What good are matching numbers with a block that has a hole rusted in a cylinder? It's been sitting with no hood since 1975, or 33 years.
What a Waste of a SS396 Chevelle!
- Thread starter 85 Cutlass Brougham
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Plus, an S396 Chevelle with an automatic and a run of the mill 396 ( no L78) is really only worth $40,000 on a good day as a perfect, concourse restoration with all the chalk marks, etc. Restoring this one like that could easily exceed the value of the finished car. If it was a well documented LS-6 it would be a different matter. This car though, has a title and the right tags, but little else to document it ( Protect-o-plate, window sticker, build sheet, etc.) and is fairly incomplete ( no seats, windshield, lots of roof rot by the back window, who knows how rusty the trunk is?, no front clip, bent frame, etc.). You also have to remember that a big block Chevelle had a convertible frame, so a standard Chevelle frame would be an instant tip off to a knowledgeable buyer.
the blocks salvageable only because its in florida.
In ny it takes one winter with water in the block for it to freeze and crack.
Ask my brothers pro stock engine how I know.(his fault not mine)
In ny it takes one winter with water in the block for it to freeze and crack.
Ask my brothers pro stock engine how I know.(his fault not mine)
There is nowhere near $4000 worth of useable parts on that car, and it would cost much more to restore it (if it could even be done) than what it would cost to buy one in excellent shape now. Someone's letting his heap go to his head because it WOULD be a valuable car if it were actually still a car and not a heap of junk.
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Tony_SS said:
Nothing illegal about it if you own both cars.
Many people have went to restore an old car only to find out its easier to buy a whole shell and scrap the other.
Swapping vin numbers happens more often than you think by reputable restoration shops.
Think about haw many parts cars end up in some restorations.
85 Cutlass Brougham said:
That was just a boxed frame. Not hard to modify a normal coupe frame.
$40,000 seems to be the average price for a 396 car from what I have seen. Not much documentation needed other than the vin and cowl tag.
Pick up a fairly clean 70 malibu for around 10k, that wreck for 4k spend another 10k on parts and labour.
24k and you have a 40k car.
Lots of well done clone cars that have already been done to almost perfection could easily have the cowl tag and vin replaced.
Some one will buy it
If you look at the other pics, you will see that one quarter is gone, the roof is toast, and the floors are there, but rusted so thin that it is likely they need replacement too. The floors in my Cutlass looked better than these, but were very thin in spots and really should have been replaced rather than patched. I had abandoned it in my driveway without windows for a few years, but had drilled drain holes in the floors and dried them out with a shop vac occasionally. Unlike my car, this thing was just left to rot. If you ever do a Florida junkyard crawl, you will see cars like that which are pulled from people's yards after decades of neglect with nothing left on them. The humidity does a number on cars that get abandoned here. This year, I have seen a collection of Datsun 510's, a 1958 Mercury that the quarters were peeling off of like paper, and a pair of Honda Z600's that were just crumbling ( among others, as the list is too bog to recall). Outside storage under trees is the death of many an old car down here, sometimes in as little as 5-10 years. Up north cars rust from the bottom up, but down here, they rot from the inside out as soon as the seals and seam sealer rot away.
a couple of years ago it MIGHT have been worth it.. now? the car values have crashed along with the real estate values. too many people took loans on their houses to buy and restore old cars. now they need to off load the car to pay the mortgage and no one can afford 'em.
What parts on that heap would be useable to create a clone- meaning what on it is worth $4k? I personally would not bother with a bent frame, there isn't much sheet metal there, (its either missing or rusted) the interior is shot, glass missing, matching numbers would be a moot point if the block is bad, etc-etc. I would not pay $40k for a clone, or anywhere near that for a heavily restored car regardless of how good the restorer is. There are still plenty of excellent original old cars out there for $10k and under. They might not have "SS" emblems, but they can be just as much fun.
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With that car, you would end up with a clone that had the proper numbers to be a restored original.Uncletruck said:
There are people that just want to drive them and have fun with them and then there are people that want the SS or Hemi etc. Even if they are not real.
Fact is, even if the market on the muscle car is crashing, a lot of these original cars are far out of reach in price to the people that want them.
I have a friend with a clone 71 hemi cuda. Everything but the vin is corect
Its an original 318 car and he has turned down 100k for it.
The market for clones has gone up since the originals are too far out of reach.
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