Friday, June 19, 2009

My '57 Chevy 4-door HT 1963-1968







This was my second car. I had owned it from '63 to about '68. I always liked the 4-door hard top actually better than the 2-door model as the top seemed in better proportion to the bottom. It was the first car that I got into showing. When I purchased it, the colour was sea foam green(turquoise) and cream. It wasn't long before my dad and I started doing a bit of custom work on it such as filling the hood, nosing and decking it(removing excess chrome and what-not from the hood and trunk), changing the grille to a '59 Chevy vintage, tinting the windows, adding a sunken antenna and changing the upholstery. This was called a "conservative custom" at the time. The first colour was "Magenta", a Chrysler colour. After it was shown in that colour, we completely changed the colour again to "Mandarin Orange". I had borrowed a set of Radir wheels for the car show from Scotty McCallum(he had them on his '63 Chevelle rag top(very cool car too). We just traded wheels and tires for the car show. We also did the grille(anodized look) in gold. It was blue when the car was Magenta. This was done by painting candy colours directly over the aluminum grille. It stuck pretty good. The automatic transmission was changed to a 3 speed standard, the engine was bored out to 301ci and it had 3 deuces(triple carburetors). When I was married, we drove this car to Chicago, Detroit and back and actually had cheater slicks on it the whole way, just in case there was a racing encounter. It was only a slap on the wrist in those days if you got caught....now just for thinking about it you will have your license suspended. I miss this car to this day and always think that some day I will own another. It was sold to a bush pilot who totalled it no more than 6 months after he bought it. The yellow ad is how it would appear in a brochure or billboard.

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