I'm looking to buy a 1966 Chevelle and was hoping for some tips. I've never owned any car like this so I'm not sure what to look out for when inspecting the car. Obviously things like rust go without saying, but I'm wondering if there's anything in specific I need to check before spending $25k on a 42 year old car

The car looks like it's in real nice condition but it's located about 600 miles from here and I haven't seen it in person yet. It's not completely original and not in show condition, but that's not what I'm looking for.
From what the seller told me it has been repainted in 2006 and the painter didn't do too good of a job, there are some small cracks in the paint now. At least he was honest about it, and I don't see it as too big of a problem.
The car has a 454 engine with 400 transmission. The engine has been taken apart last winter for a minor overhaul and some new external parts and was dynoed to 453 WHP. The transmission needs a new seal on the outgoing axle (not sure what it's called) but that shouldn't be too much of a problem either. It has a "sturdy" cardan axle (the original snapped on the dyno) and 10-bolt rear axle. I've heard some stuff about Chevy rear axles not being the toughest ones, is this anything I should be concerned about? I will probably be looking for more performance in the future.
He said there was no rust and he'll send me some more pictures to confirm this.
The entire wiring was redone in 2006 as well, which is good because the car has had 20 owners and I know from experience what the wiring can look like after 20 different people have messed with it.

So does anyone have some tips? Like any specific problems with this model, or musclecars in general.
Thanks in advance, any help is appreciated!


The car in question:

Thanks for the reply!

I actually have a car that has had 30 owners, myself not included. It's undergoing a well needed major renovation now though. The idea with the Chevelle is to have a car that doesn't require several years of work before I can use it.

According to the seller there isn't a single rust spot on the car, not on the floors either. I asked him to take some pictures of the cabin- and trunk floor with the carpets lifted, and I'm supposed to get those tomorrow. He assured me there was nothing there though, but I figure it's better to make sure before going on a 1200 mile trip for nothing.

That Currie rear axle sounds good, definitely something I'll look into later on.

One thing that is completely new for me is the amount of parts available, it's almost unbelievable Having worked on 25-45 year old Volvos I've often had to search for months to get a certain part even though I live in Volvoland... From what I've seen so far I get the impression that it would be possible to put together a complete Chevelle with all brand new aftermarket parts. And reasonable prices too.

Anyway, my plans... They are first of all to get it in decent shape. Get the paint fixed, do some polishing, just make it look acceptable. The car has a red interior (at least seats and headliner) which I don't think fits very well. Also the door panels didn't look that straight, probably because of the stereo installation. So I'll be replacing it with a new black interior.
The gauge-frenzy wasn't quite as bad as on your SS496 project, but there seem to be a bunch of different gauges, all different brands and in different places. So I'll probably get some nice autometer ones and put them all in one place instead. That should clean up the interior good enough for now.

So for now I'm not planning anything drastic, just get it cleaned up and make sure I can enjoy it all summer next year.

For the future there are more plans though, mainly horsepower related
The engine has actually had a 871 blower. The blower is gone but the engine still has the same contents. The 453 WHP was with the current configuration, so no blower. The plan is to give the engine back its blower. By then I'll probably also be looking at drivetrain/axle upgrades.
Another plan is to get a stroker kit, but that's far away. But a friend is restoring a 69 Charger and will be using a 440->512 kit and also an 871. This obviously means I must look at the possibilities to get over 512 cui, you know how things like that usually go But as I said this is far away, at least a couple of years.

So..... Yesterday I bought the car 
It needs quite a bit of work, but they're mainly small jobs except for the paint which of course is quite a job. It looks good from a distance though but I obviously want it to look good from when standing next to it as well.

The car was located about 600 miles from here, so friday night me and 3 friends started driving. We arrived around 10 AM, inspected the car, no real suprises there. Then we took it for a test drive which was when the first and really only suprise came.. The throttle hung when turning left in a sharp corner! Luckily I've had a car with hanging throttle before so I was quick to get on the brake pedal and turn off the ignition, and nothing happened. Something had happened to the throttle linkage and the previous owner had replaced one part with a steel wire. The wire would swing a bit toward the carburettor when turning left and a bit of wire that was sticking out got stuck in a different part of the linkage. As a temporary solution we tensioned the wire a bit more and put a lot of tape around it to make sure there was nothing that could get stuck in anything. That fix worked like a charm and we drove home the car without any mechanical trouble whatsoever. About 10 miles from home a moose ran out on the road right in front of me! Luckily I managed to avoid it but it was a very close call. I'm going to upgrade the lights for sure, during the summer it's light almost 24/7 here but I don't want to risk smashing into any animals if I do have to drive it in the dark.

So now the real fun can begin I'm going to tackle the problems one at a time and start on a big shopping list!

I'll post some more pictures later on, I slept most of the day today and it's too dark to take pictures now.

Thanks!

No that cable was absolutely not cool. It did put me off a bit but it was easy enough to fix. It seems the previous owner has been pretty serious in some parts but then after a while got sloppy. For example the regular wiring looked quite neat, but then the stereos wiring was an absolute mess, and then I mean pretty much the worst I've ever seen. It's stuff like that that makes a huge difference on a cars first impression. But I don't really care, it'll be fun tidying all that stuff

Yea, I was thinking of doing a H4 conversion, and then put xenon lamps in the middle lights with only high beam. That way it will all look stock while cruising, but once I switch to high beam I'll have really good lighting. Xenon might be a bit too modern for a car like this, but the difference in light is worth it. And there's plenty of space under the hood to hide the electronics.
On my daily driver (a Volvo V70) I did a full xenon conversion, high/low and 3 auxiliary lights are all converted. Except for the shadows because of the lights placement it's almost like driving in daylight!

The problem with good deals is that shipping costs to Sweden are usually quite expensive, and most stores have an administrative fee for international orders as well. So to minimize those costs I need to order a lot of stuff at once. But I'm of course open to suggestions, right now I'm mostly checking for prices on Summits site, but there's some stuff I haven't found there.
I'll get a YearOne and OPG catalog as soon as I get my credit card renewed, unfortunately they don't send it overseas for free. Summit did by the way, and they send me a new catalog every couple of months now altho that might be because I have bought stuff from them.

But some of the stuff I'm interested in buying:
- Power steering conversion kit
- Interior (seat covers, floor mat, door/rear panels)
- Trunk mat
- Some bits for the dashboard, the plastic stuff around the instrument housing and above the glove compartment to be exact.
- Tail light lenses
- A new hood, preferably with 2'' cowl scoop
- Also hood hinges
- Some bits of chrome trim

Hehe, I do love tidying up a wiring mess. Not so much the job itself but the satisfaction you get when you have 100 feet of old wiring laying in a pile on the garage floor, and knowing that putting a little bit of effort into it made it so much better

It'll be a while before I start ordering new parts, I'm pretty poor at the moment after spending $25k on this car. I'll check with GPSuperstore when I'm  ready to order some stuff.
Some good news is that a friend just bought a Chevy truck on ebay and he'll have it shipped to Sweden some time during the winter. We're going to check if there's some way I can have some heavy parts shipped in his container, that should save me a lot of cash.
A lot of stuff is available over here as well, but prices are ridiculous in most cases. For example a hood that costs $350 in the US costs almost $1100 here at one distributor I checked with, shipping not included.

I found a store called Bob's Chevelle Parts that seems to have most of the stuff I'm going to need as well. Do you have any experience with them?

Over here people are quite used to waiting for several months for their stuff just to save on the shipping costs But we've ordered directly from Summit a couple of times and the parts were delivered about a week after ordering. I asked them for a quote on shipping a hood and it would cost over $1100 because the only option for them is to use DHL.
But the container shipping apparently isn't going to be a problem so I'll be ordering most heavy/large parts through another guy.

Another question, do you know if there are any headlight conversion kits that are not H4? H4 will be fine for the outer lights, but as the inner lights are high beam only it would make more sense to use some other socket. I want to put xenon lamps in those so sealed beam isn't going to work.

Hey Nico - any new discoveries on your Chevelle?