This 1967 Chevrolet Nova SS Took A While To Purchase

When purchasing a car or truck, regardless of whether it’s new, used or classic, the transaction is usually fairly brief. Spot it, make an offer, strike a deal and bring it home. End of story.

For Glenn Nielsen of Newtown, however, acquiring his Bolero red 1967 Chevrolet Nova SS was an excruciatingly prolonged affair. It didn’t end when his first reached out or even when the transaction was consummated.

“I had sold another car and always loved these cars,” he said of the Nova SS that he bought in May 2019. An internet search “trying to find the right one; trying to find one that wasn’t gutted or had a 350 in it; trying to find some originality” eventually paid off. (The “350” refers to a transplanted 350-cubic-inch V8 motor that was never offered on the model.)

“The guy was in Chicago. His name is Wayne (Karg). He put it up on Bring A Trailer. I called him immediately. I said, ‘Oh, it’s still the original motor, still the original transmission?’ I said, ‘I’d like to buy the car.’ He said, ‘It’s no longer for sale.’”

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Karg simply had had second thoughts about parting with it. Nielsen passed along his name, phone number and email address in hopes that Karg would change his mind.

“He would contact me once a month and ask me if I’m still interested,” Nielsen recalled last fall. “I’d keep asking him if today was the day he was going to sell it and he kept saying no. And then finally one day, I guess it’s 4½ years ago now, he contacted me and said, ‘I’m ready to sell.’”

Nielsen’s patience and willingness to wait a year and a half had paid off and he understood the man’s attachment to the Nova SS. “He had the car for 28 years and I think he had emotional ties to the car, and I got it,” he said.

“We drove out to Chicago sight unseen. Just pictures. I borrowed a truck and a trailer and we drove out there,” Nielsen said, referring to a mechanic friend Eddie Murphy who joined him.

Not only did Nielsen get the car, he received some extras as well. “You can’t imagine the amount of original parts that he had in boxes that he was just loading into the truck,” he said, noting some was the results of mods made to the Nova SS.

“The alternator was moved down, but he came out with original brackets. He came out with the original exhaust manifold. Even though he had headers on the car, he gave me the original exhaust manifolds.”

Nielsen’s desire was to make the model as original as possible. “I just like the cars they way they were. I didn’t want to have one that was sort of cut up,” he said. “I like the old-time look of these cars. I like the style of these cars, so I wanted to be as original as possible.”

The Nova SS needed freshening.

“It was just very dull. (Karg) actually had the car painted in 1983. That’s the last time this car’s had a paint job. It was just scuffed and dull, so we cleaned that up. According to the codes on the car, the car needed a vinyl top. It didn’t have one. I asked him about that. He said he hated it, so he ripped it off. So we put it back on.”

Nielsen also replaced the wheels and tackled the 327-cubic-inch V8 engine.

“That very first year was during COVID. We decided, OK, that first winter we’re going to pull this motor. It had a bunch of oil leaks and it was fine but we were just going to clean it up and put it back in the car, except we pulled it out and the motor mount was broken,” he said.

“We got rid of the headers and the exhaust. We started to clean it up and I painted it and when we went to go put it back in the car and found out that the crank bolt was snapped in half, so that sort of derailed the project for a little while.”

Nielsen’s attachment to the Nova goes back to his teen years. “My first car before I had a license, before I could drive, I bought a ’76 Nova with my brother,” he said.

The Nova SS has a four-speed manual transmission, which is rare. “The four-speed cars in ’67, they made less than 2,000 of. A lot more automatics were made in ’67 than there were four speeds,” he said. It also has a tachometer style that only lasted one model year.

Nielsen is pleased with how the Nova SS looks. “It’s not a perfect car, right? It’s not a daily driver. It’s weekends, and fun with my friends, and going out to car shows, and hearing stories of people who had these as kids and loved them, or wished they had never gotten rid of them,” he said.

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Nielsen recalled being at a car show once “and a gentleman was under the hood for quite some time just staring. I said, ‘Can I help you? Can I answer some questions?’ He said, ‘I built these on the assembly line in 1967.’ So I asked him how I did and he said, ‘You did excellent.’”

Meanwhile, he’s still in touch Karg. “Every few months I’ll send him a picture. He still asks for pictures,” Nielsen said.

See the 1967 Chevrolet Nova SS in action in this YouTube video…

(A version of this column appeared in the “Republican-American” newspaper on March 16, 2024.)