Like Cheech and Chong said if it looks, smells and tastes like dog#%^......Must be dog$%&!! .

I saw a '57 Chevy for sale the other day that perplexed me. It was a 210 post coupe and it was a very nicely done frame-off resto. The asking price was $59,000 which I thought was reasonable-if you bought a "restorable" '57 and made it as nice as this one was it would have easily cost you 50K. It wasn't the price that bothered me, it was the guys choice of parts. For example the engine was a 327 that supposedly came out of a '63 Corvette. But the tranny was a Saginaw 3 speed that had the original column shifter. If he was going concours and the car had a numbers-matching 283 I could understand that. But the seller said it was built as a tribute to an early '60's style hot rod. Thus-the non-original 327. If a guy had this car in say 1965-yes he'd have swapped in a hot 327-but he also surely would have backed it with a BW T10 or Muncie 4-speed. At the very least he'd have added a floor-mounted Hurst shifter so he could shift the 3-speed a lot quicker than you could with the column unit!  The other things that bothered me were the rolling stock and the induction and exhaust systems. It had modern radial tires which is no biggie-especially if your going to drive the car at all-you want decent ride and handling. But they were mounted on body-coler painted steel wheels with dog-dish hubacps. As I remember my dad's and his friends rides in the mid-60's-including my mom's '58 Impala- it would have either Cragar S / S mags, or American Racing Torq-Thrusts, or at the very least "Chrome Reverse" rims like the '55 in "American Graffiti". If it was a really low budget hot rod it would have had plain black steel wheels. Body colored wheels didn't become popular until the mid-70's. The induction system vexed me as well-it was a dual-quad intake with two Carter WCFB 4-bbls. This was an option on the 283 V8s offered in the '57 Corvette and on the 210s, Impalas and Bel Airs. The 327 was supposedly out of a 1963 Corvette. As I remember there were 3 327s offered in 1963 Corvettes. The standard 300 hp version which had a hydraulic cam, and a higher compression solid-lifter cammed 340 hp version-both with single 4bbls. The top option was the 360 hp version with Rochester Fuel-Injection. As far as I know-Chevrolet never offered a dual-quad 327 in any model. Think about this-even in the mid-'60s no one would have spent the time or money to transplant a fuelie engine out of a wrecked 'Vette-even then they were extremely rare. If you did buy a carburated 327 out of a wrecked Corvette you'd have used the induction system that was on it. Depending on whether it was a 300 or 340 hp version you'd have had a Carter AFB mounted on a factory iron or aluminum intake. Nothing less than stellar to begin with. Or if you wanted even more power-Edelbrock offered the C355B three-two-barrel manifold, and the C4B 4bbl intake developed by Bob Joehnck and Vic Edelbrock Jr. You'd have used three Rochester 2GC 2bbls like on the Pontiac GTO or you'd have used a Holley or Carter AFB 4bbl. I seriously doubt that you would have searched out an old 2X4 283 setup with the even then-obsolete WCFB carbs-the AFB flowed more cfm and had better throttle response and drivability, as did the Holley 4bbls. If you wanted to be a total badass and HAD to have dual-quads, Offenhauser made an excellent low-rise dual quad intake that used two AFBs or two Holleys that was light-years ahead of the old 283 factory unit in terms of power and torque production. Finally-it had iron exhaust manifolds, but a stainless steel Flowmaster dual setup. Huh?  A mid-'60's hot rodder would definitely have used headers, and some loud glasspacks. If your going to go period correct, then let's do it right. What I deduced from all this was some mechanic found a clean 2 dr '57 body, built it up with a bunch of parts he had laying around, put a nice paint job on it and was planning on making big bucks off the sale. Which he will. Some one will pay his asking price or close to it. But it's not a "Tribute" to anything, it's just a nice car that someone slapped together very well with junk they had laying around. Like I said-why doesn't it at least have a 4-speed and chrome wheels? On a "Hot Rod Tribute" car your asking 60 grand for? Like Ditka says-"Come on, Man!"  I personally liked the car and if I had an extra 50 grand laying around I might even buy it-but that would be in spite of it's "attributes" not because of them. You don't find a good restored '55-57 for under 60K very often, so it's still a screamin' deal-and it's still something that some one cobbled up with crap they had laying around. It was very well done, but that's what it was, not a pristine numbers-matching concours resto like the '56 offered on the same website for about the same price that was a numbers-matching Bel Air!!  Mastermind