Customs Vinyl top on a tri five chevy?

I just can't put a face (or vehicle) with the name.

Oh the funny car guy? Duh Oh

I would say brain fart but this would actually constitute more of a melt down.

 

Maybe if you note that his nickname was the 'The Ace' and he had some success racing would ring a bell... LOL

 

Steve
That has got to be the understatement of the century.

 

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Penske did vinyl on some of the TransAm Camaros
The story and an "explanation" appears about 1/3 of the way down the page here, beside the bulging fender picture -
http://www.pozziracing.com/car_life_article_penske_69.htm

 

Back to vinyl tops.... Yeah, those things were popular on anything for a while. With Detroit installing them on almost anything with wheels (you could get a Pinto with a vinyl top!), somebody got the bright idea that they would look good on older cars (not...). There was a local guy (can't remember his name) in Tacoma who was a real artist of these things; he could vary the texture of the spray (for different types of 'vinyl') and did 'seam' detail that was hard to tell from real unless you got right up to the car. The Tri-Five Chevy guys were the big adopters for some reason, but those guys were like lemmings on this sort of stuff; if one did something, they all did it.

Smokey Yunick was the first to try one racing (on his '7/8 scale' Chevelle), but they didn't have a good enough glue to keep it on the car at speed IIRC.

 

You guys just got to remember that some days I am just dumb as wood. When Denny said McColloch all I could conjure up was a McColloch Supercharger, and my brain kept saying OK now you have seen those but they were before your time. Couldn't possibly be what he is talking about.

 

Oh, Beaner you make me smile.

 

Not to derail the thread, but there was a well known pinstriper (possibly other talents) in
Tacoma named Jr. Nelson.

 

My brother sprayed the top of his 56 Corvette with fake vinyl back in '69 and it's still on there. It was the style of the times. My aunt had a 51 Mercury with a factory vinyl top but car manufactures didn't really get heavily into vinyl tops until the mid 60s and it continued into the 70s.

 

Vinyl tops have been around forever but they were offered by Detroit as something new in the early sixties. This was about the time the squared off Tbird style roof became popular on new hardtops, the vinyl made them look like a convertible and added a luxury look.

Soon auto glass shops were doing replacement tops and also putting them on older cars.

Next came the cheap spray on jobs. I remember seeing them, they came with 2 stripes of thick tape to duplicate the seams. They were kind of like the spray on bed liner material you see today.

Last one I did was on a 68 Camaro in about 1986. The owner had mounted the body on a 4WD chassis and I had the challenge of doing the paint job. The roof was rusted and covered with old glue that resembled hardened contact cement because of the genuine vinyl top it had before.

It was a cheap job and I knew the owner was going to be bashing through the woods with it. So I gave the top a quick sanding with a fine grit disc grinder and created a fake vinyl top.

By this time the fake vinyl spray was long out of stock so I used stone guard spray which was a thing then. I stood well back to make the spray as coarse as possible and gave it 3 coats, then painted it with black primer. The car still had the chrome strip around the back of the roof to finish it off.

When it was all done it looked pretty good. But, in about 2 weeks the car was back for another body job after being bashed into trees in the refor. So, I didn't feel bad about doing a Mickey Mouse job.

 

Ford Crestliners came with factory vinyl tops in 1950.

 

Strangely there are a number of new cars available in the UK with vinyl roof covers; Vauxhall Adam, Citroen DS3 and the Skoda Fabia. What goes around comes around I guess.

 

I had a neighbor in the 80's who had a white 57 with a black vinyl top. it actually didn't look too bad. I seem to remember he had it for a long time, it just sat in the garage the whole time I knew him.

 

in upland, SoCal back around 1968 my brother bought a 56 Pontiac safari with a black vinyl roof... Nice car but I thought it was a shame to hide the original roof with its nomad style of the cuts across the roof's middle and rear portion.

 

What the hell were they supposed to look like in the 1st place?
Sorry, but it doesn't look like a convertible and the vinyl belongs on the seats.

 

Oh yeah, Petty supposedly did that to hide the mild (but illegal) top chop.

 

I'm thinking the Mercury did also,called it the Monteray. FOMOCO answer to the GM hardtop which they didn't have yet.

 

An good pal of mine had local auto detailer put black vynil top on his Matador red 57 Chevy hardtop in late 70's. I remember seeing it as a kid & thinking ....... Whaaaaaaaa ? Found out it was easy way to cover up boo boo on the roof. Flux

 

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Supposedly Donahue told Paul Van Valkenburgh who then told Car and Driver that the Camaros' vinyl roof was to hide the distortion in the thin acid dipped roof panels.
http://www.caranddriver.com/reviews...-donohue-trans-am-camaro-archived-test-review

 

This was my 56 Dodge in 64 or so... Sprayed on.

 

Yikes, a vinyl top on anything is just wrong, especially a tri-five chevy

 

Crestliner and Monterey technically make vinyl tops period correct (or at least period-possible) in 1950. Very strange to think that, but it's true. Looks neat on the Merc with the extra drip rail trim, not a fan of it on the tri-5 Chevys personally though.

At the Thunderbird resto shop I used to work at, we had a 56-57 T-bird removeable "porthole" top that was covered in vinyl. Someone did a really nice clean job of it, but I was not a fan of the look, although they kept it on there after the car was restored.

 

Here are a few pictures of Shake Rattle and Run in the mid sixties, wit and without vinyl top. Although its more like a pro mod now, it still has the vinyl roof. apparently the vinyl top was added after the car was rear ended on the return road at Oswego drag strip.

 

This is totally OT but my favorite vinyl top story...

My mom drove a Ford Fairmont Futura, baby blue with a dark blue top back in the 80's. It was a real dandy. We lived out in the country in the rural Ozarks and had a 1/4 mile driveway that would drift over hip deep if the snows were bad. One day she got home and the wind was whipping good and she knew she wouldn't make it up the drive, so she pulled her shiny Futura through the gate into the field next to our drive and closed the gate so nobody would steal her car over night. The next AM we made the Alpine trek down the drive to go off to work and school and such and when we opened the gate to get her car, her quarter horse had taken a big apple bite out of all 4 corners of that padded top! It was drop-dead funny if you were 14, but damned serious bidness to my dad. I can still see him fuming mad as he walked around that car, and the big stretched wisps of foam padding pulled straight out from the horse bites.

I cannot look at a car with a padded top to this day without getting a bit of the giggles thinking about my dad and those horse bites. I wish he would have let us take pictures.

 

The tops may not be cool , but I've made tons of money putting on the real ones.

 

I watched Shake Rattle and Run at us-30 drag strip when I was younger. Run real good!!!

 

On a Hardtop Tri-Five it's at least somewhat believable, but no way on a sedan. It was a popular way to update and modernize your car back then. I've seen several in my area back then. Remember those clip on headrests, now that was a joke, but I've seen those as well around the same time frame.

 

no no no a thousand times no. the only thing they look good on is a hearse.

 

Back in the mid 70s in Tulsa, a friend purchased a really nice '57 Chevy 210 2 dr hdtp that was black with a black, paisley embossed vinyl top. The car was built by a local body shop owner who specialized in tri-five Chevys. He also had a '57 El Morocco that I, being totally ignorant of what it was, thought was one of the worst customizing jobs I had ever seen.

 

I remember body shops and car dealers "fixing" hail damage and rollovers (required extra bondo however) with vinyl tops well into the mid 70's. Manufacturers hid some godawful body joints with them. I remember flexible paints that were used to "renew" the sun faded surfaces. Spray on versions were just a bad joke on the poorly thought out joke that vinyl tops were. Can't say I was sorry to see them go, and yes, up here they did rust underneath. The only thing vinyl belongs on is a cheap hooker.