What are the pros and cons of the corvairs??

When I was younger, my mom told me her and my father almost rolled a corvair and that was when I learned about nader. Corvairs are cool, especially gasser style

I own a '62 pontiac tempest and it has the "a arm coil over shock rear suspension rear transmission gm pot smoking let's try this and see how it works" set up. And it handles better than any car I own. The gm experimental cars are fun. I still have the slant 4 cyl engine too. Damn commie cars

 

Its all about the Rods! since its a scarce one.....fix her up....think of the money she'll be worth! Its diff. strokes for diff. folks.

Did have a old engine sitting around.......ripped all the cooling shrouds off, intakes off with carbs, sold them to a collector.........did a big bore setup for it, made a blower plate, sat a 4-71 blower on it, a single 4.......then popped it into a 66 VW Beetle......ran a 11.1 with a lot of tire spin.

Can build a decent engine out of them pancake 6's.............

 

All I can say is wow. That looks better than a 62 vette gasser near me. I want one...ghost

 

Was it this one?

 

I'll second that.....thats one slick ride!!!!!!

 

Coupe

 

The great thing about them is theres cheap and no matter what people say, there good cars.... until you need something to get re-build

 

...And you can do anything with them too

This is before and after pics of my AWB Corvair

 

Con: They suck
Pro: N/A

 

I had a little monza for a while. Fun car. I would get another one in a heart beat.
CON: NADER SUCKS
Pro: You can do this with it.

 

Agreed, Nader does suck! Bought a Corvan in the early 70s 'cause it was cheap. It was dependable, but wouldn't haul a load. Sold it in the early 70's...cheaper!

 

They had good steering boxes for hot rods.

 

My first and only car is a Corvair.
Please, help me..



Corvairs aren't bad cars, they're just weird. Love 'em or hate 'em. There is a reason people like the steering boxes though, they're the one part on a good car that doesn't piss oil..

 

I always thought the corvettes and the tbirds started out trying to be like European sports cars.

 

I was thinking more along the lines of front engine V8 (at least post 54 for the vette), rear wheel drive, the traditional American performance platform. Even the early vette had the sweet hopped up 6 cyl. Sure there were other European sports cars with similar setups, but the Americans certainly put their own stamp on it.

Maybe it's just me, but when I see Corvair, I see economy car. Especially given the context of the times with GM trying to make a vehicle to compete with cheaper imports of the day. Souping up economy cars isn't cool now, and I just can't imagine it was the hot thing to do then. Maybe my impression of the era is skewed.

That said, the V8 powered Corvairs, race cars, and that kick ass gasser are awesome.

 

Damm it Joe, just when I was starting to feel ok about souping up my 62 falcon.- just kidding Joe, I understand what you are saying.

 

A friend of mine has a butt load of Corvairs, I can't even begin to count them. I was just looking at a Greenbriar PU about two days ago. He was telling me a buddy of his back in the day had an Impala that his wife wrecked. He took the 283/PG/& rearend & put it in the 'Vair PU. In the bed W like a 12" driveshaft! Motor right behind the back of the cab. I started having visions of a mid engined big block Chevy 'Vair PU w zoomies & a tunnel ram......had to walk away or that stupid thing would be sitting in my shop right now!

-John

 

Norm Grabowski even ran a Corvair 6 in one of his motorcycles.

 

reminds me of a Mitch Hedberg joke...

how are bananas different from traffic lights?"

Green means stop! don't eat this banana yet.

Yellow means go! Its cool to eat this banana now.

Red means where the hell did you get this banana?

 

Well the trick to building a successful European car is that it must cost a lot more and break down more often.

 

Sounds like your impression of every era is skewed, it's always been about hopping up the cheap cars. Merc customs want to be Caddy's and Buick's. Falcons were economy cars. Model T's and A's were the cheap cars. It's always been about getting the less expensive car and make it better.

 

Is everyone simply echoing the cliche's handed down by people who weren't really there?


The Corvair was a six cyl "economy" sporty-type car that did fairly well on the road races.
Nader faked the "dangerousnness" tests just like NBC did with their Chevy truck fires. Both were exposed eventually, but people remember the fake part better than the real..
The rear tires were underinflated, and the driver was instructed to wag the tail with driver steering wheel inputs on every turn.
Trumped-up "evidence" just like Algore did with his Hollywood studio backgrounds and clips from studio movies to "prove" his ideas. Manufactured news sneaks in more often than you know.

The Corvair was a bigger-engined competitor that Chevy came up with to take advantage of the VW Beetle's huge popularity.

It was no worse than any other car unless you ran the rear tires really low on air pressure to greatly exaggerate the rear engine weight. Then you could make it fishtail, just like you could do with almost any car. Look at the Nader video, and see for yourself the driver steering-inputs to deliberately wag the tail just like you and I did as kids to fishtail our "safe" cars.

The Corvair engine is a popular swap with the VW and sandrail crowd.
The turbo engines would make a whopping 180 HP showroom stock, about equal to a stock 283 V8. Don't tell me that wasn't a pretty peppy combination in a small light car.
Can you say "V8 Volkswagen"?

Today, there is a group of Corvair enthusiasts turning the transaxles around, putting V8's in them (backseat area) and turning them into mid-engined V8 hot rods.
Google them, and see some really interesting stuff.

And stop repeating that Nader/Algore "the sky is falling and the sun will darken unless you make me KING" junk news.
(Yes, we did land on the moon, 911 was not an inside job, just one good volcano is dirtier than mankind, human footprints are no dirtier than deer footprints, and people love to make up things to further their political aims+donation$)

The Corvairs had a reputation for throwing fan belts if you really revved them high (with a turbo that is easy to do). The fan belt was bent around corners, and had an unusual path from the horizontal crankshaft to the top cooling fan with the vertical shaft. What a bend on a long long v-belt.

Many drivers who were driving really hard to take advantage of the rear-engined, rear-wheel super-traction would sometimes find out that first gear wasn't intended for drivers who were side-stepping clutches for the super-launch.

Vw and sandrail folks were fitting the much tougher Corvair transaxles into their rigs to take advantage of the much higher strength. Some were using the 'Vair engine with it for the extra power, and some mated the 'Vair gearbox to the smaller VW engine.

For a time, Chevy was also making quite a few different variations of the VW van with Corvair power in an attempt to capture many of the VW buyers. A rear engined van, a van with a flatbed to mimic a pickup, a flatbed with no sides, a Corvair wagon that looked like the VW Kammback and a couple other strange ones...

I am no Chevy fan, but you have to give them credit for the way they tried to follow the popular market of the time, and then took a large share of it by adding their own ideas to win back a large share of the VW market.

The extremely popular VW Beetle on steroids. (look at my avatar)
If you wanted that sort of car, as many many people did, there it was at a Chevy dealership.
Made in America.

 

CON: You ride around all night in one drinking Country Club beer (it's a 60's thing), and eating red skin peanuts, it will make you commode hugging sick . I speak from experience .
Jackie

 

The biggest problem was people not paying attention to what the factory called for inflation wise in the tires. The factory called for 15 psi front and 26 psi rear. Not following this resulted in shitty handling. And every one I've ever worked on had the tire pressure wrong.

 

I couldn't disagree more about the uncoolness of souping econo cars. Frankly, I'll question the gearhead credentials of anyone who doesn't understand the cool factor of a souped econocar. That's the kind of thing you expect to hear from a lifestyler, not from somebody who views a car as blank canvas.

Methinks it's time for you to build a street sleeper and understand what the fuss is about.

 

AHA!
Now I have a new word for my vocabulary.
"lifestyler"
adopting affectations to to try to appear to belong.
like the person who buys the completed trendy car and acts like they built it, the fair weather bikers wearing the cutesy beanies who run and hide at the first sign of a cool breeze or a drop falling (I am usually the only bike out there when it gets cool outside), whose taste is determined by current fads while attempting to seem "cool".

Did I get it right? or does it mean something else?
thanks

 

That's pretty accurate, but on the extreme end. I don't think JoeFoMoPar is a lifestyler though, his posts are worth the read time, we just disagree this time.

For the record lifestylers come in all sizes and ages. Many of them are older guys with a string of cars behind em. Sometimes they even installed the engine or did some resto work, not just checkbookers. But they all share the same mentality...... the emblems and logos are what makes a car, and they only love what's popular with non gearheads.

Corvairs have always had an underground following, they were cast off by the mainstream the way we do with tuners today. Those cars are an unbelieveable experience when prepped SCCA style, absolutely crazy. Would love to have a 68 1/2 corsa monza hunkered down on widened steelies.

The vans and ramp trucks are neat, just in a different way. Around here they all rusted off the face of the earth by 1970 so it's really hard to say what could have been.......

 

Well 12 months after they came out I had many in my shop for new motors via the factory. After about 1.5 years the ones that came in were close to gone with the rust. With that visual and mechanical experience I would not consider buying one and actually didnt think any of them survived.

 

True. They are also a car that really benefit from a good set of radials. It's interesting that one of the car magazines did their own handling test on "the new compacts", and the Vailant and Falcon ended up tires on top before the Corvair did.