About the Queen City Chapter of the NCRS

Welcome to the Queen City NCRS serving the Cincinnati and surrounding Tri-State Area

Several Corvette fans gathered to celebrate the significance of Americas finest sports car, in doing so they started the Queen City NCRS Chapter. Many years later we have developed into a tight knit group of friends, growing and learning all the way. We look forward to our monthly meetings. Prospective members are welcomed and encouraged to attend. See the Calendar for date and location.

With a variety of members any Corvette related answer is only a phone call away. We take part in road trips, picnics, technical seminars; not to mention our annual swap and chapter meets. Along with group trips to NCRS Regional and National activities there is always fun to be found within our great chapter. Look through our website, and mark our next meeting on your calendar we are looking forward to meeting you.

Tom James Queen City Chapter NCRS Chairman

2025 Swap Meet information

The Queen City NCRS Indoor Swap Meet and Car Expo which benefits the Ohio Shriner’s Hospital for Children is fast approaching. This event will take place on Sunday, March 16, 2025 and will be held at Kelsey Chevrolet in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, our new Club sponsor. The Grand prize is $1,000 with one $500, one $250 and two $100 prizes being given to lucky winners. Ticket costs are 7 for $20, 3 for $10, and 1 for $5.

If you are unable to attend future meetings but would like to purchases raffle tickets, please remit a check made payable to QCNCRS and mail to my attention at 7329 Southpointe Drive, Cincinnati, Ohio 45233 no later than 03/10/2025 and I will personally see to it that your tickets are submitted for the drawing. Thank you in advance for your help in supporting this worthy cause.

Tom James President

SwapMeetFlyer

Corvette Evolution Video

https://www.facebook.com/share/r/1PDMqsa2aL/?mibextid=wwXIfr

December Christmas Party 2024 Meeting

Cars of the month- 1998 C5 (owned by Gerry H) Very rare Aztec Gold paint–on display at the 2024 NCRS convention

Is it a Cord? Is it a Corvette? Or is Marty Martino’s latest creation, the CordVette, the best of both cars?

0:43 / 10:11

For a vehicle that only lasted a couple years on the market, Gordon Buehrig’s Cord 810 and 812 have sure had an outsize influence on car designers and enthusiasts ever since. David North, Stan Wilen, and Bill Mitchell packed the Oldsmobile Toronado with all sorts of design elements paying homage to the Toronado’s front-wheel-drive predecessor. Multiple customizers through the Fifties tried their hand at making a sports car out of the coffin-nose Cord. And on at least three occasions, entrepreneurs have resurrected or attempted to resurrect the Cord. So Marty Martino’s really just following in a grand tradition by building a modern Cord out of the bones of a fifth-generation Corvette.

“I never thought of this project as a ‘sport custom’ in the traditional way, but being that it’s a one-off Cord-inspired design, I now see it as a continuation of the genre,” Marty said after reading our recent story on Fifties-era sport-custom Cords.

The roots of the project date back to the late Eighties, when Automobile Quarterly ran a design contest asking for its readers to envision the Cord 810, Tucker 48, or Packard Caribbean as they would have appeared in 1990. “What really made the contest exciting to me was that it was to be judged by Alex Tremulis, Frank Hershey, Dick Teague, Bill Mitchell, Chuck Jordan, Jack Telnack, and Dave Holls, many of my automotive heroes!” Marty said.

Marty’s updated Cord 810/812 rendering.

Marty selected the 810, and while the phone-dial wheels, wraparound indent, and jellybean taillamps all reflect the era in which he re-envisioned the Cord, the coupe managed to blend the original’s subtly stepped fastback, haunches, hidden headlamps in winglike fenders, and speed line grille in with contemporary shape and proportions. The entry made it into print as one of four runner-up designs that the judges chose. Not bad, Marty thought, considering “most of the entrants were accomplished illustrator/designers, students at Art Center, and so on,” he said.

The rendering got filed away until about a decade ago, when Marty’s younger brother, Robert, expressed an interest in building a modern Cord using a Corvette as the donor car. Robert, according to Marty, “had long held 1936 and 1937 Cords as his favorite prewar car design… and considers the Cord Sportsman the Corvette of its day.”

They figured the fifth-generation Corvette would work best for this project given that Marty had already built the PsyClone Motorama tribute car from a C5 and that both the C5 and the Cord had hideaway headlamps. Robert wanted a convertible, so the brothers found a profile shot of a C5 Corvette, laid it on a lightbox, then drafted the CordVette’s design on a blank piece of paper above the profile shot using many of the same elements and lines that Marty had incorporated into his Automobile Quarterly rendering. Marty also did a little Bondo sculpting on a 1/25-scale model of a C5 to see his alterations in three dimensions.

scale CordVette Marty’s proof-of-concept scale version of the CordVette.

“I sketched what I could change without harming the integrity of the ‘Vette and without changing its wheelbase, door openings, top, windows, and structural integrity,” he said. “It’s the same method I used to design the PsyClone.”

Robert tacked the latter sketch to his office wall before finally deciding to take the plunge a few years later. He started by locating a C5 convertible with a manual transmission and tan interior, two of the items that would remain with the car through the conversion. He then spent another few years driving the convertible and fixing minor issues on it before telling Marty in late fall 2019 that the time had come to cut it up.

C5 Corvette Robert’s 2000 Chevrolet Corvette “about an hour before I started cutting it up,” Marty said.

When Marty started work on it in January 2020, stripping the car to its basic structure, he estimated that the project wouldn’t take more than a year. “However, in March of 2020, I casually mentioned ‘wouldn’t it be wicked with suicide doors?’” Marty said. After all, a close look at his Automobile Quarterly rendering shows rear-hinged doors, just as the 810 Sportsman had. “Oops. Well, that turned into an engineering nightmare. Way more restrictions and challenges than I would have ever guessed. I probably have as much time in just suiciding the doors as I have in sculpting the rest of the body.”

rear-hinged Corvette C5 doors The rear-hinged doors after many months of work.

With the doors figured out, Marty then started to reshape the rear of the car before he progressed toward the front. He used a couple of different methods for creating the panels, he said. About half of the panels resulted from his foam sculpture method, in which he carved the shape of the fenders from blocks of foam, then sealed them to use for creating molds from which the actual fiberglass panels could be pulled. The others, he said, “were cast from wood, Bondo, and Masonite molds made with out a male form – only a sketch and dimensions – then assembled in reverse.” He then joined the fiberglass panels to the C5’s structure, preserving not just the hideaway headlamps but also the convertible top.

Robert in the CordVette “This is shot after the doors were hung and the rear shaping roughed in,” Marty said. “Robert is test driving as it hasn’t been started for several months at this point.”

More than two years after starting the project, Marty said he’s “seeing the light at the end of the tunnel,” with all of the fiberglass panels created and mounted. He’s currently working on extending the door wiring, and he still needs to paint it, but he said he and Robert are both pleased with how the design has evolved from that lightbox sketch and from that long-ago design contest entry.