This is the kind of someone else’s project I wouldn’t mind owning. Looks like all of the hard work has been done and everything updated to reasonably modern. The Corvair engine is a substantial upgrade from the usual VW four-lunger. The guy obviously knows Corvairs, so I’m sure this one is right. All in all, a good…

The Cord 812 wasn’t built by ‘80s GM.

The car’s perfectly usable as a nice day driver without the hardtop. The hardtop stays on my 560SL when it’s in winter storage and then only for as long as it takes for me to round up help to take it off in the spring.

And I would certainly buy my 560SL again over this car. Still, finding a good SL, either R107 or R129, for $6K is not easy, though not impossible either.

Not sure I wouldn’t rather have the 1992 version without the Northstar’s headgasket problems.

I’m going to take them at their word the hood scoop is removable. The badge? History. A hot rod that car ain’t. (In fairness, neither is the Mercedes SL-class, in either R107 or R129 flavors.) But with the Northstar, assuming you can keep head bolts and head gaskets in it, it’s not a bad driver at all, I would expect.

Yech bleagh.

Nice looking build aside form being lowered a bit too much for my taste. But...even though it’s in Colorado, that Wisconsin plate says “rust”, and a very close inspection, especially of the floor rebuild, needs to be done.

The last time I had a Ford with a 2.3 liter turbocharged four was a 1983 Thunderbird Turbo. A lot of fun to drive, but I unloaded it at 43K miles after having eaten a turbocharger and a camshaft (in two separate $3000 repairs) and with a cracked exhaust manifold.

All the folks pooh-poohing the Buick V6 don’t know what they’re talking about. That engine kicks some serious ass, on top of being unkillable.

Oh yeah. $2900 for a fun car like this? Even with the missing pieces, this is a car you can take out and enjoy for not a lot of cash. NP.

*rimshot*

COTD material right here.

Merciful $DEITY. It might be worth that much money if it was in pristine condition, needing absolutely nothing. In the shape it’s in?

There’s a Renaissance faire performer around here who does a rope trick He hands out three pieces of rope, different length, for men in the audience to check out. When he takes them back, he asks, in turn, for the guy who has the long one to hold his up and say “I’ve got a big one!”, and the guy with the middle one to…

One time, I called not the cops, but the company, on a trucker. At one spot along this route, the speed limit drops form 65 to 35, and then a stop light, all in the space of about half a mile. No problem if you’re paying attention, but this trucker didn’t. He blew into the 35 zone and swerved his way through traffic…

True. That’s true of any classic Mercedes, though: you either wrench on it yourself or else you pay someone lots of money to do it for you. This one, fortunately, is well in the range of something you can wrench on yourself. If you don’t know much about wrenching on cars, I can think of far worse ones to learn on, too.

Even the high-spec complicated ones hold up well if you don’t beat them to shit and keep the maintenance going. The 600K mile vehicle I mentioned was an S350...

There was a Mercedes diesel for sale around here north of 600K. Never let the miles scare you on one, especially of this vintage. If the maintenance has been kept up, it’ll run for several hundred thousand more miles.

Mercedes products make 500K miles all the time. Hell, drive that one 20K miles more and you’re eligible for the *second* high mileage award (500K kilometers).