Age is just a number

John Knight Sr. had a Corvette crush way back in 1968.
“I worked for a construction company in Charlotte and every week I’d go through Fayetteville (on the way to a job). They had a ’67 Corvette in a showroom there. It was 1968 but they still had the ’67. I wanted that thing so bad.”
But working and raising his family came first.
“Me and Bill (his wife Billie) and (sons) Johnny and Dale didn’t fit in a Corvette so I didn’t get one,” he said.
The car of his dreams was a dream deferred, not a dream lost. He and a partner formed their own construction company. His business grew and his two boys grew up and helped take over his thriving construction business. Sixteen years went by since he rode past the sleek sports car that called his name from a Fayetteville showroom. Buck Knight had a little more money. In 1984, he bought his first Corvette, a ’67 maroon coupe. He bought his second one, a 1966 convertible, the same year.
Now he is one of the top Corvette restorers around. He just returned from the 33rd annual winter regional competition in Kissimmee, Fla., where his 1967 Marlboro maroon Corvette won a Top Flight award from the National Corvette Restorers Society.
Five teams of two judges scored the car. Each team judged a different part, spending 30 minutes to an hour walking around, hovering over and looking underneath. They gazed into the engine. They looked at the interior. They eyeballed the paint job. They looked inside the glove box to see if the light comes on. They honked the horn. Knight had a photo that shows four judges examining his 1967 classic, two peering at the engine and one underneath the car.
“Originality is a big thing,” he says. “They want everything as it came off the assembly line.” His Corvette “has a new convertible top and it’s been repainted. Everything else is original.”

Bill Moss

Buck Knight

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Bill Moss

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 ‘Over-restored’
When he trailered the car down to Central Florida, the vibration from the trip jarred the horn relay loose. “I lost 25 points because the horn didn’t blow,” he said.
The car restorers get docked for a variety of small imperfections or non-original parts. At a chapter meet in West Jefferson, N.C., he lost points because the choke didn’t engage and the windshield washer sprayer failed to work. In Kissimmee, judges counted off points because some overspray from the paint job hit weather-stripping on the door. They dinged him for a dab of grease on a doorjamb. An “aging door panel” cost him a point. He even got a demerit for being too good.
“I got marked off for being over-restored,” he said. “They said it was a little too shiny. Originally they were painted with lacquer and you can’t get lacquer. You paint ’em with regular paint and put clear coat on top, and that’s what makes them over-restored, the clear coat.”
Even so, the Marlboro maroon paint job impressed the judges. “At least 10 people told me it was the closest match they’d ever seen. One of them was the chief judge,” said Knight, who goes by “Buck.”

Truth be told, restorers like Knight are just as much the perfectionist as the judges.
He showed a visitor the interior.
“This is what they call standard black, which is black vinyl, carpet. Seat covers, steering wheel, dash pads, sun visors, mirror, every bit of that is original,” he said. Under the hood he pointed out a part he’s proud of. “This is the original master cylinder cover,” he said. “You just don’t see them.”
Among the many tasks he did was scooting up under the engine and reaching up with a 2-inch brush to paint the parts the original “Chevrolet orange.”
“I took it apart basically without taking the body off,” he says. When he says he took it apart, he doesn’t mean a part here and a part there. He means disassembling the car and restoring it to showroom quality, piece by piece.

 Sweat equity pays off

Assembled March 8, 1967, in St. Louis, Knight’s Corvette received tender loving care for a lot of its life. It has 89,453 miles, a relatively light road total for a 43-year-old automobile.
A man named Edwin Sage bought the Vette new from Jim White Chevrolet in Ann Arbor, Mich., for $5,115.70. It was owned by a couple of different people in New York. It was owned by a collector in Marietta, Ohio, when Dale Ledbetter, the owner of Motorama of Monroe, read about it. “Dale saw it advertised and he went up there and bought six of them,” Knight said. “I bought it from Dale.”
Ledbetter paid $49,000. Knight bought the car in April 2008 for $61,000.
“What’s it worth now? A dealer in Atlanta came and looked at it (in Kissimmee) and said $90,000, and if he found someone that really wanted that color, $100,000,” he says. “He knows what they’re worth.”
Knight restored his first Vette in 1986 and has restored eight since and sold most of them. He has a white convertible Corvette that looks new but is not quite the standard of his maroon edition.
Chevrolet made the first Corvette in 1953, and still makes them today. Knight doesn’t pay much mind to older models or newer ones. He loves the classics from ’65, ’66 and ’67. “I just like them better,” he says. “Sixty-seven is the most popular of them all. They sold about 21,000 new Corvettes in 1967.”
He’s fixed the fixable flaws that got him docked in Florida.
“If I had the same judges now I’d get a 96.1 versus a 95.2,” he says. He pointed to a slight warp in the hood, where it’s not perfectly flush with the body. Most likely it came off the factory floor that way. “Some of them (the judges) think every bit of paint matches up, that it’s perfect,” he says. “They weren’t perfect. I saw one up in Charlotte with 3,700 miles. They were in a hurry to make these cars.”
He figures he’s got 200 to 300 hours worth of labor on the Marlboro maroon Corvette Stingray.
“I may go two to three weeks and not ever touch it, and then I may work on it 10 hours a week,” he says.
At 77, Knight looks years younger, and it’s obvious his work ethic keeps him that way. Crawling up under the engine, scrubbing, painting, figuring out how to make the car look like it was out of the showroom, checking and rechecking details is a good fitness plan for mind and body.
“Things like that keeps you loose,” he says. “It keeps you going.”