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Classic Cars I spotted an (insert obscure car name here) classic car today!
17960 messages, Last post on Nov 27, 2009 at 6:08 PM
You are in the Classic Cars Forum. Your Host is mr_shiftright
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Replying to: explorerx4 (Jan 03, 2009 6:30 am)
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Replying to: lokki (Jan 03, 2009 7:25 am) |
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Replying to: texases (Jan 03, 2009 10:27 am) finding a picture of the chassis was the only thing i was looking for. 
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Replying to: andre1969 (Jan 03, 2009 4:30 am) Chevy priced the '82-model Cavalier and Celebrity, for what they were, way too high. In '83 both were reduced in MSRP and content added (and in the case of the Cavalier, the engine bumped from 1.8L to 2.0L). Later on, say '84 and later, both lines were strong sellers. Bill |
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Replying to: Mr_Shiftright (Jan 02, 2009 6:49 pm) Heck, if I could get that thing for $100, I'd snatch it up in a heartbeat! FWIW it's up to $2700 now. It's actually been on eBay for what seems like forever now. It'll usually bid up to $6-7K or more, but never hit the reserve, so then just gets re-listed. You'd think that the seller would figure out that it ain't going any higher...he might as well just bite the bullet and sell it while he can, rather than being doomed to repeating history.
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Replying to: andre1969 (Jan 03, 2009 4:30 am) The car was a tinny mess with wafer-thin doors and seats and a finish with such bad orange peel, the car should've been stamped "Sunkist!" It had a gutless 4-cylinder engine and a weird dashboard where ll the instruments were crammed into this skinny deep-recessed slot. Ads proclaiming the Celebrity as Chevrolet's new direction frightened me more than anything Stephen King could pen! |
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Replying to: andre1969 (Jan 04, 2009 6:44 am) |
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"Actually, the Camaro Z28 was Car of the Year in 1982." Thanks for correcting me on this. I think I was misled by the fact that Motor Trend featured a Celebrity on the cover of one of its issues at around the time that model was introduced, so I'm guessing it may have been the September, October, November or December '81 issue. Anyway, in that issue MT praised the Celebrity and described it as the right family car for the time, since it was space and fuel efficient, and featured front wheel drive. We can criticize Motor Trend in hindsight, but if GM, and Ford and Chrysler too, for that matter, had delivered good quality, Motor Trend's evaluation of the GM A-bodies would have been reasonable. Let's remember that the superior reliability of the Japanese cars was not nearly as obvious in late '81 as it became later. Also, GM was recognized as a trail blazer in down sizing, while retaining interior space, as evidenced by the downsized '77 large bodies and the '78 intermediates. Converting the intermediates to FWD seemed a logical next step for achieving further gains in space and fuel efficiency. |
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Replying to: Mr_Shiftright (Jan 02, 2009 12:35 pm)
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Replying to: explorerx4 (Jan 04, 2009 12:06 pm) On the plus side: One time I got a call from a woman who said she was moving to a retirement home and needed to know the value of her old Mercedes, which "hadn't been driven in many years". Well I was thinking..."yet another 1980s 4-door sedan with a frozen motor and chickens in the back seat".... but lo and behold, what I saw when we opened her garage was a baby blue 190SL convertible, with 1971 license plates tags on it, the key still in the ignition, original untouched with about 80,000 miles on it, plus a factory hardtop. The car needed restoration but was undamaged, unrusted and it looked like not one factory part had ever been changed. She had all the books, original bill of sale, all of it. Anyway, I called a dealer friend--he came up, wrote her a check (quite generous I thought), picked the car up and it was sold back to Germany within a week. And I made a tidy commission. Lady happy, dealer happy, Shifty happy, car happy. Another time I was called to appraise a collection of cars in a warehouse in Reno Nevada. While some of the cars were interesting, mostly they were old 20s and 30s American iron, and while a few were open cars, none were specialty coachwork or large-bore engines. However, way in the back I spotted pieces of an unusual car....one fender, a grille, a trunk lid. "What is that"? I asked. "Oh, one of Dad's weird French cars I think. Do you think it has any value in that condition"? "Is that all of it?" "No, the rest is in another building, in boxes". After examining the other parts, I suggested we try to bring it all together and kind of piece it up, to see what we have. Well, turns out what we had was a 95% complete and correct Darl Mat Coupe, 1938... a custom built Peugeot 402 spports coupe by coachbuilder Pourtout.  My other fondest memory is a similar story, but from an attorney handling the estate of what was apparently a very eccentric (okay, CRAZY) car collector who had apparently run up $63,000 in storage fees on an MGTC! So I found the car in a storage locker, and here again, it was unusual in that it was in bad shape, but all there, solid, and totally unmolested from factory new. And this one had racing badges from Pebble Beach way back when they raced there in the 1950s---so this car was one of the veterans of those days. That one went back to the UK. It needed a complete restoration, and being a TC and not a Mercedes 190SL, I don't think one could have restored it in the USA and come out ahead---but in the UK, they are worth more and parts are more readily at hand---those rare bits that are so hard to find in America.
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