As the years flew by, Fred never gave up on searching for the right Corvette to materialize. “One day I recognized a familiar shape underneath a car cover. The car ended up being a 1966 Vette coupe. The owner wanted $16,500 for it, and I negotiated on a fair trade of $6,000 plus a beautiful custom spiral staircase and railings for the deck. I owned a staircase company after retiring from the fire department, so this was an easy trade for me. The car had bad orange paint, but it also had a police-package 350 engine in it, so it was still a fun car to drive.”

Fred’s ’66 sat around for a while as he made some upgrades and maintained it, but a string of injuries while being a fireman is what exponentially extended the car’s downtime. Fred had his Corvette stored in Santa Monica, California, which is roughly only 40 miles away from his home in Santa Ana, but that drive can oftentimes turn into an hours-long fiasco spent sitting still in heavy Los Angeles traffic. Fred’s friends back home were getting tired of him talking about his car that they have yet to see, so when Fred left town to take care of a family matter, his buddies made the drive to Santa Monica to pick the car up and bring it back to his house so they could figure out a way to get it back on the road. Now that’s the kind of friends every car guy needs in his corner!

After Fred reassured his neighbors in Santa Monica that the guys who “broke into his garage and stole his car” were friends of his, all plans to contact the authorities were dropped. Good neighbors are just as valuable as good friends, and after the car was “stolen” and dropped off at his house in Santa Ana, the Corvette sat for another few years before he even thought of contacting a shop to professionally rebuild it. Enter Old Anvil Speed Shop in Orange, California. Fred knew Old Anvil would be more than capable of taking care of everything his Corvette needed, from installing a new engine, dialing in a sporty suspension system, and completely restoring the exterior and interior. The guys at Old Anvil had their work cut out for them, and Fred was confident the result would be nothing short of spectacular.

Out went the old 350, and in its place a brand-new GM 454 crate engine that was decked out with performance goods in the way of a Holley mid-mount serpentine system and Terminator X Stealth 4150 throttle body, headers and exhaust from Doug’s Headers, cooling components courtesy of DeWitt’s and SPAL, along with one-off accessories that were fabricated in-house at Old Anvil’s facility. A TREMEC TKX five-speed transmission was soon paired to the fresh big-block, so Fred could once again experience the gratifying feeling of manually punching through gears.

Next, the Old Anvil crew assembled the components necessary to overhaul the factory Corvette frame. The frontend received fresh control arms and QA1 coilovers, and the rear was blessed with a fiberglass monoleaf spring and coilover setup, as well as fresh Wilwood braking products to promptly slow the car’s roll. With so many new parts going into his car, Fred wanted to add a true vintage set of wheels to finish off the chassis renovation. Of course, nothing less than original 1970s-era American Racing Torq Thrust IIs would suffice.