<VV> The Route 66 adventure - Part 1 of ??

[J R Read_HML]

OK, there have been posts about deals gone bad and posts about long trips to 
buy a Corvair and get it home.  This post fits into at least one of those 
categories.  I don't think that it will all fit into one post and I had 
promised to give a story to VV about my experiences.  So, this is part one. 
This might extend over a week or two, so you'll have to save it in order to 
get the entire story in one reading.  Believe it or not, I've received a 
couple of inquiries saying "When are you going to tell the story of the 
Route 66 trip?"

The beginning, to me, was both exciting and scary.  It started with a car I 
saw on eBay.  I kept going back for more looks and the price seemed to be 
stuck.  No one had bid over $5,500 on a gorgeous (to my mind) '65 convert 
with 4 speed trans and 140hp engine.  The description was in some ways 
understated and in other ways (but we are not to that part yet) overstated.

So, I sent a couple of questions.  Basically, I was trying to test the 
waters to see if the seller really knew what he was selling.  Anyone that is 
reading this and has bought Corvair stuff (any kind) through eBay knows what 
I mean by that.  The answers which came back made sense, but I still did not 
have enough information and the extra pictures (specific shots) that I had 
asked for did not come back.  Warning sign!  But, a couple of additional 
pictures did come and it was easy to see why they had not been posted on the 
eBay page.

The angle of the additional pictures had sun spots in them which made it 
appear as though the left tail pipe was sending out smoke.  Studying those 
pictures along with the others, I concluded that (hopefully) it was an 
illusion.  There were sun spots, less obvious ones and not at the tail 
pipes, in a couple of the other pictures as well.  However, I never did 
receive any really close up views.  This had me worried.

My next step was to phone the seller directly.  His eBay AD said that he had 
the car advertised locally and that he could withdraw the eBay auction at 
any time.  We had two or three conversations over the course of two days. 
He was adept an giving me answers to the questions I had at that time.  Now, 
I've been around Corvairs for about a dozen years at this point.  I know 
most of the questions to ask, but not necessarily all.  I have a friend (and 
partner in the Ice Race car) who is considerably younger, but who has triple 
the Corvair experience that I have.  So, I arranged a three way phone 
conversation, with Dom Perino asking the more provocative mechanical 
question and me listening in.  After the seller hung up, Dom and I hashed 
things over and came up with a max number that I should go to on the 
bidding.

Never mind what that number was.  I called the seller back and suggested 
that since it was (according to his eBay AD) advertised locally, how about 
if I just buy it and he can take it off of eBay and avoid (I assumed) at 
least some of their charges.  By this time, there was only about six or 
seven hours left to the auction.  He said that he wanted to let it ride on 
eBay.  So, if I really wanted the car, I was going to have to figure out how 
to be the top bidder.  Without going into that whole scenario, let me just 
say that I won the bid and now I needed to figure out how the heck I was 
going to make everything happen within the time frame to which I had agreed. 
As an aside, had he agreed to sell it to me off eBay, he would have gotten 
more for the car than he did on eBay.

My immediate problem was sending (wire transfer) $1,500 as a deposit on a 
car that I had not seen and no one on VV had been close enough or had the 
time to look at on my behalf.  That took me a day to accomplish because I 
felt like I was now in the gambling phase of this whole deal.

This is enough for Part 1.

Pics from the eBay Ad are at:

http://pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/hmlinc@sbcglobal.net/my_photos

Attachments (if any) are scanned with anti-virus software.

Later, JR