Big Red and Frankenvette

Early in my blogging life, I made a solid go at an automotive blog called Cowl Shake. I still like most of what I wrote over there—it is still out there, though I think the title image must have perished when I closed my HiWAAY account—and I still think “NVH from an SOB” is a clever tagline.

I’ve told the kids an occasional story of Frankenvette over the years. This was a distressed 1971 Corvette convertible that Dad and his buddy acquired and then decided was going to be too expensive to restore as a ’71, so they started using whatever C3 parts fit. (That’s nearly all of them from 1968 to 1982.) Mia asked me about it this morning, and it reminded me of this Cowl Shake post. (It would be much better with photos; alas, I don’t have any. Hopefully you will nonetheless find the narrative compelling.)

Back before we moved to the Huntsville area in 1986, Dad spent most all of his spare time restoring cars. He and his partner in most of these ventures, Jay, owned a single-car hauler named Big Red.

Big Red was a beast. It was a ’66ish heavy-duty Ford, something like an F700, maybe. It was hard and tedious to drive. It rode like the cabin was bolted directly to the frame, particularly when not carrying a car. If you could coax 6 mpg from it, you were doing very well. It wasn’t particularly pleasant to use, but it got the job done. Jay and Dad had built a lot of the truck themselves, so there was a certain parental pride too.

On the plus side, the Mustang under-dash air conditioner Dad had installed would run you out of the truck, even in the middle of July.

To load or unload Big Red, you unbolted huge steel ramps from each side, and set the ends of them in grooves at the rear of the bed. I don’t remember a loading or unloading ever taking any less than 20 minutes, and 30 was typical. The ramps were grooved, but they were narrow, so there wasn’t much margin for error. Alignment was critical.

For most of the time we had Big Red, I was too little to do much but be underfoot during a load or unload. But I was pressed into service one Saturday morning at about age 8. The mission: direct Dad, in a recently-acquired ’71 Corvette convertible, up Big Red’s ramps.

“Ratty” didn’t begin to cover this particular ‘Vette. The nicest thing I could say about it was that it had a decent set of white-letter Dunlop GT/Qualifiers on it. There was a little silver paint here and there, but most of it was gone. The interior looked to have been set upon by rabid beavers. A Caprice radiator had been installed with a sledgehammer. (Really.)

Particularly complicating our specific endeavor for the day: there was almost no oil pressure, and there was no exhaust system. Also, it needed to be pushed off. This was a hideous, snarling, stinking, demon of a car that was drivable only in the most liberal sense of the word.

So, let’s review. Minimal oil pressure means we have to do this quickly. No exhaust system means we won’t be able to talk. Needing a push-off means Dad has to pop the clutch halfway down the street, circle the block, and return.

Establishing some hand signals before the car was running would have been a great idea, don’t you think? Didn’t occur to either of us.

He coasted out silently. I watched him go. I waited. The engine fired about 30 seconds later, sounding like the beginning of the end of the world, and I knew he’d be back in about that much time again.

Here it came. It was so damned loud my sternum was resonating. He rolled up to the ramps, and I started trying to direct him up. It already smelled hot. Fruitlessly, I yelled. Fruitlessly, he yelled back. He started up. I pointed him back down. He turned to the left and started back up–oops, too much. He coasted back down. And so it went. After a couple of minutes, he waved me off violently and gunned it. The dilapidated piece of Corvette squirted up the ramps and, miracle of miracles, landed on the bed pretty straight. He killed the engine and got out.

“I had to stop. See?” Dad pointed at the wisps of smoke coming from the engine compartment. I smelled what I would later learn was metal on metal, starving for lubrication. No long-term harm done, though. Albeit sloppily, we’d accomplished the mission. Dad had left part of the sole of his cheap sneaker on the padless clutch pedal; that was how hot the car got.

That was the last time I saw that car in that shape. Dad and Jay had begun restoring it as a ’71, but when they figured out what that was going to cost, they took a different tack. They began using whatever C3 parts they could find, and ultimately built Frankenvette. When finished, it was a ’71 Corvette with ’79 front and rear clips; ’76 instruments; ’80 seats; and an ’81 steering wheel. There were other contributing years, but those are what I remember. It was charcoal gray with a red interior and white convertible top, and quite sharp. It was great fun watching someone walk around it at a show or sale, finally giving up and asking “What year is this car?”

Alas, that one-of-a-kind Corvette was sold at an auction several years ago. Big Red’s gone, too; it was headed for a fourth or fifth life as a logging truck. Oh, well. Can’t keep ’em all.

Big Red and Frankenvette

Big Red and Frankenvette

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