[carnut4life]

Well here are a few pictures of my new pride and joy. Several of you probably figured it out in September but this is the car I finally purchased after two and a half years of looking for a Cranberry Red LS5/M22 1970 Chevelle that met all the criteria I was looking for, a documented, born with drivetrain car, with complete ownership history to fill the void of the first car I ever bought back in May of 1987. My first Chevelle was a red L34/M20 car that needed everything but over the years I decided a LS5 would be the perfect Chevelle for me since they were half the price of a LS6, still had a M22 and a were little rarer. I started seriously looking for a Chevelle in May of 2019 after I found a black LS5/M22 survivor in Atlantic, IA with 21k miles that I passed on that my buddy Mark ended up buying. Looking back I should have bought the black car but I didn’t have the space for it at the time but it lit a fire in me to start looking for a Cranberry Red or Shadow Gray to replace my first Chevelle. I started looking online every day and quickly realized finding a documented car with the original drivetrain would be a lot harder than I first thought since most were clones, restamps or had fake build sheets. In May of 2020 my girlfriend and I sold our 69 COPO Camaro so I finally had the space for a car but still wasn’t having any luck finding one so I finally put a want ad on the Yenko site looking for one. In February of 2021 a Shadow Gray LS5 popped up on the Minneapolis Craiglist so I drove up and looked at it that night. It had the nicest build sheet and window sticker that I’d ever seen but had some poor trunk, floor and quarter panel repairs I didn’t want to deal with so I passed on it and kicked myself all the way home figuring the next person to come look at it would probably buy it( they did the next day). Around this time my buddy Mark sent me the link to the thread of the red LS5 69L78 found back in 2013 and posted about here on the Yenko site. While looking through the thread I noticed a post by SS4REAL about his LS5 Chevelle so I sent him a message asking if he knew of any others like his. He didn’t but we agreed to stay in touch and over the next several month’s I kept Jim in the loop about how my search was going and found out he had just as much trouble finding his car back in 1998. In late August a friend give me a lead about a red LS6 Chevelle project with the original engine that was missing the original transmission and rear end. Waiting to hear back from the owner to find out if the carb and distributor were original(they weren’t) I found out the car had been sold 4 minutes earlier. The next day I emailed Jim and let him know about my good luck and he told me for the price of the project car he’d sell me his LS5. Since I really wanted an LS5 anyway and knew I wouldn’t be able to afford restoring the LS6 until I retired I went ahead and pulled the trigger on this car. A few days later Jim set me up with Jim from Enclosed Muscle Transport and three days later the car arrived here in Iowa. All I’ve done to the car so far is install an original looking shifter handle and knob on the Hurst shifter and purchase a dated carb, starter and water pump for it to get it as original as possible eventually. Last week the new F70/14 Goodyear Polyglas tires I bought from Rusty arrived so my son and I put the original wheels back on it and I’m thrilled with the stance of the car. The new personalized license plates for it showed up for it yesterday, while I was devastated that SS4REAL plates were already taken here in Iowa I was pretty happy that I was able to get 70SS454 by putting a O in the form instead of 0, especially since the zero in IA has a / through it. While I was originally hoping to find a car with black interior, since we put the Goodyear tires and original wheels back on it I’m really falling for the saddle interior and couldn’t be happier with the car. Sorry for the book but since I bored everyone about my search in my want ad for the last year and a half I wanted to update those who cared to read about it and to thank Jim for being such a great guy to deal with and tip my hat to him for taking such great care of the car for the last 23 years.