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Dave Harvey owns own of the first FiberFab Avengers — serial #61 from 1966 — and when I last talked to him he had over 60,000 miles on the car.
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Want your car here? Email pictures, a description, and if it's for sale, the price, to toys@priceofhistoys.com. All posts are free, including classifieds!
Brian McRae built his terrifyingly fast red Kelmark GT (or “Kelmark Liberator” depending on whose naming convention you want to use) around a tube chassis and a V8 mated to a Corvair tranny… I have almost the same car sitting in a barn right now, but trust me, Brian’s is about a zillion times nicer! Last I checked this car was in Nepean (near Ottawa, Canada).
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Want your car here? Email pictures, a description, and if it's for sale, the price, to toys@priceofhistoys.com. All posts are free, including classifieds!
Jerry Ryginski has got to have one of the sweetest looking (it just looks so “finished”) Valkyries around. For those of you who don’t know the car, the Valkyrie was the Avenger for people who needed a little bit more power, as it was a V8 based car rather than a VW based one.
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Want your car here? Email pictures, a description, and if it's for sale, the price, to toys@priceofhistoys.com. All posts are free, including classifieds!
Back to the exotics!
One of the most famous Manta Mirages out there is Neil Albaugh’s, which spent the better part of its life as the second car Manta ever built and the factor demonstrator that was all over the magazines at the time. After Manta Cars of Santa Ana, CA went bankrupt, this car and it’s “MANTA 2” license plates spent a few years sitting in the dirt as a cut-up, mostly disassembled “basket case” before it fell into Neil’s hands.
As you can see, the two years he spent restoring the vehicle paid off well. It’s street legal and last I heard is running Arizona plates.
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Want your car here? Email pictures, a description, and if it's for sale, the price, to toys@priceofhistoys.com. All posts are free, including classifieds!
Most kits are either weird looking, exotic looking, or are replicas of existing respected vehicles. However, there have been a small number of kits built in the mid 70s (and always, really) that had a rather mundane look — although you may disagree with me.
Let’s begin with the Triad, made by SIE out of Santa Ana, California. Built on a shortened (by 4″) beetle chassis, it sold for under three thousand dollars and was quite advanced in design. Although it could be built using only hand tools (not including shortening the VW chassis) in about eighty hours, rather than being a single piece body like most kits of the time, it was made of of ten outer panels attached to a set of inner panels which bolted to the chassis.
A specific top speed was never claimed, but it was said to be capable of — and stable at — speeds in excess of 185 kph, even on a stock VW engine.
A very similar car (just a touch smaller) was manufactured by Dutton Sports in Sussex, England. This one is front-engined though, built on a custom chassis (designed to be a simple bolt-together operation with the other components) with Triumph front suspension, a Ford read axle, and a wide variety of engine options (BMC, Triumph, Ford, or Alfa Romeo). It even contained basic safety features to protect drivers in the case of collision, rare in kits even now.
Both of these cars were marketted under the “practical yet sporty” meme. I can’t say I entirely agree with either point, but they do have a certain charm about them, don’t you think?
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Want your car here? Email pictures, a description, and if it's for sale, the price, to toys@priceofhistoys.com. All posts are free, including classifieds!
Bill Carter was an employee of Ordinance Maps that had designing these crazy cars made part of his job. On the left, the “Top Cat”, and on the right, the “G-WHIZ“. Both are built using V12 Jaguar bits with radical cab-forward designs, and both are reliable, driveable day-to-day vehicles rather than relatively non-functional show cars.
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Want your car here? Email pictures, a description, and if it's for sale, the price, to toys@priceofhistoys.com. All posts are free, including classifieds!
I recently showed you the wild Bentley EXP Speed 8 that my friend Joe Lee in Bulgaria is working on. On his home one day recently he caught a picture of this incredibly rare Sofia kit car, of which her writes,
This is a fiberglass kitcar, called the “Sofia”. It was constructed and produced during the years of socialism, with the first prototype completed in 1981, the second in 1985, and production began a year later. Between 1986 and 1989 about six cars were made, and during the 1990s there were another 6 or 7 cars made. During that period this kind of hidden headlight was also disputed.
This particular one is is a “Sofia type B” on a custom chassis with a Lada gearbox (without the engine) and a Lada interior (from a 70s model). The hidden headlight is opened by a manual crank. It looks like this one was made at the end of 80s. The owner asked about $600 for it.
Here are some photos of the one he spotted:
And for reference, a couple other models:
One of the rarest kits in the world. Thanks again Joe!
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