First Car Stories!

[camarojoe]

OK, Here's my "first car" story... bought this car for 400.00 when I was 15 years old, and spent the better portion of a year making it look good, along with the help of my buddies and my dad, and my little brother (who was 10 years old at the time!) Car was a 307 powerglide 72 Nova with a really bad 5 year old Earl Shieb paintjob. You "Day 2'ers" should dig the nosebleed/airshock rear stance, and Cragar/slot wheel combo!

[camarojoe]

We painted it a medium blue metallic, consisting of the remants of about 6 different colors of blue lacquer all mixed together. Painted 70 Chevelle SS style stripes on the hood and deck, and "blacked out" the side window frames for a racy look. Also changed the complete interior from tan to black. Saved up my money from a part time after-school dishwashing job to buy a used set of tires and 15x7 rally wheels, and located some other odds and ends at various swap meets, including better used bumpers, door handles, grille, valve covers, air cleaner, etc. Also bought some new stuff for it, such as weatherstrip, front end trim, bumper filler, etc... and cleaned up/reused as much as I could on my shoestring budget. In all, i had less than 1500.00 in the entire project, and did 95% of it myself.

[camarojoe]

Drove it from the time i turned 16 in May, until storing it behind my dad's house for the winter in November. During my Christmas break, My buddy and I decided it would be "cool" to swap in a Borg Warner T50 5-speed tranny from a mid 70s Chevy Monza. We had gathered all the needed stuff earlier in the summer, and decided to install it all over the holidays. After 3 solid days of work in an essentially unheated, 1 car, dirt floor garage, we had the trans in it...on Christmas eve... Well, i test drove it around the block, everything seemed to work, and I had my buddy follow me from his house back to my dad's house. On the way, i decided to "run her through the gears" and hit a small icy patch going into 4th gear. The car spun around and slid down the road backwards for about 100 yards until colliding into a utility pole. I sheared the pole off about 3 feet from the ground, and totaled the car. Luckily my own injuries were minor, but it was a pretty sad holiday.

[camarojoe]

A week later i bought another Nova for 150.00 that I had looked at earlier for a possible parts car when building the first one, and within a year I had built this "twin" to the car I totalled, using many of the salvagable parts from the wreck. I had alot of fun with that car too, but you only get one "first car".

[Belair62]

[ QUOTE ]
While all my friends blew their cash on minibikes, motorcycles, drugs, beer, women (not necessarily in that order) I ended up saving $2700 by my 14th birthday.

[/ QUOTE ]Well...after I pissed away all my money on a JC Penney Golden Pinto mini-bike,some pot and Ripple wine with my very first girl friend (priorities)I bought a 1965 Impala SS...327/300 powerglide for 325 bucks...drove it until my lady friend distracted me and I drove over a parking block in the local forest preserve completely tearing out the lower right control arm of the car. I went to a boneyard and got a used A arm and installed it...did some "bodywork" on the car and had it painted at APCOA...I sold it a month later after going thru at least a tire a week....guess I didn't fix it too well...it sounded like it had the brakes locked while driving down the road...the alignment and the frame were just a BIT tweaked !!...........Hey Ed....glad to see you made it out of that one....usually a tarp over the car means there was a fatality !

[Supercar_Kid]

Well here's mine...when I turned 14 my Dad handed me an envelope with a distinct lump in it. Inside the usual birthday card was a pair of very worn GM keys. He led me outside where I found the car you'll see in the attached pics. It was actually one of the rarest Chevelles made in 1970, no not an L-78 or LS-6 convertible, or anything of such high performance pedigree, but rather a lowly Canadian built 1970 Chevelle 300 sport coupe. A thrice repainted, severely neglected, 307 two barrel 3 speed auto on the column. Black bench interior and an option list you could tally on one hand. Didn't bother me a bit though, as I'd always took a liking to the '70 bodystyle and I could see a diamond in the rough. During the next year and a half I spent every weekend and free moment I could spare working on the car with the help of my Dad, older brother and a few friends of the family. The car needed extensive rust repair including quarters, doors, fenders, decklid, hood, floorpan, and even a roof skin from a '72 Malibu parts car I bought for $150 and robbed of all it's valuable parts. I used the bucket seat cores, console, power brake setup, floorpan, doors, roof skin, and numerous other parts from the '72 to bring my '70 back to life. Looking back on it I probably should have saved the '72 and scrapped the '70, but I had my heart set on bringing this first car of mine back to life. It was lots of work and lots of scavenging swap meets and bone yards, but by the time I turned 16 and got my driver's permit the car was complete, at least for the time being. Needless to say as a 14 year old gearhead the original Champagne on black bench seat 300 trim didn't really do it for me, so I took the artistic license to create the SS454 clone you see in the next attachment.

[Supercar_Kid]

I trimmed the car out in full SS454 garb and continued driving it around with the 307 and a rebuilt quadrajet on a freebie iron intake. The cowl induction air cleaner was cool enough to make most people at my high school drop their jaws in awe, and it ran well enough to be fun yet keep me out of trouble, so at 16 I was happy.