Bertha is dead, long live Bertha

So, whoever said that time heals all wounds must not have studied physics.  If that person had studied physics, they would know about entropy.  Look it up.  It basically says that, unless you do something to prevent it, everything only ever gets worse.  Now you know why physicists always look depressed.

Well, I didn't do enough to prevent it, and Bertha got a whole lot worse.  I kept thinking that some day, when I had all the proper facilities and the means, I would fix her up the way she deserved.  In the mean time, she was rusting and rusting and rusting, and by the end I felt like she was too far gone to save.  Pretty much every major body panel was rotted out, and the frame had actually gotten so flimsy that I probably shouldn't have had it on the road.  Anything can be fixed, but I felt like by the time everything had been replaced that needed to be, it would be like the guy who says he has his grandfather's hammer, but he's replaced the handle three times and the head once.  It wouldn't be the same car.  So, me and Bertha enjoyed more than 100,000 great miles together, but I decided it was time to let her go.

Well ... that is to say, I decided it was time to let go of the rotten frame and body.  I pulled her 402 big block out, with a plan to rebuild it and transplant it into a new car, so that Bertha can live on.  The intended purpose of this blog is to document the project for anyone who's interested in following along.

I stumbled on to Bertha through dumb luck when I bought her.  Once I started thinking seriously about transferring her motor into something new, I had to decide just exactly what that "something new" was going to be.  I knew it would be a Chevy, of course, but that still left a lot of possibilities.  I didn't want to do a Chevelle or a Camaro.  Those are beautiful cars, but I feel like their popularity drives up their prices too much, and I wanted to do something different, anyway.  Something that you don't see as much.

At first I thought I wanted to do a 1968-72 Nova.  But I'd also always liked 1967 Impalas, the two-door hardtops.  Then I started to get into hot rods.  For a long time I really wanted to do a hot rod.  Finally I started to realize that a hot rod wouldn't be real practical for daily use, and whatever I build, it's important to me that I should be able to drive it regularly and reliably, just like I've always done with Bertha.  I think I could build a hot rod to be reliable, but with no trunk space and the engine exposed to the rain and other things like that, it just doesn't seem like a practical choice.  So, I started thinking about other options.  I think 1962-64 Impalas are real cool, and I thought about something along those lines, maybe a '64 Biscayne.  After a while, though, I was back on to 1968-72 Novas.

I love looking through photos of old race cars from the '60s, and one of my favorite series is the SCCA Trans Am series from the late '60s and early '70s.  The Trans Am series most famously featured Camaros and Mustangs, but it also featured Cougars, Firebirds, Barracudas, Challengers, Darts, Javelins, Corvairs, and--on a couple rare occasions--Novas.  Those Novas were the 1966-67 body style, but I thought it would be real cool to do a "what-if" 1968-72 style Nova done up like a Trans Am racer.  But, Trans Am cars were limited to 305 (5.0L) cubic inch motors, and it just didn't seem right to put a big block into a car that was supposed to look like a Trans Am car.  It's just too much weight up front for such a small car, especially if it's supposed to be able to handle at all.

So, the more I thought about it, the only old race cars I could think of that ran big blocks and made turns were NASCAR cars and Can-Am cars.  While it would be pretty amazing to have a daily driver modelled on a classic Can-Am car, that still didn't sound real practical, or affordable.  That pretty much left NASCAR.

Chevrolet didn't have much of a presence in NASCAR during the second half of the '60s, but there were 1970-72 Monte Carlos, like Bertha, in NASCAR in the first half of the '70s.  And I knew that there had been a few 1965 Impalas raced, too.  So when it came down to time to buy a car, I was looking for either a 1971-72 Monte Carlo (I don't like the 1970 Montes as much), or a 1965 Impala.  I was having a devil of a time deciding what to get.  The Impala has more class, in my mind, and I liked that about it.  On the other hand, there's something really cool about the Monte Carlo's early-'70s tackiness.  One practical advantage of the Impala is that, in 1965, NASCAR was still requiring the cars to run showroom-stock bodies, whereas by the early '70s the bodies were being modified, especially around the wheel wells.  So that meant that it would be easier to get an "authentic" look with a '65 Impala without chopping up the body.

Well, this story's already long, but to make it a little bit shorter, a '65 came up on Craigslist, and it looked like it had potential.  The purchase process was a bit drawn-out, with a bunch of separate trips to go look at it, similar to the purchase of the original Bertha.  I had about talked myself out of this one, but then the owner said that he would knock a bunch of money off the asking price if he could keep the engine and transmission.  I didn't want the engine and transmission, anyway, so that suddenly made the car more attractive.  When I found out that it already had a 12-bolt rearend under it, that made it a little more attractive, still.  I was still debating whether a 1965 Impala was really what I wanted, but finally I decided that it was and I pulled the trigger.  I am now the owner of a 1965 Impala.  "All it needs" is some body work, paint, an engine, a transmission, some suspension modifications, and an interior.  Nothing that a massive investment of time and money can't fix.  But the body and frame look to be pretty solid, and I think it's a good starting point.  A lot of what it needs is stuff that I would have wanted to re-do anyway.

One other thing I should probably clarify is that I am not actually building a race car.  I want the car to have the look and the feel of an old race car, but in the end I still want it to be practical, reliable transportation that I can enjoy driving every day.

So.  All that being said ... here we go.  Like I said earlier, I will attempt to use this blog to document the project.  I wanted to write these first two entries to kind of "set the stage," but in the future I think that entries will be mostly just pictures with captions, and maybe a few paragraphs here and there.  We'll see how it goes.

Bertha's engine has already been pulled and stripped down to the block. Her transmission is sitting on a pallet in the garage. Last weekend, what was left of the Monte Carlo was hauled away, and the Impala is now in the garage.  Nothing to do now but a whole bunch of work.

Bertha is dead.  Long live Bertha!