A man walks into a bar. He overhears a woman who says she’s down on her luck, and hoping to sell her ’59 Corvette. After introducing himself and some brief conversation with her, he buys the car, sight unseen, for only $800.
No, this isn’t an automotive version of an old joke with a setup for a dumb punch line. It’s the true story of Mike Babcock’s discovery of a basket-case Corvette back in the mid-1970s, one that was even more destitute than its owner. The car ultimately required about eight years of painstaking restoration, including a search for all the original parts, before eventually winning a NCRS Top Flight award while competing against 30 other Corvettes. Now the car is estimated to be worth more than six figures. (How’s that for ROI?) What follows is a rundown of what went into the project, and what makes Babcock’s C1 high-value collectible in today’s market.
Truth be told, Babcock didn’t actually pay $800 cash for the car. Instead he traded his old, but still-running, Chevy Blazer, which was valued at roughly that sum. Based on the inoperable condition of the Corvette, however, which he first got to glimpse in a Sacramento storage facility, some might think the downtrodden woman in the bar got the better end of the deal.
The car was in terrible shape, having been hit both front and rear. The white lacquer paint was cracked and peeling off the crushed fiberglass body. The interior looked horrible, the 327 engine was non-original, and the frame was bent. Who would want to take on such a daunting project?
Babcock with the car, mid-resto in the 1970s.
To his credit, Babcock, who is now 78, already had many decades of experience restoring cars in his shop, North Tahoe Classic Cars, located on the shores of Lake Tahoe. Raised on a farm in central California, he built go-karts and hay wagons in his youth, and learned mechanics and welding along the way. He later got into building and restoring hot rods and muscle cars, which was a sideline to his eventual profession as a certified welder and metallurgical engineer.
Consequently, straightening out the C1’s frame and re-welding it didn’t pose too much of a challenge. But Babcock was careful to preserve the factory numbers and the car’s date of manufacture, which was stenciled on the frame underneath the driver’s seat.
What did prove to be a thorny issue was fixing the fiberglass and sourcing all the required original parts. Repairs previously performed on the damaged nose were poorly done—way too thick and not reinforced. After removing the body and turning it upside down, Babcock cut away gobs of fiberglass and fabricated metal supports to mate with the body’s bonding strips, as well as the runners alongside the spongy fenders. This ensured that the hood ratchets would have a firmer foundation.
“It was an intense amount of work,” he recalls with a wince. “I had to do a lot of fiberglass work to make the body straight.”
Rather than using the factory’s thick layers of lacquer primer, which tends to check or crack over time, Babcock applied a thinner layer of polyester primer. The corresponding polyester Crown Sapphire paint was expensive, but it didn’t require a clear coat that might get cloudy and peel over time. And despite all the extra efforts expended on the prep and paint, Babcock eschewed buffing out the final top coats.
“It would’ve looked too good,” he points out, speaking from experience as a judge for NCRS. “It needed to have a certain gloss from having a lacquer finish—not too shiny.”
The car was originally Snowcrest White, as noted in factory grease pencil markings on the trunk’s forward bulkhead (used before paint codes were employed). Since Babcock chose a different tint, he removed them and rewrote the painter’s reference abbreviation as “TOQUR” to correspond to the new color.
While the prep and paint were in progress, he sent all the grille and metal trim pieces out in one batch for re-chroming. Fortunately they were intact and didn’t require any repairs, despite the previous body hits. Babcock did spend the extra money for triple plating (consisting of zinc, copper, and chrome) because this method smoothes out imperfections better than the factory’s single-stage plating.
There was one trim item that presented a challenge: a broken taillight bezel for which no suitable replacement could be found. Worse, the factory piece was made of pot metal, which is notoriously difficult to weld. Drawing on his metallurgical expertise, Babcock fabricated a new part from a template he made, then used a careful cool-down technique to ensure the 5356 aluminum would stick together. Finally, he was able to machine down the part and polish it off.
As for the engine and its accessories, Babcock traipsed through numerous machine shops, salvage yards, and swap meets to find the correct, matching-number parts. The 283 short-block came from a shop in Modesto, which sold it on the condition of being allowed to perform the rebuild. That job featured a .030-inch overbore, along with cleaning, hot-tanking, and the installation of a “Duntov” high-performance camshaft.
This cam was used by Chevy in all solid-lifter applications from 1957 through ’63, including the 270-, 283-, 290-, and 315-hp 283s, along with the later 327 engines delivering 340 and 360 horsepower. While the Duntov cam was fairly radical—it was intended as a racing-spec unit that would still meet SCCA Showroom Stock rules—its performance was well-matched to the smallish ports and intakes used on the 283 engine.
After scouring newspaper classified ads, Babcock finally found correct intake manifold to top the 283 at a wrecking yard in Taft, California, but this item also needed the help of Babcock’s welding talents. A hole had been previously drilled for a PCV valve, which he filled, along with correcting the timing numbers to original spec.
Similar efforts were required to find the cylinder heads in Bakersfield, but the distributor and water pump were fortunately closer to home. Babcock shares a restorer’s tip on the finding the right distributor: It has an aluminum band with numbers and date codes. For a “correct” match, they have to have to fall within the three months prior to the engine’s manufacture.
Finding original-spec “Ram’s Horn” exhaust manifolds proved to require yet another daunting search project, but Babcock finally located a set with the bracket on the passenger side for the generator. Since the manifolds were coated in white paint that couldn’t be removed, he decided to paint them in the same orange as the engine block.
A four-speed transmission turned up nearby, but it required some extra ingenuity to be made suitable. A local friend, Pete Kohler, who also restores cars, had about 40 transmissions in his shop, but none were fully numbers-correct. So he and Babcock cobbled together a correct unit by scavenging a case, side plate, and tail shaft from a few different gearboxes.
A fresh shifter was ordered through a Corvette parts catalog (way before the Internet made things easier), and while the third member was still in decent shape, Babcock had to change out the gears for the correct factory ratio.
Al Knoch supplied the interior upholstery, but finding the turquoise soft top—available in ’59 only—required some extra legwork. After a diligent search, the correct fabric turned up in a warehouse, but Babcock had to buy enough for two tops, since the material is likely no longer available. Getting the top installed properly required some extra research as well, but the results are hard to fault. Indeed, Babcock ended up as a dealer for Sweeney, the manufacturer, and has since helped with other such restorations.
All of the dash gauges were in fairly decent shape, except for the speedometer, which needed to be rebuilt and then calibrated, as did the Wonder Bar radio. The odometer was turned back to zero since the car was being restored to like-new condition. (Babcock doesn’t recall the original mileage on the car when he acquired it.)
Recently, after our photo shoot northwest of Reno, Babcock had to have the radiator core replaced to fix a persistent leak. Again, he insisted on installing the original component, which flows downward rather than crosswise. That took some hunting to find, but the car now runs fine in the high-desert heat. As a precaution he always uses 100-percent coolant, in case he has to add some water that would dilute the mix.
Babcock is not one to sip wine over his hard-won restoration, as he does tool around town on occasion. He also shows the car at Reno Corvettes club events, such as the one where we found it displayed in a casino parking lot.
While this all-original ’59 is obviously no modernized Vette-rod, the exhaust emits a throaty burble, and the chassis tracks straight and smooth despite the previous accident damage and vintage model year. The tires are authentic 670-15 wide white-walls supplied by Coker, with a non-radial poly core that develops flat spots if the car isn’t driven often enough.
Overall, “It handles like it should,” Babcock says, and the engine “runs perfect.” Manning the large steering wheel requires the vintage “Armstrong” method, given the lack of power assistance.
Babcock has lost track of how much this project cost him, and he won’t even consider any offers from prospective buyers. “There’s no reason to sell it. I’ll probably be buried in it—it’ll be my coffin,” he chuckles.
While declining to put a dollar value on this rare “bar find,” Babcock points out that, “It’s not so much the money as the time.” Put another way, his personal investment in the project was like yet another variation of an old joke: “Ninety percent of my salary I spent on Corvettes—the other 10 percent I wasted.”
Which is a sentiment most Corvette owners likely share.
