Particularly for the uninitiated, buying a used Corvette can be a financially dangerous experience.  If your desire is a ‘mid-year,” a ’63 through ’67, or a “solid axle,” generally a reference to ’57 through ’62, you almost need an authority at your side to make intelligent decisions.

In the land of the Corvette, the car must be “numbers matching” to be of utmost value.  But, even that’s tricky, because “numbers matching,” a reference to the chassis number, engine number, serial number, transmission number, and other allied numbers, all being from the same time frame, is fraught with danger.  The arcane of the St. Louis Corvette factory, for example, mean that an engine built in December could, in fact, have gone into a car built in May.  Or not.

Then there is outright fraud: restamped engine blocks, switched VIN plates, and more.

When there is this much money at stake, people will do what they have to do.

Which is why there are more tri-power ’67 Corvettes in existence today than were actually manufactured by Chevrolet.

There is, however, some particularly well informed help that you can have, for a mere twenty-five bucks.

Krause Publications has just issued the “Corvette Bible,” written by Mike Yager.

Yager is, himself, almost as much a legend as the car upon which he built his fortune – and it’s a pretty good sized fortune.  He is the owner of Mid America Motorworks, likely the largest Corvette centered aftermarket retailer in America.  As a way of saying thank-you to his customers, he holds the largest Corvette gathering in the nation every September. 

Thousands of Corvettes travel to the company’s home town, a little joint called Effingham, about an hour south of Springfield, Illinois, and endure the lousy road that leads there just to be there.

Yager started out with a love of Corvettes and $500.  He built it into an empire, and he also built one of the premier Corvette collections on the planet.  He owns CERV-II.  (If you’re not familiar with the CERV cars: another post, another day.  Suffice it to say that to a Corvette fanatic, that is one of the three “holy grail” cars in the Corvette world.)

Now, he’s written a book about how to buy a Corvette.  It covers the history of each year, the unique aspects of each year’s models, problem areas, mistakes commonly made during restoration, all of the stuff that you really ought to know before you take your check book and credit line to search for your Corvette.