What to look for when buying a C5 or C6 Corvette

Video Transcript:

[Music] Hello everybody welcome to lyle's friday podcast as you can see i've changed up my location a little bit we had some really great cars in the show room i kind of wanted to share them with you uh the one you see right in front of you with the stars and stripes is our new 73 track day car with a big block in it we'll be doing a video on that once we get it a little bit more finished but trust me it's pretty cool today's video however is not about this awesome car today's video is basically a request from you guys uh about c5 and c6 corvettes things to look for when you're going to look at buy one of those cars i recently did a video on this on c4s and the response was overwhelming saying hey do c5s and c6s because those cars are so similar i'm able to kind of group them together because they pretty much have the same foibles and cautionary tales that we want to avoid first and foremost you want to avoid looking at cars 97 through 2000 as you're looking at these cars for sale online you're going to see that there's a pretty good price bump between the 98/99 and the 01/02 cars and you may say i don't understand why they look identical and they do look identical but there are a lot of things with the 97 through the 9 the 2000 cars specifically when we get into things like the analog braking system and other things electronically that when they fail there is no way to fix them no way to replace them no new parts being made by bosch that's completely dead it will give you idiot lights forever and i've even seen cases where it starts to intrude upon your driving in the safety of the vehicle so 01 to 04 or 01 all the way to 13 doesn't have those specific problems because they used a completely different and mostly repairable and rebuildable system number two you want to make sure to look down at the front of the engine any ls engine has a balancer on the front of it at the very bottom that balancer starts to wobble over time as it starts to age once that starts to wobble everything else in that system starts to get stressed the belt tensioners the guide pulleys even the belts themselves doing that job all the way top to bottom which is how normally you're going to do it runs anywhere from a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars depending on what balancer you choose to use if you're pinning the balancer which i highly recommend and i'll be doing another video on that specifically later on but know that going into it because if you see that balancer wobbling like this when you look down you're going to end up spending some money pretty quickly that's important also in relation to that torque tubes now you know we do a lot of videos on torque tubes here because it's one of our big specialties in our shop in what we make and what we sell online and what we do here torque tube rebuilds if you are sitting with the car idling in gear out of gear and you hear like a waka wakka wakka wakka or some kind of like loose rattling under the car beware it very well could be a torque tube fixable not a problem however you have to gut the car like a fish to get to all that stuff and you're again going to spend somewhere between fifteen and nineteen hundred dollars doing that job so if the car is a great deal and you like the car awesome but if the car is all the money and you really like the car and you see either like the harmonic balancer wiggle or you hear that sound from under the car beware you know you're going to be spending somewhere in the thousands to solve that issue before you can happily and safely go down the road number three be cautious about weather strip okay the big piece of weather strip that goes up one side of the windshield across the top and down the other side gm is the only manufacturer of that kids and it is anywhere from 500 to 750 depending on where you buy it and that's just for the part that is not putting it in there is no aftermarket on that when it comes to aftermarket weatherstrip for c5s and c6s specifically for the convertible soft top weather strip there are aftermarket parts but they're really not all that great uh even adjusting the windows fully installing everything the right way and doing it perfect i still end up having these cars with leaks so be warned that weatherstrip if it's ugly or if it's torn or if it's missing altogether on a c5 or c6 is going to be expensive and in some cases it's going to be difficult to even find replacements so be forewarned on that overall for these cars don't look at a car that's been wet by being wet i don't mean that it's seen rain in its life which to some corvette owners does make the car worthless but what we're talking about here is cars that have been in a flood cars that have been uh caught in a monsoon with the top down where you ended up with this much or this much water in the car if that happens you want no part of it because those cars are very heavily electronic most of the electronics are located near the floorboard and once those get wet especially if it's salt water you're going to have problems for the rest of the life of that car you don't want anything to do with it other thing anybody who's selling one of those cars who has a set of records with the car for their maintenance and it shows that they have taken care of things like fluids transmission differential brake coolant all of that if they've done that regularly even if the car has higher miles that car is going to probably be in better health than that 20 000 mile garage queen that no one ever drove because it didn't get the maintenance it needed because they figured we never drive it and it's only got 20 000 miles on it judge the car based on the way it is today and how it's been cared for over the last x amount of years don't judge it just on mileage that's a bad habit to get into because if you're buying a garage queen to keep it a garage queen that's probably okay if you're buying a garage queen and you plan on driving it every day you're going to be fixing things really quickly because they're going to break because the car's never been put through any stress these are the basics for c5 c6 buying any questions feel free to call me 800-886-5064 uh leave comments down at the bottom make sure to like and subscribe to let us keep doing what we're doing here uh i'll look forward to your comments and if there's other things you want to know or other videos you want to see made just leave it in the comments below have a great weekend