Fwd: <VV> rebodied corvairs

[Tony Underwood]

At 08:42 hours 06/28/2005, kaczmarek at charter.net wrote:
>Folks
>
>Bob makes some excellent points.
>ALWAYS do your homework. If you are satisfied that the car isn't stolen, 
>title services exist to help you. It costs, but you can end up with a 
>clean title.
>
>Tony U and others can relate tales of dealing with the DMV trying to get a 
>clear title. In some cases state legislators have to get involved to get 
>the job done. TO some, the path of least resistance is to buy a VIN plate 
>and title from someone who has "an Extree" as they say around here, and 
>take it to the DMV and be done with it. in most cases the VIN and Title 
>are from a car long ago cut up or crushed.


What Hank is describing is known in vintage car circles as a "shoe box 
car".    It's a title, matching VIN tag and body tag, and sometimes (where 
applicable) a dealership "certiplate card", all stashed in  a shoebox or 
similar container, more often just a brown  manilla envelope.    Such are 
used to resurrect a vehicle which has title issues which cannot be resolved 
through normal channels such as an ancient title long since lost or 
misplaced and previous owner deceased and the car sold "as is", or a car 
resurrected from a junkyard after sitting "in the back" for 20 years and 
there's no records on file anywhere, or a car in a similar situation which 
already had the title turned in as "JUNKED" and recorded by the DMV as 
scrapped, or maybe the car simply was a through-channels "hand-me-down" 
parts car which is now scarce enough to have become worthy of restoration 
and the previous owner never had a title, nor did the one before him, or 
the one before ad nauseam and nobody wants to take the time to straighten 
it out so as to get a valid title and in fact the last three guys don't 
know who ever had the title in the first place...  "I think he died in 
'92..."    ...and so on.

In such instances, legal or otherwise, sometimes a "shoebox car" is the 
only way to get the vehicle in question titled without having to spend a 
fortune and wait for weeks only to be disappointed in the end because of 
some technicality which some DMVs seem to live for.

Illegal it may well be but I'd be damned well tempted to do it in order to 
save an untitled car I knew was otherwise legal.   And I know a lot of 
people in here will agree with me that sometimes the shoebox route is the 
only way to get to where you need to be.

...we just don't talk about it much.

...and I bet more than a few in here keep their own "shoebox cars" on hand, 
just in case.

I personally have NO problems with this sort of approach if I know for a 
fact that the car is "OK".   Sometimes the correct legal channels simply do 
NOT act in the consumer's best interests and the only way to get something 
done is to stretch the letter of the Law a bit, thanks to crooks who in the 
past have exploited reasonable channels for illegal purposes and thus 
changing a reasonable process into a nightmare of paperwork and 
signature-chasing.

If I suspected the car had dubious ancestry and someone was trying to sneak 
a title onto it, I'd be damned suspicious of whoever was attempting to do 
it.   Likewise someone who would try to sell me a car without a title and 
refuse to sign their name to a bill of sale.   Of course, if somebody tried 
to sell me something they knew was "hot" and dumb enough to come out and 
say so, I'd drop a dime on them.

...think about it's being YOUR car that disappeared from the driveway a few 
weeks before...


"Shoebox car" resurrections are only tolerable when the car being saved is 
NOT stolen and is in fact legally owned and has no other interested parties 
in its past who would be shorted should it be resurrected (no liens on the 
vehicle etc).

I  sometimes wonder how many respectable cars well worth restoring, or just 
saving, have been "thrown away" because there was no title...




tony..