“The devil is in the details,” we’ve heard over and over again. The point of that statement is to slow down and fully appreciate what it is that you are looking at instead of taking two or three seconds, making your mind up, and moving along, lest you miss something seriously important. Around BangShift Mid-West, it is easy to dismiss a Corvette…even a clean C3 Corvette…because we’re within spitting distance of GM’s Bowling Green Assembly Plant, the National Corvette Museum and NCM Motorsports Park. We’re saturated with Corvettes of all types, so we have to admit that it takes something special to focus our attention on one of the fiberglass sports cars. Usually it’s an engine note…the lumpier the better, but in the case of Greg and Susan Boger’s 1981 Chevrolet Corvette, it was a tiny chrome emblem.

During our last visit to the JDRF Car Show at Bruster’s Ice Cream, we were honestly in a hurry. The goal was to shoot a good picture of every car present and be gone in about fifteen minutes. The JDRF shows are small get-togethers, so it isn’t like we are missing anything, and normally we hang around for a couple of hours, but this day we had work that had to be done and the schedule was tight. As we were making one final sweep of the car show we walked past this C3 and caught a flash from a chrome emblem coming from the scoop on the front fender. For whatever reason, we looked down and noticed a cobra emblem…from a Ford.

The Corvette’s story starts in 2012. Greg bought the Corvette for Susan, who had owned one years ago. It was in rough shape, having done nothing but occupy space in a garage for most of it’s life. They drug it home on a trailer on tires so dry-rotted that they later exploded, one by one,  in their garage! Over the next three months the two worked on just making the car roadworthy…fresh paint, fresh interior, brakes, suspension, the 18″ wheels and tires, and a general once-over on the 190 horsepower 350 that lived in the engine bay. For a year Susan used the Corvette as a commuter car, but at sixty miles a day, the 350/TH350 combo was drinking through fuel at a rate that just didn’t line up with the power rating. The lack of overdrive and weak-sauce power from the smogger 350 was the catalyst needed for Greg to cook up a new drivetrain for the ‘Vette.

Greg is, by nature, a Ford guy. Just trust us, you will be seeing more of his work down the road, but suffice it to say that the man knows his Modular motors. He also had some on hand, having bought “some brand-new 4.6L DOHC motors from Kar Kraft a few years back”. Greg is also handy with AutoCad and a measuring tape, and after running the entire layout through the computer system, he determined that the swap would be possible. Out came the Corvette’s stock running gear and in was shoved an “Aluminator” supercharged 4.6L setup and a 4R70W overdrive automatic. The wiring harness was hand-built, as was the hybrid return/non-return fuel system for the car. It fits under the Corvette’s stock cowl hood, but just barely. As Susan pointed out, “We used about every tub of Crisco we could find to get that motor in there.” And as we will attest from seeing it in person, we don’t doubt it. The tolerances are tight and the notoriously wide engine maxes out every ounce of useable space. Items like the idle control valve had to be moved for clearance, and as you will see, the tach signal box is a hair away from the hood’s pop spring.

Even on a basic preliminary tune, the Corvette sounds like it’s ready for a fight. The car is a tick on the loud side, but it isn’t annoying loud, just very, very authoritative. However, the Corvette is really a near-daily driver, only getting put up when the weather really goes south. The interior is pretty much a stock restoration, with the exception of a couple of detailing touches in carbon-fiber, the custom cupholders and a speaker box in the very back of the hatch, which looks dead-stock but is actually handmade and removable.  Tops in or tops off, the C3 now has the power to overcome the “Disco Vette” reputation that these later cars had. Greg is still tinkering with it as Susan puts miles on the car, and hopes to put the Corvette on a dyno soon for some actual numbers.

We’ve seen plenty of the “Ford Tough Using Chevy Stuff” stickers, and with LS Fest right around the corner, we will no doubt be seeing more of them, but if you don’t think that argument can work the other way around, the Boglers would like to have a word with you. Plenty of power, an overdrive automatic for cruising, plenty of looks, and an exhaust note that should be considered a warning for those who wish to test out their luck. That’s a recipe we love no matter how it’s cooked up.