JCHansen1

I'm in Michigan, and I work with clients dealing with this routinely. You will wind up having your local county sheriff deputy come and examine the vehicle. Call them and get an appointment. They will run the VIN and see if anything comes back as previously stolen. There is a VIN inspection form they will fill out for you to take back to the SOS. In addition to this, the state will require an appraisal. If the vehicle appraises for less than $2500, you can avoid getting a bonded title, anything over $2500 and you'll need a bonded title, obtaining a bond from a bonding company in order for them to issue your title. Red tape for sure, but not impossible. Let me know if I can be of assistance, I handle lost title appraisal work in MI routinely, but you'll need the sheriff out first. Good luck.

I really don't know, but this is all I can think of when I see these radios...

Yes, I never heard anything past that. My guess is the whole thing is still tied up in some sort of litigation, or like the allegedly bogus Porsche that Seinfeld auctioned off with a settlement later with undisclosed terms, we'll probably never know anything until the vehicle resurfaces for sale sometime. I remember one spot of lore about this car was that it was dumped in the Atlantic off the Florida coast. I'm glad it sounds like that never happened...

My latest doozy was a '67 427 Corvette I was hired to authenticate this spring. It was sold about 7 years ago by a large auction house (won't say who), advertised as a frame off resto of a supposed 21,000 original mile car. Loaded with options including PS/PB, A/C, tilt-tele, headrests and side pipes. Numbers matching, of course... Sold at auction 7 years ago for 160k. Seller decided to sell it this year and was wanting about 190 for it. An interested buyer sent me to go through it, and while it was absolutley beautiful, I ultimately found a small block car built around a legitimate 427 engine, transmission and VIN tag. (yeah I know, never happened before). Naturally, my client ran for the hills and I ruined the seller's day (week? month?). Last I heard, high-five figures would buy the car, (and credit to the seller who made an honest mistake buying it and is fully transparent about what they now have). If you think the auction will step up voluntarily to cover the seller's massive losses I have a bridge to sell you... IMO some dealer ads are ridiculously more misleading and/or inaccurate than what I see at auctions, where typically the less said, the better.

Indeed. I'm reminded of a send-off gathering I attended at the Gilmore several years ago when their sports car exhibit was taken down. It was a rainy April afternoon, and a couple dozen owners came to gather their cars with enclosed transporters, with one notable exception. The owner of a stunning Gullwing 300SL chose to drive his back to metro Detroit that afternoon in the pouring rain, which I found quite impressive. Any number of things could have gone wrong, but to him using and enjoying the car was worth the risk. Good on him as far as I'm concerned...

Since I'm between British cars at the moment (and will be until my kids are out of college), my whitworth sockets and wrenches do little but gather dust, same as my SU wrench. Still keep a 4 carb motorcycle around, so sooner or later my sync gauges will be put to good use again.

Probably not without a Protecto-plate.

Check the block for a suffix code on the pad on the front passenger corner of the block. If it hasn't been milled off in a rebuild it can provide an indication of the original HP of the engine currently in the car. Bonus points for a block casting code and date, as some suffixes were sometines used more than one year and on different types of engines. These are commonly found on the back of the block, and if the ignition shielding is still there it will be harder but not impossible to see. There are several differences besides a tach in the 270 and up cars compared to the lower powered ones you can read about if you suspect you have a high HP car on your hands.

There are differences. 5500 would be a 230 or 245hp car. The 270hp cars are like a 6300 rpm redline. There are also early and late tachs in 60 with some slight cosmetic differences but no change in redline, it was engine dependent.

Im surprised this hasn't come up eariler in the thread. The device is called a thickness tester. Boiled down, it's an electronic device that sends a signal through the finish to the metal beneath. Think like sonar. Thickness is measured and reported in a specified unit, most commonly mils. I use one fairly regularly when dealing with cars with claimed original paint and while it is handy, it's not a silver bullet. It's a tool, and like most tools, only as good as the person using it. These things get inept appraisers in trouble from time to time for making outlandish claims about a car that are not true. People don't always know what the readings mean, and the good, accurate models require periodic calibration, which is not always done. Anytime I'm dealing with a reputed original paint car the meter is usually last check, after I've evaluated the entire car for inappropriate overspray, masking lines, blend lines, etc. Naturally, when you think of all the different orders and processes different car makers used to paint and assemble their cars, there are no hard and fast rules to using these, interperting measurements is a little more "art" than science, and having an understanding of how different cars were built can be very useful. Even new cars throw curves at you. I can meter an entire car and have readings be reasonably consistent throughout, then find a quarter panel or hood with double the paint on it, or more. Further examination will usually reveal a blend in a jamb or something, and it becomes obvious that something was reshot either at the factory or dealer after being damaged in transit. Having worked in new car sales for a season of my life I can tell you they don't all arrive off those transporters unscathed...

I wasn't going to wade into this, but John is absolutely right, and here's a real world example that I just encountered... I was recently hired by a lawyer to appraise a pretty nice 57 T-Bird for an estate. There's a bit of a story, but the short version is that somewhere along the way there was also a 59 Squarebird owned by this estate at some point in the past. The title for the 57 was lost, but among the records a title was found for a 59. The attorney didn't know the difference between the two, and thought they had a title for the car in question. No knock on the attorney- while they were studying the law, I was busy reading about McNamara's Lifeguard Design campaign and learning how to differentiate between Littlebirds and Squarebirds. Anyway, they hired an appraiser to come in, and rather than tell the attorney they had a title mess on their hands, he appraised the car as a 59, using 1959 comps and pricing guide information to come to the laughably low value of $13,000 for what is easily a mid-thirties car. His written appraisal came with a cash offer to buy the car for appraised value of course- what a generous guy! Luckily, the attorney smelled a rat and called me for a second opinion. The car is now appraised properly and they are working to obtain a correct title for the car. Make no mistake, this appraiser knew exactly what he was doing, and was seeking to deliberately manipulate the uninformed. They should not be in business. I also had another client last year trying to buy a fairly rare and hard to find Porsche and he hired me to help him vet a potential purchase. He was cagey with me right out of the gate, and pretty difficult to work with, which is really odd for me. I sent him my service contract, and he made me add a lengthy provision that forbade me from contacting or speaking with the seller at any point, and also forbade me from making an offer to buy the car regardless of whether my client purchased it or not. I was happy to oblige his demand, but not without finding out why first. Finally, I found out he had been searching high and low for this particular model and another guy he'd hired to inspect and appraise a different potential buy had worked an end around and bought that car out from under him. Another flipper moonlighting as an appraiser. I'm a big believer that appraisers should not be in the buying and selling business as well, even though it happens all the time. John is also correct that there are guidelines about this sort of thing in the standards set forth in the Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice. Competent appraisers work hard to operate within those standards, while lesser "appraisers" have never even heard of the USPAP.

Sorry to hear this. I have a favorite Bob story... Three years ago I was looking at a '61 Olds located in Bob's showroom, which at the time was in the lower level of the McKinley Grand Hotel in Canton. Bob suggested we take a ride. Being in the basement of this hotel, Bob had engineered a "reinforced" 4-post drive-on hoist to raise the car up from his level to street level (the loading bay behind the hotel) so he could get cars in and out. It was a pretty neat idea, but I was a little nervous watching the car go out this way. We got the car out and I had a drive, but I traded places with him about a block away from the hotel, as there was no way I was driving the car back onto the hoist for our descent back into the darkness of his storage area behind the cars on display. From the passenger seat, I was mildly terrified as Bob drove back into a very dark hole, but trying to play it cool. Once the car was about a quarter of the way onto the hoist the ramps disappeared from my view, and you couldn't see anything at all in front of you, which was somewhat disorienting. I let out a nervous groan. Imagine driving on a road where there is no road, just darkness. Bob confidently drove straight onto the hoist- and there we were, maybe 8 or 10 feet above the ground on the hoist. All I could imagine was Bob hitting the brakes too hard, and the inertia stored in that 4,000 pound Oldsmobile as it stopped on the ramps ripping the reinforcements from the vertical I-beams the hoist was secured to, sending the hoist, the car, -and us- crashing to the ground. Fortunately, that didn't happen, and as Bob's helper lowered us slowly back down into the basement, I have never in my life been happier to have a car back on the ground as I was in that moment. Sitting in the driver's seat, cool as a cucumber, Bob saw my nervousness and had a good-natured laugh at my expense. Later, even though I wanted to get back on the road home, and it was around closing time, Bob and I sat and talked cars in his office for maybe an hour. We had a really nice chat, and I'm glad I took the time to get to know him a little. He had lots of good stories, and he really scared the heck out of me that day- I'll never forget it.

Sidebar to a good post... ... I grew up around Ford 8 and 9N tractors- in fact, the first Ford engines I ever worked on as a youngster in the early '90s were tractor engines. As a kid, I always had a little thing for Oliver tractors from the '40s. I thought they were good-looking, for a tractor anyways, but my dad always held them in low regard compared to the Ford's.

A very good client of mine in the UK sent me a copy of this movie a few years ago. I'd never heard of it either, but it's fantastic!

Man, the OP made such good points. Had a similar experience about two months ago with an Olds 442 W-30 that supposedly had a wonderful provenance and "known history" from new. Verbally anyway. Zero documentation to back up a word of it. On close examination, it was full of wrong parts and was a provable (not probable) re-body to boot. But it sure was a beautiful car, nice and shiny, with a mid six-figure asking price. Unfortunately, told by the right salesman, somebody is going to fall for it and pay too much money for a figment of someone's imagination. This is why younger buyers in the hobby sometimes make me nervous. A 30 or 40 year old can sometimes have a warped sense of time compared to someone twice their age. In the case of the Olds- it's been around since the Nixon administration, yet the buyer may have been born two decades after Nixon left office. My point is these cars are older than I think some buyers mentally really grasp, with big chunks of history simply lost to time. To a 40 year old, 1997 almost seems like six months ago, but in reality, it was 25 years ago (I'm 42, I oughta know). Complicate that with a younger buyers mindset (because of the world they were raised in) that these days they can simply point and click on a computer screen and buy whatever they want, delivered right to their door within 2 days, with little research or due diligence other than what they might read about an item on the internet (which has proven 100% trustworthy so far). That same buyer, who is used to that sort of transaction, decides they want an old car, and becomes a remote bidder in a classic car auction, placing bids through a computer from home, spending big bucks on a car they know little about, based on whatever the auction listing chooses to share, which is often a tiny, tiny fraction of the history of a particular car. To be sure, there are many really well-documented cars out there with excellent documentation and provenance, and they rightfully should sometimes command premium interest and values, but there are also a lot of phantoms. In the context of our hobby, that Olds is only middle-aged, in a hobby now well over 100 years old. Time compounds these problems sometimes, folks fooling around with pre-war, brass era and such can really have their work cut out for them trying to prove some of the information about their cars. But here's some good news... We also have a hobby where most of this information and history is not vital to most cars- the overwhelming majority of the cars in our hobby can just be bought, driven, loved and enjoyed, without worrying about all this stuff. Thank goodness, because I suppose if that wasn't the case I'd probably take up some other passion in life.

Certainly both locations are out of the way. My client said that Bend, OR is on the road to nowhere, and frankly so is Pentwater, MI, which is about halfway up the Lake Michigan coastline.

No it has not... A client of mine recently got a quote from one of Intercity's worthy competitors for shipping a car (enclosed) from Pentwater, MI to Bend, OR- over $3k. Nearly fell out of my chair...

Intercity Lines. www.intercitylines.com

A long established dealer in the absoolute middle-of-nowhere Illinois. You send them money, you're going to get a car. Careful vetting of any potential purchase would be well advised before committing to a deal. Others have commented in greater detail on other threads than I'll go into here.

Heck yes! Love HGF novels. In 1990 I was a distractable sixth grader who was always struggling to pay attention to my math teacher, Mr. Harney. Trying to find a way to reach me, knowing how much I loved cars, he gave me an old dogeared copy of 'Street Rod', and from then on, I was hooked. I brought it back and he gave me another one (hated math, but I've always been a voracious reader). I never forgot his kindness, trying to get through to a kid who really hated math. I worked a little harder in his class after that, not wanting to disappoint my new friend.

Yes, agree this site is nonsense. Walk away. As written about before, we have some shady characters running a "dealership" in Big Rapids, MI. They are stealing images from at least two other dealers, GR Auto Gallery and Seven Hills Motor Cars in Ohio. They're hunting for people foolish enough to wire them deposit money or a full purchase price if they can get it. "We'll ship it to you, seven days to inspect, send it back, blah blah blah..." Not two days after I posted about that one, another one has popped up in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Was asked to go there and ten seconds into looking at their website knew it was a scam. Super high pressure to wire money TODAY! for the Porsche (another one) my client called about. Luckily he's not sent a dime. I had a real problem with another one of these outfits in Flint, MI a few years ago, they took a client of mine in Spain for $4000 in deposit money to hold a car that not only they didn't have, but a car I knew very well. Called the actual owner, who assured me the car was resting quietly in his garage, most certainly not for sale. This was a six-figure car, and when I googled street viewed their address, it came up as a boarded-up abandoned gas station in the middle of a near demilitarized zone in the heart of Flint. Just the place people keep six-fig cars for sale. You think the fella in Spain ever got his money back from these scammers? Nope. Eventually, their site was taken down, but I got calls about cars there for months before it finally stopped. Callers would mention the dealer's name and my first question was "please tell me you haven't sent them money yet!" These scammers do this because it works. For every person who smells a scam, another one wires them money, none the wiser they're getting screwed. The two dealers here in MI that are causing trouble now are https://www.warnerautosales.com/ and https://goodfcars.com/ Michigan Attorney General has been notified by me about them both. Steer clear. Drumbob, sorry! It's not normally this hard to find reputable sellers. Keep your eyes open and keep asking these questions, your money will stay safe!

I agree with most of the numbers everyone else has posted here. We had a local one running around my area. Looked similar to this one condition wise, but the engine had been rebuilt and the entire engine bay and engine itself was spotless and "judge ready" correct and clean. Tired paint, tired chrome, tired original interior, so when the owner lifted the hood the wow factor was quite unexpected. (He'd also been through the brakes, suspension and steering, so the wear bits underneath were fresh too, but you couldnt tell that at street level). I thought it was awesome, and wouldn't have chnaged a thing.

Hows that for an endorsement!

Is there a chance the Fountainhead Museum in Fairbanks may know of someone trustworthy who can help her? I don't know anyone there, but it's a thought.

Total scam, I just turned in a "dealer" to the Michigan attorney general for operating the same sort of scam supposedly out of Big Rapids Michigan. The "dealer" pirated classic car photographs from other legitimate dealer websites, and is offering the cars for sale on their own website, for extraordinary attractive prices. It's the same old sthick, they will send it to you and if you don't like it send it back to us. One of the cars they were selling happened to be a Porsche I had gone through for a client. I had a good chuckle over that, as I know exactly where that car is and it most certainly was not for sale. Then I started making calls. This has been going on for a long time, here in Michigan, this is the third criminal outfit I've come across pulling such scams. They will wait until a low-level dealer closes their lot, and then use their name and address (with a new phone number) to build a fraudulent dealer website. There's no activity physically at the car lot, so the state of Michigan is typically none the wiser until a guy like me turns in the outfit. They don't even care if you wire them the full purchase price, even if they can get you to wire them $1,000 deposit money, it's easy money for them, selling cars that don't exist.