1973 Chevrolet Chevelle Deluxe Coupe 2-door 5.7l on 2040-cars

VIN: 1d37f3z463293 Year: 1973
Exterior Color: White primer and Red front half
Make: Chevrolet
Interior Color: black carpet tan seats
Model: Chevelle
Number of Cylinders: 8
Trim: Deluxe Coupe 2-Door
Drive Type: U/K
Warranty: Vehicle does NOT have an existing warranty
Mileage: 152,000
Sub Model: 2 door

Condition: UsedA vehicle is considered used if it has been registered and issued a title. Used vehicles have had at least one previous owner. The condition of the exterior, interior and engine can vary depending on the vehicle's history. See the seller's listing for full details and description of any imperfections.Seller Notes:"Needs body work completed and paint completed."

 Hello Ebay,

**Edit**- see the video I made on youtube:  http://youtu.be/5RwunRSYetw          (if link doesn't work, copy and paste it in your browser)


I'm selling my 1973 Chevelle.  I had to move across country and I am now in South Carolina, this car is located in Garden Grove, California ( orange county, near L.A.).  My landlord sold the house we were renting and to make a long story short, I had to leave this car behind and pack up the family and move.  This was my own project car, and it is an unfinished project at this point.  I've patched rust and was going to perform a rustoleum paint job.  I have done a lot of work to this car.

Around 2006, I did the work on this motor I bought used from a fellow bmw mechanic.  I origianlly installed it in an El Camino I had, and that car was also always a project car that never saw many miles put on it with this motor installed.  Than when I got this Chevelle I am now selling, I pulled this engine I'm describing and reserved it for the Chevelle.  So this basically is a rebuild motor from about 7 years ago that never got used much at all.  It has a rebuilt late model 350 chevy motor, the kind that has a one piece rear main oil seal, one piece oil pan gasket, and no provision for a mechanical fuel pump.  It's from a 90's GM vehicle.  I am a bmw mechanic, and I went thru this motor and re-ringed it and put new bearings in, and personally measured the pistons, crank journals, and came to the conclusion this motor did not warrant new pistons or any machine work.  I did have a machine shop clean the block and hone the cylinders for me, and I did all the rebuilding using parts from Summit racing.  I believe the rings were "sealed power", the camshaft is around a 262 summit hydraulic camshaft. I put in a new oil pump, new timing gear set, and called the bottom end good.  The cyclinder heads are Dart Iron Eagle 215 cc heads.  They were topped off with new pushrods, pushrod guide plates, and Harland Sharp roller rockers.  It has an Edelbrock performer rpm qjet intake manifold, but I now have an edelbrock carburetor on it.  It has Summit's Doug headers on it, and it has a brand new electric fuel pump that I put on about a month ago.  The exhaust is 2.25" exhaust with aftermarket mufflers, I believe the brand is Dynomax, but I had them put on when I first bought this car about 5 years ago and I don't remember all the details.

The transmission is an automatic th350.
The rear end is an open diff, and I believe the ratio is 3.42 based on tire diameter, rpm and speed.

The engine sounds great, has a moderate lope at idle, and when you rev it up it makes little kids smile or cry :)

When I first got this car it was pretty junky.  It had a terrible interior, bad paint with unpainted bondo on the rear sail panel.  The first thing I did was order a seat upholstery kit from OPGI and get the new exhaust pipes put on.  I also put in new black carpet.  I did replace the rear parcel shelf trim at the time.

I discovered the rear window leaked, and water damaged the new rear shelf.  Thats when I decided to take this car apart and fix the rust and clean it up.  I removed all the glass (except for the drivers door window).  I discovered rust in the front and rear windshield channels.  I welded up the one inch hole I found in the front passenger window channel at the bottom.  The rear windshield was my biggest project, and I only got it about 90% done.  There is still about a 2 inch section on the lower right horizontal section of the rear window channel that needs new metal welded in.  Also some of the rear window channel trim locating tabs need to be welded on (easily obtained from a auto body supply house).  I did complete welding in patches in all four corners of the floor panels.  I weld in new metal and put seam sealer on the inside of the repair and also on the outside of the patches.  Then I primered the repairs with zinc based primer, then I covered the whole floor panels with rustoleums clean metal primer, then painted the floor boards with rustoleum satin black paint.

I did completely remove the front end of the car and the passenger door.  I pulled out the original 307 motor, and spend months cleaning, degreasing, and priming and painting the front frame area of the car.  I literally scraped off around ten pounds of sludge and grease from the frame and suspension pieces.  I built a sandblasting cabinet, and sandblasted the control arms, the brake booster, windshield wiper motor, fan blades and fan clutch, pulleys, and generally anything I could fit inside my sandblaster.  I removed the HVAC box, degreased it, primered it, and painted that satin black.  Everything under the hood that you see is black was disassembled, cleaned, sandblasted, primered, and painted.  It was a lot of work.  I even spent about 3 hours re wrapping the whole engine bay wire harness with new electrical tape.

I did also install a ford starter solenoid that you can see is mounted on the firewall next to the hvac box to help avoid the famous chevy small block hot start problem you get with headers installed sometimes. 

Installed Moog upper and lower ball joints.
Installed Energy Suspension polyurethane uppper and lower control arm bushings.
I checked the steering, and all the tie rod and center links, pitman arm and idler arms- all the moving ball joints had no excessive play when squeezed with big channel lock pliers, so I just cleaned and painted them all.

So this car's biggest draw back is the fact that I had to just give up on the body work.  I began spreading filler on the rear deck underneath the window channel and that's about as far as I got.  That filler still needs to be gone over and sanded properly. 

There is still rust that needs to be repaired besides the small section on the rear window channel.  There is about 5 holes in the trunk floor that are all fairly small, and all of them could be individually patched.  (The rust I repaired to the floor boards was much worse than the trunk is.  Once you get the trunk patched up, the car would be rust free.

I did grind remove the trim from the doors and grinded off the trim tabs.  On the driver door I welded in some trim holes.  On the passenger side, I got creative and filled in these holes with a type of glue so that the car could be put back to original.  By the time I got to the driver door, I didn't car about that any more and did what I thought was better and welded them. 

The interior needs the headliner replaced, the dashboard is heavily cracked, but I did put in a dash cap.  The rear window shelf trim will need to be replaced again as well. 

I did buy and install an original radio, I got it here from ebay several years back.  It works but it's nothing to brag about sound wise of course.  The origianl windshield held the antenna  molded into it, and I just ran a temporary antenanna out the side of the door and laid in on the cowl.  You'll either need to replace the front windshield or drill a hole in the fender to mount an external antenna if you want one.

So I think I've pretty accurately described this car.  Basically, it was a project that I was about to put on the road and got stopped short about a month or two early.  It needs the body work smoothed out and paint to be finished.  I laid on rustoleum "sunrise red", and if you took the time to wet sand and polish it, it would look like a red mirror.  If you hate the idea of a cheap paint job, well the car would be very easy to sand back down since there's no trim insalled, no door handles, mirrors, etc. 

Oh yea, I also put in brand new guages, water oil pressure and voltage.  The water and oil are hooked up to the motor, I did not mound the guage pod to the dash and I didn't wire the voltmeter.

Whoever ends up getting this car, I would recommend you being willing to assemble this back together and know how to do body and paint work, or youll be paying big money to have this work done.  It's possible I've missed some details, but not on purpose.  Obviously this car needs work, and it's a great car that deserves to be completed. 

The interior was black door panels.  They were in decent shape, but probably should be replaced.  When I had this car towed from the house we left, to our friends house where the car now sits- the tow truck driver hit a bump and a door panel flew out on the freeway and is missing.  Also, the front windshield that was already out, got cracked while transferring all the parts over to where the car is now parked.  So I would put new upper and lower door panels and a new windshield on your budget list.

The title is in my name and has been registered "non op" for many years now.  I did sign the title and left it with a friend of the family to be the guy who helps.


** if you go to youtube and search for 1973 chevelle , you'll see a lot of this car on there, mostly to do with the rustoleum paint job.   The paint was dusty and needs polished now, as I never got around to any polishing.

You'll have to deal with shipping, as I'm no where near this car now.  


If you read all this, you must still be interested---- Thanks for looking!