BRAND-SPECIFIC AUTO SHOPS ARE SLOWLY DISAPPEARING
Corvette Specialties is shutting its doors after 54 years in business. The 17,000-square-foot building that has been a Vancouver-area fixture at the Surrey end of the Pattullo Bridge since the mid-'80s will turn off the shop compressor and showroom lights for the last time on May 15.
For more than five decades, brothers Bruce and Glenn Iggulden have bought, sold and repaired thousands of Corvettes. They also worked on painting a Lamborghini Countach and a Ferrari Testarossa along with race cars, hot rods and classics.
The closing of their business follows a trend of shops that specialize in one brand of car shutting down in urban centres or moving to less expensive locations. Retirements, high land values, soaring taxes, difficulty in finding skilled workers and other reasons are making it harder for these unique automotive repair and restoration companies to stay in business. And that makes it more challenging for owners to maintain their aging and classic vehicles. The Iggulden brothers are retiring, their property has been sold to a developer and highrise condominiums are on the horizon for the 2.5-acre site.
“It's time to wrap it up,” 74-year-old Bruce Iggulden says. “It's been a great ride.”
Bruce has loved cars all his life and started working on them as a teenager growing up in Surrey with three brothers. He was barely out of his teens when he bought his first Corvette: A 1963 roadster.
He opened his own shop at the age of 21 after a brief start with two other Corvette enthusiasts in a business they called 3 Vettes. When that partnership didn't last, Bruce went out on his own.
Younger brother Glenn started sweeping the floors after school at age 14 and was soon doing bodywork on the fibreglass Corvettes.
At that young age, Bruce realized that, if he was going to make the auto industry his career, there would be no one there at the end to supply with a pension income unless he supplied one for himself. So, he went out on a limb and bought his first building as a strata title in Surrey's Newton area.
“I was fixing a lot of Corvettes and people heard about that and brought more for repairs,” he says. “The business kept growing and I had to expand, so we built a 10,000-square-foot building.”
Soon, even that building wasn't big enough. In 1982, he learned of a gas station property for sale at the major intersection of Scott Road and King George Highway adjacent to the south end of the Pattullo Bridge linking New Westminster to Surrey. It was a high traffic area with a convenient location.
“It was owned by an oil company. I was told to make an offer with a 10 per cent deposit,” he recalls. “My offer was accepted. Then I had to come up with the whole purchase price in 30 days.”
He was able to close the deal with help from a close relative, but he needed to find a purchaser for the shop in Newton to enable construction of a new 17,000-sq.ft building.
He got lucky.
A graphics company with an identical building next to his business had won the B.C. government contract to produce licence plates and had an urgent need to expand.
They bought Bruce's building, and he was able to close the deal for the bare land on which he would construct the Corvette Specialties building featuring a mechanical repair shop, body shop, parts department, offices and a showroom.
Glenn ran the repair and body shop while Bruce dealt with customers, buying and selling Corvettes and running an online Corvette parts business.
“At one time, we had over 40 Corvettes out in front — all for sale,” he says.
“There were seven restored 435-horsepower 1967 Corvettes in our showroom. They are worth 10 times what we were selling them for back then.”
In the mid-'70s, Bruce stumbled upon one of the rarest Corvettes in existence: a 1953 Corvette General Motors Motorama show car. It was registered as a 1954 Corvette, but it was different than any he had seen. It had a hardtop, roll-up windows and chrome throughout the engine compartment. He knew it had been a show car. His research shows that it was number 260 of the 300 first-year Corvettes produced in 1953. It had been taken off the assembly line and made over into a show car by the manufacturer.
General Motors built one Corvette for its Motorama display. The Corvette with serial number E53F001260 was specially built and painted candy copper/ bronze for display at the 1954 Canadian National Exhibition in Toronto. This became the first Corvette to feature a removable hardtop, roll-up windows and a glove compartment inside the kick panel — the formula for the 1956 Corvette introduced to compete directly with Ford's two-passenger Thunderbird.
The restoration-in-progress General Motors Motorama Corvette will be taken home so parts expert Bruce and body man/painter Glenn can complete the rebuild of one of the most historic Corvettes in existence as Corvette Specialties fades out of sight in the rear-view mirror.
Bruce and Glenn will still keep in touch with their customers for help and advice by email, bruce@corvettepartsworldwide.com, by phone at 604-580-8388 or online at corvettepartsworldwide.com.