Hundreds of Corvette Body Molds Show Up on Craigslist

There’s more than enough molds here to start a small business, and the chop gun is included, too!

You never know what you’ll find at an estate sale. Sometimes you find stuff that hasn’t seen the light of day in decades. Someone on Craigslist in Carrollton, Ohio unearthed one of the most unusual barn finds of all time. Now, they’re ready to sell.

According to the ad, they found over 500 individual molds for Corvette body panels. Apparently, all of the molds are there to produce every replacement panel for any Corvette from 1953 up through 1979. In addition, there is a Glas-Craft chop gun, so that the new owner of the molds can start cranking out new parts right away.

Obviously, these molds take up a ton of space, so you’d need quite the facility to get your new Corvette parts business off the ground. It would be pretty cool to be able to create all-new fiberglass Corvette bodies at a whim, though.

There’s a huge aftermarket for chassis, suspension, and interior trim components out there. With enough time and money, you could build as many Corvettes as you wanted. It’d be like assembling full-sized model kits. The lack of VINs and titles might put a damper on those plans, though. In addition, the asking price of $25,000 is considerably more than your average 1:25 scale plastic model kit!

The folks selling these molds must have some idea of what they have. After all, they were smart enough to photograph a ’63 split-window coupe tail section.

A Barn Full of Surprises

Looking closely at the photos, there are several things that stand out. Many of the molds shown are clearly not for factory stock body panels. One louvered C3 rear section mold is even labeled “MAKO REAR” with spray paint.

From our research, this mold, as well as a few others we can see, appear to be for the Baldwin-Motion Mako Shark Corvettes. We’re not sure if these are the original molds used in the late 1960s and early 1970s, or if they were created after the fact to make reproductions of those incredibly rare cars.

Either way, we’re wondering what other secrets lurk in that massive collection of molds. It would likely take days to go through and document everything that’s there. What if there are C2 Grand Sport molds in there?

As evidenced by the estate sale provenance of this impressive collection of molds, making reproduction Corvette body panels was likely someone’s life’s work. We hope that someone will carry on that work for the next generation.

We just wish we knew the backstory. Our curiosity has us wanting to look at the ads in the back of old Corvette magazines to see if, decades ago, some guy in Ohio was cranking out reproduction Corvette body panels in his barn. Hey pal, wherever you are — congratulations on a life well-lived. Maybe we can help find someone to take your business over. If you do end up bringing this truckload of molds home, be sure to tell us about it.

Photos: Craigslist

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