[fsjonsey]

Originally Posted by RJMiranda

Hi fsjonsey! Great looking TV, good job!
I am very sorry about what happened to your Corvair.
There are some Corvairs in Havana (I can´t tell you much about other provinces) but MOST of them have replaced the original engine with a Russian Lada 4-cyl mounted at the front. Don´t ask me what they did to the steering system, nor how they mounted the engine without proper reinforced surfaces. And of course they had to open a ventilation grille between the headlights and run the transmission shaft to the rear axle.
All said, they don´t look half as bad as it sounds... except that I LOVE to see older cars running as they were made.
I have a 1953 Chevrolet Belair (it needs a new front grille because the original one rusted apart), but with the original engine and transmission. Only change is an alternator instead of a DC generator.
The Corvair is a beautiful, unique American car. I think it is the ONLY 6-cyl H-engine ever made. Maybe they made it after the Volkswagen, air-cooled, rear-engine, but being American it had to have 6-cyl power!
A friend of mine here had a Corvair with automatic transmission, but after so many years it was worn, and after 30-40 mins of driving, it wouldn´t shift to high!

RJMiranda, I had a feeling that most of the Corvairs left in Cuba had been converted to Lada or Moskvich power. I would love to see how they made that work, haha.
The Corvair engine has sort of a unique back story. Ed Cole, the head of Chevrolet, and father/champion of the Corvair, was an accomplished Civil Aviator. He was quite familiar with the flat-six Franklin and Lycoming engines in the aircraft he flew, and knew that American car buyers wouldn't accept the roughness of Volkswagen's flat four in an American car. The Corvair engine shares more with small aircraft engines of the era than anything else. Chevy had an air cooled flat-six engine in mass production 6 years before Porsche debuted the first 911.

Originally Posted by RJMiranda

A friend of mine here had a Corvair with automatic transmission, but after so many years it was worn, and after 30-40 mins of driving, it wouldn´t shift to high!

Also, it's too bad about the Powerglide in your Friend's Corvair. It was probably something as simple an a broken E-Clip or at worst a $30USD Vacuum Modulator. The Corvair Powerglide is almost indestructible. They were so reliable, in fact, that GM never issued a full rebuilt kit for them. I've seen a few that outlasted being swapped into five or six cars.
http://corvairfleet.blogspot.com/201...es-e-clip.html

Oh, one last question. Did imports of American cars cut off in the 1960 or 1961 model year? I've seen some photos of Corvairs in Havana that look suspiciously like 1961 models.