Used Corvettes For Sale: How To Find The Right Corvette

Posted on March 5th, 2009 by User Image

Used corvette for sale, when your looking to buy a used corvette you’ve got to think about a few things, and it’s just a bit different from any other used car, rather your looking for a project car, or a driver.

I will attempt to give you some information to help you in the endeavor buy a used corvette, hopefully I can save you a little agony when it comes to the purchase of your used corvette.

I am a huge proponent of corvettes, I love them from top to bottom, and inside out, the corvette is America’s sports car, but it’s also a muscle car, and no other car on the planet is both, the corvette is special.

So let’s get in to the hunt for your used corvette, the tips that I will give will help you locate just the car you want, a corvette that you can be proud of, a corvette that you can love.

Let’s get in to the meat and potatoes of this article, I will cover very briefly a few tips to help you find the perfect corvette, just the one you want, I will start with the body, and work through the rest of it.

First of all you’ll need to do a walk around, and get a general idea of the car your looking at, below I will give a bullet list of things to inspect on the car, these things will help save you time and money.

Body Inspection List:

After you walk around is finished you’ll need to take a good look at these things.

1.Look closely at the alignment of the body panels, looking for gaps the look to wide, or to narrow, misaligned panels usually indicate that the car has been wrecked.
2.Look for cracks in the fiber glass, hair line cracks called stress cracks mean body repair.
3.Open the doors and watch for them to drop and you do it, this indicates that the hinges need to be replaced.
4.If the corvette has a removable hardtop, take it off of the car and see if it’s digging in to the body of the car, this means body work, and new seals for the top.
5.Look for stress cracking around the door handles, and locks, it commonly happens there.
6.If the corvette your looking at has pop-up head lights, make sure that they pop-up, also look at the openings for stress cracking.

The list above will give you a good place to start, remember I said that it would be a short list, it doesn’t cover everything, just a few of the major things that you should look at.

Now I’ll give a few ideas on the mechanical part of the car, this will of course require a test drive of the car, if the car doesn’t run, you of course can’t do some of these ideas on this list.

1.Open the hood of the car, look for leaks around the valve covers, intake manifold, water pump, and carburetor, leaks here indicates that you need to replace gaskets.
2.While your under the hood look at the wiring to see if it’s burned, or has had an ugly repair job, this will tell you that you need to replace the engine compartment wiring harness, a good reason to save money.
3.Look at the brake lines, the ones you can see, a brake fluid leak will remove the paint where it leaks, it should be easy to see, this indicates that you need to replace brake lines, another reason to save money.
4.Take the car for a test drive, and listen for the transmission to make grinding noises, and watch for it to pop out of gear, popping out of gear indicates scynchros are going out, and you’ll need to rebuild the transmission, a whining sound is normal in most old corvette transmissions.
5.Step on the brakes and see if the pulsate, grab, or grind, all of the conditions indicate that the brakes need to be rebuilt.
6.As you go over bumps in the road listen for popping and cracking sounds to come for the front of the car, this will also happen during a sharp turn one way, or the other, and it indicates that you need to replace ball joints, another good reason to save money.

This should help you find just the car your looking for, and possibly save a little cash in the process, I hope it helps you in buying your used corvette, but most of all I hope you enjoy reading it.

Technorati Tags: corvettes, Corvettes, autorevival.com, muscle car blog, used corvettes for sale, classic corvettes for sale, old corvettes for sale, zo6 corvettes for sale, xr1 corvettes for sale, muscle cars for sale