She wanted a Corvette, but not just any Corvette, a C1 Corvette. But not just any year C1 Corvette, a 1959 Corvette. Not that it was necessarily the best or the rarest of the C1s, but that it was produced the same year she was “produced.” It’s funny how we tend to gravitate to seemingly small numerical connections such as this, but it happens and it happens quite often. It’s certainly not a bad thing, either. If anything, someone that goes out of their way to find a certain model year that has significance to them means that they’re going to cherish that car even longer and keep its history alive. And she—Debbie Daniels of Candler, North Carolina—really went out of her way to make the ’59 thing happen.
Going back to 2010, Debbie had wanted a classic Corvette for a while so she and her husband, Jerry, decided to start putting their feelers out for a 1959 Vette. They asked friends to keep their eyes peeled for a ’59 that was in need of a little TLC. Then it became a waiting game because nothing was coming up. Plenty of ’58s and ’60s popped up, but it was two years before their friend John Beaver in Pickerington, Ohio, found an elusive ’59 that fit the bill. It was the right model year and it had been sitting in storage for 30 years, but it had been in the same family for 41 years and you know how that one goes. The owner obviously wasn’t too keen on selling, but after extensive conversations he decided to let it go.
“We made the trip to Pickerington to bring it home,” Debbie told us. When she and her husband got there they found it to be “a real barn find, dead mice and all.” The owner, Eric, had purchased the car from his mother when his father passed away. The car had sat in a barn for 15 years then in Eric’s shop for another 15 until he handed it over to Debbie and Jerry. “It was a hard choice for the owner,” Debbie recalls. “Forty-one years in the same family.”
Eric gave the Daniels copies of all the paperwork documenting the car’s history and showed them pictures of the trophies his father, Dallas, had won racing the Corvette at Powell Motor Speedway in Columbus, Ohio, back in the day. He also made sure to give them his business card so they could stay in touch. Then off they went.
“We originally wanted to stay as close to original as possible since the car was complete, but a few comfort features snuck in,” Debbie told us. They started with the powertrain by rebuilding the 283, using many of the original parts, such as the crank and rods. It received an 0.030 overbore, then Jerry put the engine back together with a Speed Pro hydraulic flat tappet camshaft and Melling high-volume oil pump. The stock heads went back on, along with a ’66 Corvette L97 intake manifold. Spark was handled by a Corvette tach drive distributor updated with a PerTronix Ignitor module and a PerTronix Fame-Thrower coil while fuel and air delivery would be handled by a FAST EZ-EFI system. An OEM off-road replacement polished stainless exhaust would give Debbie the sound she wanted.
The crown jewel of the small-block, though, was the Inglese Sidedraft Induction. “While the Inglese Sidedraft was my pick—it looked like car jewelry to me—it was not an easy fit for Jerry,” Debbie recalled. The hood ended up not clearing, so Jerry modified the motor mounts to drop the engine 5/8-inch but that still wasn’t enough. The solution came in the form of four new custom CNC-machined stacks with a new angle that would clear the hood like they needed. Debbie expressed a huge thanks to friends Dennis Edwards and Jimmy Clontz of Diversified Machining Concepts in their hometown of Candler, North Carolina, for all their help making that happen. Then Jerry gave the new stacks a good file and polish to get that jewelry look Debbie loved. All that was left was to get ’er tuned by Chuck Gleaves of Gleaves Custom Induction.
