Where I live in the boondocks of Northern Arizona, the dirt roads have no curbs, so we have what you might call Dirtside Classics. My friend Terry found one just a couple of weeks ago–this cute little Corvair pickup, which he towed out of someone’s back yard. “I felt like it was something I needed,” he says. He got it for $300, with a lawn mower thrown in. The mower is fully functional. The Corvair, not yet.
The wonderfully idiosyncratic load bed, accessible from either a side gate or rear gate, cannot have been cheap for GM to fabricate.
Terry plans to dump the air-cooled flat-six. (Note the four carbs; it’s a 140hp engine from a 1965-up Corsa/Monza.) He wants to install a Chevy V8, currently in a dirt-racer that he used to drive in Baja.
Here’s the dirt racer, with a tubular frame that Terry welded himself, and Pontiac body panels. He’ll transplant the engine and transmission straight into the center of the Corvair’s load bed. “I’ll make a wheel-stander out of it,” he predicts. “Like I did with my 1932 Model A, back in the 1960s.”
The Corvair’s interior is not so bad, although kids threw rocks at the windshield.
The gas tank is under the seat. If there was a spare wheel, it would nestle conveniently behind the seat.
Why is this man smiling? Maybe because his Corvair cost him almost nothing (so far). The tail-gate is missing, but that may be the least of his problems.
Oh, Terry, please, NOOOOOOO!
That ‘Vair is way cool as is. They ain’t makin’ any new ones!
Funny for me to say this, but it’s even cooler because it isn’t a PRNDL. 🙂
To be fair, though, even the most basic resto on this beastie would require serious cubic dollars. Maybe go more of a sleeper route. Looks like you could hide a V8 pretty easily if you made the bed flat.
Its not in bad condition really considering its age and outdoor storage. I’d do enough to make it roadworthy and leave the flat 6 in there mainly because I’d still want the ute part to work.
No! Not another damned hot rod!
I’ve come to the conclusion that the current hot rodding/resto-rod madness is due at least partially because old car owners are lazy. It’s obviously too much work, time and money to put a vintage vehicle back to stock, original condition.
Better to just do whatever you want, in any way you want, and to hell with going to the effort to “get it correct”.
I miss the days when hot rods weren’t welcome at vintage car shows. We need to go back to that standard.
Guilty as charged I’m doing that to my Hillman altering it to suit modern driving conditions but from the outside only the Peugeot wheels are a giveaway but its being modernised mechanically for better cruising ability and stopping ability
I, like many here, hate to see an otherwise decent car destroyed by ill-advised customizations. But if the vehicle’s condition is such that it’s not really feasible to restore, I say rod it rather than crush it. I’d rather see a few more Frankensteins on the road than have certain models go extinct.
If you’re doing quality work, and especially if you’re saving a car from destruction, then I say there’s no shame in using what’s available. Putting an SBC into that Rampside might be sacrilege to the Corvair purist, but would anyone have been happier to see it continue rotting away in its former resting place?
OTOH – people that take rustbuckets, get them (barely) running/driving, and say they built a rat rod? Now *that’s* lazy.
Add me to the list of people who appreciate factory cars to rods. Last night I chatted with the owner of a 1937 non-rodded Terraplane. He also owns a genuine Auburn Speedster, and has been entertaining selling it. Some young guy wanted to buy it and drop in a big block V8. When the current owner heard this, he told him “you can’t buy this car.” He wasn’t about to sell it to someone who was going to destroy it. What is wrong with people?!
Obviously this guy knows what he’s about and it’s his truck. Personally would love to see him explore bracket racing with the corvair powerplant. Might take a long time to kill it, who knows? Seems like if he is going to use the power unit that he had in his dirt racer you could have a lot more versatile vehicle taking it off road too. Drags are a lot of fun though. With the corvair or with the V8 if you go bracket racing you are the determining factor once dialed in.
I wish him luck.
Just gonna throw this out there… Toyota Previa drivetrain conversion, maybe?
Anything to get this old girl out on the street, instead of just the track.
A nice Subaru Boxer 6 would fit in there as well, its already a proven path with the swap having been done in VW Vans.
If he’s gonna go to all that trouble to hammer in a small block, why not (thinking way out of the box here) a Subaru turbo four conversion or the flat six from an XT-6? They’re both a flat boxer design and I’d think it would fit without altering that rare and decent condition bed.
As an old hot rodder, I understand where he’s coming from but even I’d hate to see this cut up. That shot of the 4 carb engine brings back some memories. An old girlfriend had a ’66 Corsa with a 4 carb. I think half the reason she went out with me was because I could get it to run properly!
Good score for 300 bucks.
I’ll take that 140 off his hands, though I would rather have the whole rig, its not that clean, but a Rampside that someone has already gone through the trouble of converting to 4 carbs with a stick, that’s something I would keep original. Restore it with a slight rake and some Chevy rally’s with police caps, install a Spyder custer with a tach, that would look good, sort of like a So Cal style VW, but out of a Corvair.
Something like this…..
+1
Yes! A Rampside Corsa would be excellent. “What GM could have built.”
He’ll transplant the engine and transmission straight into the center of the Corvair’s load bed. “I’ll make a wheel-stander out of it,” he predicts.
Do it! I eagerly await your grudge-match with the Little Red Wagon.
Believe it or not, my boss owns one of the original LRWs. He bought it at an auction and it used to belong to the Petersen.
The Rampside always seemed like a rather useless and complicated design to me. If you were carrying a load in the bed and there was an engine problem, you would have to remove the cargo before you could check the engine. And a gas tank under a seat does not sound safe either. But then I prefer the 2nd gen models over the first anyway.
There is a small inspection panel that allows you to check small things without having to open the engine compartment, as for the gas tank, its behind the front axle so its still aways away from any crush zone.
I too have mixed feelings about Terry’s plan to hot-rodize the Corvair. On the other hand, I am not totally convinced that this is going to happen. I suspect many other plans may percolate as time passes.
Meanwhile I’ll let him know that the 4-carb motor is relatively unusual, preferably not to be disposed of unless it is truly irredeemable.
Thanks for all the comments here.
As soon as I caught a glimpse of the red thing in the shed in the corner of the lead photo, i knew I’d have to ask about it! But you ended up preempting me nicely 🙂
Corvair is a bit of an odd duck, but I wouldn’t say no.
Don’t do it Denim Dan! Stick your Indian Blanket jean shirts and semi Jay Leno motif, and ruin another more common car, please leave the Rampside alone!
The world has enough factory-correct restorations to permit this owner to do whatever he wants with this thing. Do a wheel-stander. I’ve got shots of the Back-Up Pickup from 1970 for future release.
I agree. Which is better that it rots away, or someone puts it back on the road and has some fun with them. To properly restore it could quickly eat up $40-$50K and when done you’d have a truck worth no more than half that and really can’t be enjoyed because too much was spent on it to actually drive it.
Fifty thousand what? Lira? Drachma? No way restoring a Corvair Rampside is going to cost $50K, unless you farm it out to one of those Concourse d Elegance Pebble Beach shops that restore one off racing Delahayes made out of wooly mammoth bones.
I’ll buy it for double what he paid, and slowly restore it myself. $40-$50K? Never, you would probably spend $5-$6K making this nice, the body looks pretty solid, its in Arizona, not Wisconsin, so the rust is surface only mostly.
If you want to do it right and you pay someone then yeah it will cost $40-$50K real easy and even if you aren’t paying someone you’ll have way to many hours into doing it right. Here is a Scout II who’s restoration ran $45K http://www.binderplanet.com/forums/showthread.php?t=87621 note how nice the truck they started with was. For that money they didn’t rebuild the running gear. That was not done at some fancy high dollar shop either and there are actually replacement parts for a Scout II.
They could have just thrown $45K in a bonfire and driven the truck as is, that was a tremendous waste, but hey, its their money not mine.
It came out nice, but you could have bought the 5 nicest Scouts in the world for that much. You don’t spend $45K on a Rampside or a Scout, in my opinion at least. I could spends $40K making the most pristine Gremlin on earth too, if I tried, but I wont.