[VIDEO] Dennis Collins Hunts Down a 1955 Corvette and a Matching Pedal Car

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[VIDEO] Dennis Collins Hunts Down a 1955 Corvette and a Matching Pedal Car


Dennis Collins has been in a lot of rickety, dirty, old barns pulling out old cars over the years.

But in the latest episode of his YouTube show “Coffee Walk,” Dennis admits he’s never been in a barn as nice as the one where he has just found a ’55 Corvette owned by the same couple for 43 years!

After six months of discussions about purchasing the car, Dennis and his crew finally travel a long way from their shop in Texas to picturesque Westminster, Maryland to pick up this significant piece of Corvette history.

That’s where Dawn and her late husband (whose name ironically was also Dennis) had carefully looked after their white over red 1955 Corvette in a barn that’s never so much as seen a cow or a horse inside, tucked away among the blooming dogwoods that make the setting for this car one of the most beautiful imaginable.

[VIDEO] Dennis Collins Hunts Down a 1955 Corvette and a Matching Pedal Car


A lifetime Corvette enthusiast, Dennis says this will become only the third ’55 he’s owned over the years. Since only 700 of these cars were built by Chevy, finding one on the market these days is a very rare occurrence, according to Dennis.

“I’ve chased ‘em my entire life,” Dennis says, “and I haven’t had a ’55 in at least 10 years. And I do watch for them every single day.”

Dawn explains that she and her husband first bought the car in 1977, then sold it two years later to buy an additional house. “We both cried for two years,” she admits, “and then one day he was sitting beside the pool reading the Washington Post, went and got the phone” to call about a ’55 he’d just spotted that was being advertised for sale in the paper.

[VIDEO] Dennis Collins Hunts Down a 1955 Corvette and a Matching Pedal Car


Turned out it was the couple’s original ’55, and of course, they immediately bought it and hung onto it for dear life this time around.

The ‘55s are historically significant, of course, because they marked the beginning of Corvette’s long and illustrious history of high-performance V8 engines under the hood. Only seven of the Corvettes made in ’55 came with the Blue Flame six-cylinder engine; the rest had a 265/195 horsepower V8.

[VIDEO] Dennis Collins Hunts Down a 1955 Corvette and a Matching Pedal Car


“What you want to see when you first walk up to one,” Dennis explains, ” what gets my heart pounding is to see the gold V,” pointing to the front fender. “You know [then] you’re looking at a V8 which is really great.”

Dennis doesn’t go into too many details about the car in the video, but it’s obvious he’s very, very excited about the condition of this beloved ’55.

With the deal he struck, Dennis even gets to take home a custom-made hardtop, a nice find since for some reason Chevy didn’t offer that as an option in ’55 after doing so for the first two years of production.

[VIDEO] Dennis Collins Hunts Down a 1955 Corvette and a Matching Pedal Car


Another added bonus is a pedal car commissioned by General Motors in 2003 for the 50th anniversary of the Corvette. The couple spotted this 1953 replica (which looks identical to their car except of course for the missing “V” on the fender) in the showroom of a dealership and just had to have it, especially when Dennis noted that the little car was serial #135 out of the 300 produced and ironically their real ’55 is serial #134.

“What a beautiful day!” Dennis concludes.

Indeed, Dawn feels the same way about sending their beloved ’55 to a good home.

“I am so excited to find somebody who really appreciates what we have here,” she tells Dennis before he departs, “and not just the uniqueness and the rarity of it but the joy that it brought us. I mean, we went out on many a weekend driving all over the countryside going places in this car. It was just so much fun.”


Source:
Dennis Collins / YouTube

Related:
[VIDEO] Dennis Collins Rescues a Barn Find 1966 Corvette Coupe in Colorado
[VIDEO] Dennis Collins Snags Two One-Owner Corvettes With Great Backstories
Corvettes for Sale: 1955 Roadster Was Used to Test 3-Speed Manual Transmissions

 



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