I've got two that I can't believe I cut up. The first was a 68 Firebird 400 coupe 4 speed. I bought it to cut the quarters off of and use on my convertible (yes you can do that). The car should have been restored, but at the time, I was just looking for original GM quarters and the weren't making full repops yet.
The second car was a 69 Bird that I got for free off of Craigslist. The guy who owned it was at the end of his lease on his apartment (as in last day) and he had to get rid of it. He said he would give it away to the first person that could be there to trailer it out of there. It even had a clean title. He was going to make a mad max car out of it and had welded an exhaust pipe to the deck lid just to make it look stupid. The interior was covered in fake fur and fuzzy velvet. I managed to borrow a trailer and got some help from a buddy. When we got there, we asked the guy who had it if it ran. He said he thought it would if we threw a battery in it. We tossed a battery in it, but it didn't even turn over. Since we were out of time, we just trailered it to my friends house. We were just about to start parting it out when I noticed a push button under the steering column.
It started and ran right away when I pushed the magic button. I shut it down and got out. It was starting to snow outside. To my surprise, my buddy hopped in and did doughnuts all over the road in front of his house, then brought it back into the garage.
I can remember taking an air chisel to get the windshield out and sawzalling the roof off and then cutting the entire rear section off and flipping it over to get the rearend out of it. We had people coming over all night to buy parts as we took them off. Since we were part of large Firebird car club, we posted an email to our club list about our find, so there was no lack of interest. I can even remember telling some folks that we wouldn't get to removing some parts that night, so they tore them off themselves. There was very little on that car that went unsold or unused by us.
Had I examined the car more closely before starting, I would have realized that it had a very solid shell that would have needed little work to restore it. In the end, I think my friend and I got about $2K for all of the parts and we also kept some. It even had good doors and fenders. But hey, it was a heck of a lot of fun.
OJ
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