Built on a Dare - 1964 Chevrolet Chevy II | The Online Automotive Marketplace

“Children wish fathers looked but with their eyes; fathers that children with their judgment looked; and either may be wrong,” old Billy Shake-a-spear told us in his Midsummer Night’s Dream theater extravaganza. It could well be that the idea that both parties could benefit from seeing the world from the others’ eyes–one of wide-eyed innocence, the other of experience and cynicism–is a theme that transcends time. Yet, it also seems clear that the Bard’s dad never dared him to build a straight-line Nova from a pile of rusty parts.

“I used to tell my son my car stories from when I was younger,” Scott Goldman of Suffern, New York, told us recently. “I’d get a car somewhere, fix it on the weekend, drive it all week until it blew up, then I’d fix another one up. I’d go play at the track at the drop of a hat. And even now, I could still do that if I wanted.” That playtime included, as you might suspect, an early Nova. After seeing a couple of hot numbers running around town when he was in high school, and admiring their fitness for purpose, he finally managed to secure one. “Back in 1974 or ’75, I had a ’66 Nova that I put a freshly built 302 in. Everything under the hood was brand new.”

Wanting to test the mettle of the metal, he went to his local track–Englishtown, in Old Bridge, New Jersey. “I launched it, snapped a rod bolt around the 60-foot mark, and that was it–everything came out the bottom. But I didn’t realize it, and instead of pulling to the side, I rolled the quarter. Slicked down the entire lane, and the track had to close for cleanup. They kicked me out and told me never to come back. When I got home, I threw the engine at the curb for the garbage men.”

Other parts, and cars, came and went over the decades, until Scott had quite a collection of pieces, parts, components and cars tucked away at the house. The problem with these adventures is that, decades later, they start to sound like fish stories, where the fish grows with each retelling. “I was a single dad, and raised my son Richard by myself. So he was raised around cars, but time to work on them wasn’t always there. He had always heard that I did paint and body work, but never believed it. When Richard was in college, someone gave him a Bronco. Well, one weekend while he was away, I painted it for him. Prep and paint, done in 48 hours. But he came home and said, ‘Yeah, right.’

“A few years later, he looked at all my stuff and said that I should get rid of it, since I wasn’t going to do anything with it anyway. So I built this car to prove that I could still do it. I guess you could say I did it as a dare.”

Out among the pieces and parts, Goldman the elder chose this ’64 Chevy II to build up and prove his point. And why not? It was light, the two-door sedan body meant that it was stiffer than a comparable hardtop, and it had some local racing provenance, though that provenance couldn’t be confirmed. The previous owner had built it into a purpose-built strip machine of sorts, with a ’47 Dodge truck front axle and painted the loveliest shade of brown the ’70s could muster.

That owner then got bored, moved on with his life, field-stripped the little Deuce of any worthwhile parts, and let it sit under a tree for 20 years in the changeable weather of Connecticut so that rampant oxidation bubbled beneath the paint and burst through. Even tetanus bacteria feared this race vet’s corroded steel flanks.

“It was left to rot in the elements–covered in surface rust,” describes Scott. “The quarters looked like they were radiused with a chisel. The racing driveline was missing–engine, trans, all gone–and the 12-bolt rear end he once had in there was replaced with a solid-axle Corvette rear. The front seat looked like it was taken from a van, as did the filthy shag carpeting on the floor.” Yet something about it spoke to Scott when he saw it in 2004: “It made me want to build a hot rod for the first time in years.”

Even so, it sat until three years ago, when son Richard’s verbalized disbelief and taunts finally prodded the old man into action. “Everything had to be redone. It needed new quarters, new fenders, an interior. I redid the front end. I went through it from soup to nuts.” Its adherence to the past went as far as keeping the solid-axle Gasser vibe, but no more: “I originally intended to bring her back the way she was decades ago, but since I could find nothing of her history, I got to use my imagination. Her old brown coat of paint seemed too much like the sleepers everyone tries to build nowadays, so making it bright purple with a white interior seemed about as subtle as this car’s exhaust note.”

Once the body was media-blasted down to bare metal (and there was actually metal worth saving beneath the dodgy paint), reproduction front fenders and rear quarters were spliced in; a combination of leading, filler and glazing were used to get the bare metal looking fresh and straight. A DeVilbiss MBC and trim/touchup gun were used along with an HVLP gun to apply four coats of epoxy primer, block-sanded between coats from 600- down to 1000-grade. Once everything was blocked and straight, pal Mike Jones applied five coats of DuPont Chromabase custom-mixed ’65 Chevy Evening Orchid with a generous helping of Violet Pearl, a color mixed by local pigmentologist Dan Seville. After the clear was sprayed, the resulting finish was wet-sanded, using paper between 800- and 1500-grade, then buffed to a lustrous shine.

Most of the trim went missing years before–bumpers, door handles, any exterior item that may once have had anything resembling luster about it was long gone–but on the upside, anything that was shared with a Super Sport was easily located through any number of mail-order catalogs. It was the lower-model Chevy II items–things like the rear-quarter emblems and the trim piece on the leading edge of the hood–that required some digging and luck.

The interior was handled via a PUI vinyl interior kit; Scott and friend Sheldon Knapp installed the complete interior, with period-correct Nova seats, a brace of under-dash gauges and a Sun Super Tach front-and-center atop the instrument panel. Seat belts were added as well, because… well, keep reading.

With the flashy stuff out of the way, we turn to the driveline. “I had a small-block Chevy sitting around–I don’t overbore, so it was a standard 350 out of a ’69 Chevelle or an Impala or something. I had some carburetors and intakes lying around as well.” The small-block runs a set of Keith Black pistons on stock GM rods topped with standard cast-iron Chevy head castings with 63cc chambers and little more done to them than a port clean-up, a set of 1.98-inch intake valves, and a full set of 1.6 roller rockers to help gulp a little more air. The solid, flat-tappet cam is plenty hairy by contemporary standards, but doesn’t seem to cross the threshold into sheer insanity for the street.

Scott’s horsepower claims for the small-block point to somewhere well north of 500 hp, seeming more than a bit optimistic to us, and since there are no dyno sheets to back them up, we’re not going to delve any deeper into that discussion. But Scott swears up and down that it’s a legit combo: “At normal operating temperatures, it won’t detonate,” he tells us. “If it gets up to 185 degrees, it’ll start to ping. But I’ll drive that car anywhere.” Hooker fenderwell headers fill up most of the rest of the engine bay, which was sprayed the same color as the body; the exhaust is handled by a pair of 49-cent glass-packs, the token fiberglass strands that act as sound suppression doubtless blown out eons ago.

The close-ratio Muncie M21 four-speed was sourced from a deal in Michigan somewhere, prompting Scott to report that “the most difficult part of this whole restoration was getting the Z-bar to actuate the clutch properly using the parts that were installed years ago.” The 12-bolt rear housing is out of a ’70 Chevelle–I found it in a dirt-track car that someone was junking,” Scott informs us. “It’s been narrowed 21⁄2 inches. I sent it to Moser in Indiana, to get it narrowed, plus the axles installed. A friend of mine is a truck driver; his route took him that way, so he dropped it off for me. They turned it around the same day, and he picked it up for me on his way home. Same day!”

And then there’s the chassis and suspension. “That Dodge truck front axle on leaf springs was the best part of the whole car,” Scott says. “It was a Gasser back in the ’60s. I added the ladder bars; they’re holding the rest together.” There are a couple of reinforcements under the hood, which stretch from cowl to the leading edge of the fabricated front clip, but there are no subframe connectors, no roll bar… nothing. Isn’t he afraid that the body is going to torque at launch and the windshield is going to pop out, or the unit-body is going to pretzel itself into uselessness? “I’m a firm believer,” Scott tells us, “that if you keep the doors shut, you’re not twisting it.”

It will surprise no one that he hasn’t taken it to his local track–still Englishtown, after all these years. It seems that Scott isn’t keen on tempting fate by dancing down the 1320 in his current box-a-Nova: “I’ve been back a couple of times since they kicked me out in the ’70s, but… let’s just say I haven’t asked ’em to do any favors for me.” Letting this monster run down the quarter sans roll cage might fall under the “favors” category. Thus far, it’s been restricted to cruise nights, and the inevitable street brawls that come between home and the parking lot at the show.

What’s more, it’s served as inspiration for others. “I met a man at a swap meet a while back, and he was building a Nova. I asked him what he planned to do with it, and he told me he had pictures of a car that served as his inspiration.” He pulled out the pictures, and… “It was my car. I never expected that; he had more photos of my car than I did.”

From rolling wreck to how you see it on our pages, Scott Goldman’s efforts (and those of a select group of friends) took roughly nine months from start to finish. That has actually got a lot to do with the car’s appeal in our eyes–a group of friends reviving a cast-off race car and turning it into something that is once again useful. We also liked the rough-and-tumble vintage ’60s/’70s street machine vibe. Though it has the aura of a strip stormer of yore, Scott is content to keep it on the street, where, he says, it tends to get noticed.

“I’ve let Richard drive it a couple of times in the two years since it’s been done. I caravanned with him somewhere; I was following him. I saw him get on it, and suddenly I see he starts to drift off to the left. He let off and continued on his way. When we parked, he told me, ‘You know, it pulls to the left.’ So I told him, ‘You know that, when you got on it, you had the front wheels off the ground, right?’ He just looked at me. Now he likes it; he says it’s scary.”

Built on a Dare - 1964 Chevrolet Chevy II | The Online Automotive Marketplace | Hemmings (2024)