Hi, I'm Aaron and this is Jerry's (my dad) '55 Chevy 150 Business Man's coupe. Before you leave, be sure to sign my guestbook so I can check out your cars. Also, click the link to check out my '98 Cobra.
This car has around 42K miles and those are original from what we have been told by the previous owners. We are the 4th owners and we found the number to the second owner so we called him up. Just so happens that he lived in the same house that he did when he sold the car over 20 years ago. But he confirmed that the miles were original as he bought the car from the original owner.
We found out about the car in Hemmings Motor News and made a trip out to California to see it. And as you can see, we bought it and had it shipped back here to Missouri. This car was built in Las Angelos, CA and spent it's whole life right there in Orange County until we got it.
The Business Man's Coupe cars were built for the salesmen that traveled around with their work. So therefore, they were built as the cheapest priced '55 Chevys available. Along with that, they were also the most rare '55 Chevy that wasn't a Nomad or Corvette. Chevrolet made these cars cheap and useful to the salesmen by not using a backseat and no roll-down back windows. Also, they only used one sun visor, etc... Since then, another visor, etc. was added back on, but the back seat and rear windows remain as built. See pics below.
The car has a '70 lt1 350 motor with the high nickel block bored out to 355 ci with a .496 lift/.300 duration cam. The motor has 9.5-1 compression and has roller rockers, etc. It has the ol' fuelie heads with the 2.02 slainless valves. The heads have had extensive porting and polishing and some more ing's that I forgot. The engine is topped off with an Edelbrock RPM Air Gap intake with a 650 double pumper Holley carb. We just bought a new 750 double pumper Holley that we'll stick on soon. The motor dynoed at 420 something horses upon completion but since then we have added that Edelbrock intake and Holley carb, along with all MSD ignition, coil, Pro-Billit distributer, and MSD wires. And that motor is running better now than ever, wide-open that is. This motor winds up fast and flies past 6K rpms so fast, it's scary. It has solid lifters so it will rev itself to death if let so we don't go up much past 6000 rpms. We are going to tinker with the timing advance curve and put that new 750 Holley on soon so that should help the low end torque along with wide-open performance. I will add some pictures of the motor soon...
Behind the motor is a 4 speed Muncie transmission and a 9" Ford rearend with ladder bars. The rearend has 4.11 gears. Whenever we would go to a cruise-in about 30 min away, the motor used to be running around 3500 rpms keeping up with traffic so we added a GearVendors overdrive unit behind our Muncie tranny that gives us an overdrive for every gear. That allows us to drop down around 2500-2600 rpms running with traffic. And we still have the acceleration of our 4.11 gears;) All in all, this setup under a pretty heavy, full interiored car will run down in the low 12's. We have an old time slip from 1986 when it was just completed and it ran a 12.3 at 112. It is running better now and with some timing mods and this new 750 Holley, it might even be in the 11's, I don't know... Every year, we say we are going to take it to Gateway International to see what it will do but we haven't made it yet. Oh well, here some pics of us screwing around with a 355hp Boss Hoss Trike we bought and sold. The guy on the trike was just a friend.
***Well, we finally got the timing curve set to advance faster and our new 750 Holley double pumper on and tuned. We took it out for a drive and could tell a difference right away. The throttle was more "touchy" and it had much more low end torque along with more top end too. We took it down to a place everyone calls "The Bluffs" where it's a straight 2 lane rode along a bluff and brought it off the line. Dad was driving and I was shotgun. He has better powershifts than I with the muncie. (My cobra's a different story...) First gear didn't last very long at all, which then again, neither did second or third. When we hit fourth it was still pulling very hard and I looked down and we were doing over 110. There was a blue sign by the road that Dad said we passed right at 100 mph. The next day, we clocked it with his Jeep and it turned out to be exactly a tenth and a half from where our signature was on the pavement to the blue sign. So a 1/4 mile race would give us another tenth of a mile to get the speed built up more although that tenth would go by very fast at that speed. Oh well, that was enough excitement for one day, time to go fill up, again... ***
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