Digging deeper

With the gas tank out, the damage in the tail and deck panels is a lot clearer.

The collision repair of these two panels following a rear-end accident is really awful. Clearly, the tail panel will have to be replaced and work will have to be done to get the duck tail right again. This is exhausting to look at, but it's just fiberglass and can be fixed.

And yes, that's a paint stir stick that was thrown in to build the fiberglass up when they were patching up the tail panel. A paint stick. Wow.

There was a chance that the tank sticker, which bears the list of options and spells out how the car was assembled down to what sort of tires it came with, was still attached but it was not. Clearly the tank was out at some point given the use of pieces of inner tubes between the tank and the tank straps. The tank sticker was probably lost then, but who really knows? It's too bad that was lost.

General Motors has no record of the options list for any Corvette younger than 1976. A tank sticker was the only piece of documentation to say what "original" means when it comes to this car. The VIN only reveals that it's a convertible with a base-model engine. All other options are unrecorded anywhere else other than the tank or window sales sticker.

The good news is how little rust I found. There is nothing but surface rust beneath the car. This will clean up nicely with no rust repair on the frame.

Great so see this tag. It marks the rear differential as having a limited-slip unit installed. It's a really nice option that makes my car worth a little more. Spinning the rear wheels with the car on a jack hinted at this, but seeing this tag makes it certain. Great news.

A lot of progress was made in getting the pedal boxes, gauges and wiring out of the interior. The harness shows a lot of damage from mice and will have to be replaced. There are several companies which manufacture exact copies of the harnesses in Corvettes so unlike my Land Cruiser, I can just buy a new one and install it.

While the wiring isn't very confusing and shouldn't be too difficult to reinstall, the vacuum systems for the air handling, headlights and windshield wiper door are quite another story. What a complicated mess of hoses that travel throughout the car. So many have been cut leaving with no clues how to put it all back together. Luckily, an assembly manual came with the car which should make it a snap.

At some point, someone used contact cement to secure the carpeting to the car, making it very difficult to remove and leaving quite a mess. A bottle of spray foam remover that has been in the shop for a long time proved the most useful in removing all of this adhesive.

A favorite part on the car so far has to be the little interior light that goes into that square bracket on the back wall of the cabin and lights up the space where the convertible top is stored. It's really charming.

It's becoming a shell of a car and its flaws are starting to show themselves. Previous owners spent a lot of time in this car with very little working and a few things really unsafe. From looking at the wiring, it's been decades since the wipers, hide-away headlights or the air-handling systems have worked at all.

At the same time, I'm also starting to see the real potential of the car as more and more signs of how sound it is are revealed.

So far, only one fastener is proving difficult to remove, which is really a pleasant surprise. It's far more normal to have to struggle with a hundred or more on a project like this.