Tag: restoration
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Why Corvairs (or) Why Me?!
Hunting around for an interesting tech article, we accidentally stumbled across this very entertaining article from the January 1986 CORSA Communique. We got a good laugh and thought you might too. The original authors dollars are 1986 (40 years ago now!) so keep that in mind when reading. Also of note, ALL back issues of…
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6-Day Wonder: Sterling’s Stealth ’64 Corvair Full Respray
By Gabe Lopez, Owner of Sterling Restorations It’s not often in the restoration business that you encounter a 60-year-old classic car that’s, well, almost perfect. For those of us who make a living sanding, welding, and fixing decades of rust and poor repairs, finding a truly solid foundation is the equivalent of striking gold. That’s…
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Corvairs in the wild
To borrow from the famous line from Field of Dreams, “If you build it, he will come.”… When you drive your Corvair, they will come. From far distances…. to look at and talk about YOUR car! New member Scott Lyon took his 67 Monza out to Goodguys this past weekend. No sooner did he get…
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An El Corvino Story
New to Corvairs and never heard of the “El Corvino”? What is this air-cooled Ute and what is the story behind it? Much like the Corvair roadsters and “shorty’s”, the “El Corvino” was never a production car. In fact, it may have never been a GM concept car. It was, however, the brainchild of a…
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SFBA Zoom Meeting Tonight & Upcoming Weekend Events
Hi Everyone, Just a last minute reminder that our November 2025 Meeting will be this evening (Thursday) starting at 7:00 PM on Zoom. Last month we forgot to include the Christy Link (below) and heard from many people about it. I hadn’t realized how many people depended on this link. Sorry! We have a few topics…
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7 Budgeting Rules For Your Project Corvair
Original article from Kyle Smith at Hagerty can be found here. We took Kyle’s fantastic article (you should subscribe!) and made it a little more “Corvaircentric” If you are like most car people, you tinker with carburetors or fine-tune fuel injection because cars are an interesting novelty in your life. There are likely fewer people…
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Bringing a ’65 Corvair Corsa Back to Life: A Body and Paint Restoration Journey. Part 4 of 4
After a second priming stage, we painted the smaller areas. The trunk was refinished in the original grey with white specks, and the underside and engine bay received a coat of satin black (60% gloss). Then came the payoff for countless hours of block sanding and prep: the final application of the Madeira Maroon. The…
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Bringing a ’65 Corvair Corsa Back to Life: A Body and Paint Restoration Journey. Part 3 of 4
Perfecting the Metal and Bodywork Getting the now-bare metal shell back from the blasters revealed a few more spots that needed attention. We finished any remaining welding and fabrication on the clean metal before finally diving into the bodywork. Our goal was to align all the panels to tolerances even better than the factory ever…
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Bringing a ’65 Corvair Corsa Back to Life: A Body and Paint Restoration Journey. Part 2 of 4
Uncovering Hidden Damage and Fabrication The first stage was what I call “pre-paint stripping.” Using extremely coarse grit sandpaper, we manually removed the old paint and, more importantly, the heavy layers of old body filler that were hiding shoddy repairs. It’s always a relief when an owner is prepared, and luckily, Bruce had sourced new…
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Bringing a ’65 Corvair Corsa Back to Life: A Body and Paint Restoration Journey. Part 1 of 4
Gabe Lopez of Sterling Restorations was kind enough to share the story of restoring Bruce’s 65 Corsa convertible. Many longtime SFBA members may remember this car belonging to Marc Bruchy. Mark’s parents bought the Corvair brand new in San Francisco. Marc grew up with the car in his family and, eventually, inherited it. After some…
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