Well I tell ya guys, It is a sad and angry story...I was working at Freightliner Trucks in Portland Oregon as a contract CAD Design Engineer...I had been there for close to 7 years, dealing with lay offs every few years as the trucking industry ran it's roller coaster ride...
I had just sold my '67 SS Chevelle ragtop back to it's original owner, (who happened to be the mayor of New York in 1967 - Another time/Another story)...It was a numbers matching car down to the date coded Packard Suppression wires and it was all done but paint...Total build by the book, back to GM specs...After all the "Well hell, it HAS to be like this to be correct", I was ready for something I could get creative with...
I found a clean '67 wagon shell and a pair of '67 El Camino doors and door jambs and started to figure out how I was gonna pull this off...
I found a great body man locally who was into the whole build and started sending him the wagon in spurts...First the media blast, some primer, some POR 15 and some minor bodywork...
Then it was the full shave; door handles, side trim, door locks, drip rails, and finally the fuel filler door...I made my own spring hinge for the tail light so you could put gas in...
While my body man had the shell on an extra wagon frame, I had the original frame in my shop up on a jig...Next to it, on another jig, was the frame/suspension of the 1989 Corvette
convert roll over I had purchased...Since CAD is my thing, I digitized both frames and started the task of making one frame package using the 'vette suspension incorporated into the Wagons shell, making sure the frame had the right pickup points for the C4 suspension, but fit the track width/wheelbase of the wagon....
Now remember, this was 2005, before any hotrodder with a fat checkbook could call up Art Morrison, or RR frames or Paul Newman and just "order one" like today...
After the frame was close to finished we did a mini-tub so a set of 345/30/17" Eagle F1's would be comfortable out back and mated the new underpinnings to the shell...All that was left was blocking the $hi* out of it and picking the color/colors...Single?...Two tone?...
About that time Freightliner threw 25 of us CAD Design guys a curve and with no notice at all, labeled us unemployed...Me being the live for today type of guy didn't have jack saved up to fall back on, so I tossed most everything into storage and cut a deal with the body man...I could keep the wagon on the back burner of his shop, (it did make quite the conversation starter) for as long as I wanted...Famous last bullshit...
I took a contract job with Seagate Technology, near Santa Cruz, California and ended up getting on a project that was 65-70 hours a week...Before I knew it 6 months had gone by and it was time to fly home, cut the last check to the body man, and get the thing in paint...
I am sure you know what's next...Showed up at where the shop "used" to be...No shop, no parking lot, no projects, and NO LONGROOF!!!...All I got was a shrug of the shoulders from the property owner he rented from and a "He went outta biznuz and moved"...
Police report, stolen car flyers, $5,000 reward for the dudes head, Uhhh I mean the dudes where-a-bouts...Did what I could with only a 4 day pass from the Calif. job, and jumped on a jet back south...
Never heard anything legally...A friend of a friend said he saw an article in Hemmings Motor News about a 2 door wagon purchased on the west coast and carted back east to have a high dollar, full "Bitchin Rides", or "Rad Rides" type of finishing done to it...Couldn't give me a magazine date or even a page no, (ever try to find just one small thing in a
Hemmings?...Good Lord that's a shitload of pages...Anyway, I hope that's what became of it...It deserved to be done and done right...Hate to think it was parted out to complete somebody's 6 cyl El Camino or 4 door resto...(Heavy Sigh...)
Oh well...Better to have "Short-bussed" and lost, then to never have "Longroofed" at all...
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