The following is a true story...... I used to work in southern NH with a kindly old gentleman named Lee, who despite silver hair, was our leading hi-tech serviceman in the plant. That guy was up on his electronics. Anyway, lunch generated the following story after we drove in my OT modified car and he realized our gearhead connection.... Around the 60s, Lee was the "leading mercedes fuel injection specialist in New England". His words, and Lee was a soft spoken type. People would ship cars from all over the US and he had stories of midnight runs in supercharged gullwings, but I digress. Before an uninusured heart attack took the business in the 80s, he had been sought out by a professor from chicago to build the professor's experiment, a steam powered corvair. It's around 65, and the corvair is an early style 4 door with whitewalls and hubcaps. The "steam" system is somewhat misleading. The car's fuel source was propane, and the backseat was occupied by a large heat exchanger. The car basically operated like a giant air conditioner, it used freon as the heat exchange medium, and the car's original engine was a slave expansion chamber for the freon, with the exhaust captured to close the loop. You can imagine the plumbing and sealing nightmares. Lee always joked about being the cause of global warming due to this car's leaks. Up to now, an interesting story, but nothing too memorable. You're probably thinking they got it to run and putter around a parking lot. You'd be wrong. In addition to being nearly silent, the car was an absolute terror. Another Lee quote "It put 560hp to the chassis dyno before the axle shafts came out, the burners were not wide open". The car was returned to chicago after a year of development, deemed not-very-successful, and faded back to obscurity. However, the car did function well enough for several thousand "test" miles on the roads around Lee's shop during that year. So if you were running something pretty mean on the streets of southern NH in 1965, and got smoked by a stock, silent, grandma white 4 door corvair....now you know why.
Great post: Ive always loved these little cars. I owned a 68 convertible, black and white ...owned it for less than a week, but still had the paper for it..... Reading this thread, I seem to remember guys buying a v8 kit from Clarks corvair (out of the berkshires in MA). I want to say it was called a lakewood kit...or a franklin kit???
From the old days: Dick Dean's personal car and Starbird's Forcasta. I think one of the Roth-mobiles was Corvair powered, too.
My '66 Coupe has a reversed 4.3 in the stock location. I had a rear engined '65 with a reversed 350 in 1971-74.
DAMD HAMB... NO MORE OFF TOPIC POSTS... I found myself with a few minutes to kill Sunday, and the only think I could think of typing into craigslist was "corvair". Well the daughter is 12 and doesn't have a car yet so it will make a great father/daughter project, right??? All of the parts are there, even the 4 carb 140hp motor looks complete.
This thread makes me want to dust the cobwebs off of this project I started about 15 years ago and havent finished yet
You have seen the after, now for the before. I snapped these pictures last week near Cullman, AL. The guy has about a dozen Corvairs of both early and late body styles and a Greenbriar or 2. If interested, PM me and I will send you the owners phone number. N B R P.S. There are also few 46 to 48 Fords not shown.
That was yet another ill-fated Scoobmobile. It had a 426 HEMI though. That's sports car enough for me. It wasn't nearly as bad as it looked condition wise either. I thought it was cool.
My buggy uses a '61 VW pan, '65 Corvair 140 hp engine, and a '63 4-spd 'vair transaxle. It all comes together using a '70's vintage Hadley Transvair kit.
In '68 I built a Manx style buggy with a stock 110 horse engine. The adaptor, clutch, and flywheel came from Crown Engineering that was someplace out in the south west. Green flake and Indy wheels and some cool headers. It had a real light flywheel and it rumped like a big cam. Lost my storage in about 72 and sold it for $500. What an idiot!
Where can a person get corvair engine parts for a rebuild? Gaskets ect.. Hop up parts still around? intakes ect... Thanks, Lippy
About the only place left for corvair parts is http://www.corvair.com/user-cgi/main As far as hot rod parts go you might search on e-bay.
The site above (www.corvair.com) is Clark's Corvair in Mass. There are a couple of other places on the west coast and one in the southwest for less rusty sheetmetal. Clark's is the largest with the most investment in the business.
The Jalopy Journal
