turn on the fan dude [Music] [Music] okay you're good nothing to see here oh my god face two rules oh my god dude you

Channel: MotorTrend Channel

Views: 241,190

Keywords: motortrend, motor trend, motor trend channel, automotive, auto, motortrend on demand, motortrend full episodes, roadkill, roadkill garage, c2, corvette, c2 corvette, crusher impala, roadkill full episode, david freiburger, muscle car, classic car, roadkill garage new episode, roadkill garage full episodes, car rebuild, car restoration, corvette restoration

Id: iz5Uh3QWNY4

Length: 18min 6sec (1086 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 30 2022