Originally Posted by BTC

Thank you. It's certainly seen better days from an appearance perspective, but all things considered the car is probably not in bad shape. The paint has lots of imperfections in it at this point, but it cleaned up pretty good with the DA buffer. It removed a lot of oxidation, swirl marks & scratches. I'm sure if I used a more aggressive polish/product, I could remove more.

I'm the original owner and it was my daily driver for around 6.5 years. For a number of reasons I parked it, or put it in storage, in October of 2000 and it pretty much sat, unprepped, for the next 17 years. It sat in dirt floor garages & barns until my brother & I started messing with it when I was home for holidays/vacations, which was around 2006/2007. It needed TONS of TLC after sitting for so long. We put headers, exhaust & a CAI on it, and replaced all of the stuff that no longer worked or we felt should be replaced. I thought that some day maybe I would get a cam and have the heads ported etc., but who knows.

I started driving it over Thanksgiving 2017 for the first time since I parked it in 2000. It's a lot of fun to drive, at least for me. Getting in & out of it is a lot more difficult than I remember, but it has been lowered, so it probably has nothing to do with me being 20-25 years older. I don't know if I'll ever get around to addressing any of the cosmetic blemishes. The older I get, the less I seem to care about that kind of stuff. I wish I had bought a door when they were still available, but I never did. Maybe some day I'll get a wild hair and try to find someone to fix that stuff and paint it, but I'm feeling no sense of urgency. I also hear that paint jobs are crazy expensive these days. I don't know whether that's true, but one of my gearhead buddies says paint has gotten really expensive. I want to put some wheels & tires on it, but the choices seem endless. It could probably use some motor mounts too. I've got just over 2" of clearance at the lowest point on the y-pipe. I'm not sure how much new motor mounts might increase that number, but probably a little bit.

Sorry for the long winded post. I'm off work today due to the polar vortex and don't have much going on.

Originally Posted by squarehead

Hi BTC,

Thanks for the reply, I like cars so it didn't seem long winded to me!

I hear you about caring less about dings and blemishes as you get older. If it was mine I would leave it alone and enjoy driving it. And best of all, enjoy parking it and not worrying about some inconsiderate bashing their door into it! You have beautiful original paint now so if you had it painted it wouldn't be original anymore. I see a lot of cool cars at the various shows. I often see the results of people dumping lots of cash into cars that had paint color changes but it shows up in the doors and the engine compartment as out of place and it always looks wrong to me. That makes buying a car with the great paint color the first order of business if you are looking for a car to restore and you have that covered! What is the paint code on your car?

You said it is lowered, that is probably one of the reasons I like it so much. I drive a lowered convertible and yes it is harder to get into and out of but these cars really look good when lowered IMO.

Originally Posted by BTC

I also had a Quasar Blue '85 IROC Z28. I'm not sure if the color was called Quasar Blue back then, but it was pretty much the same color. That car was super sharp for its day, but it was a piece of junk.