[MUSIC] So many of you friends may or may not know I'm a car guy, I've worked in the car business for 17 years I was a service manager for a Ford dealership and a Ford mechanic for many years Lincoln Mercury I'm going to give you Look at some cars from
I've been interested in it from time to time maybe some of you will stay tuned [music] get rid of the challenge so friends here's a bradley gt2 and I'm going to zoom in here so you see it says gt2 has a Bradley gt I remember these as a kid being the professor living in the town I grew up in had a couple he'd been working on that I thought was never done and now he's a Bradley GT and from a tv show called live them
coyote this was supposed to be a gt not a gt2 so this is my friend jim jim is the owner of the bradley gt2 tell us about the car jim so you know you're talking about a bradley gt this It's actually not uncommon for people to confuse a bradley gt with a bradley gt2 but they're completely different cars first of all they make a lot of bradley gts I mean a ton so they're pretty common, the GT is more for getting around A car for people in town just fiddling with as a hobby and later the gt2 bradley doomsday company was designed more as a daily driver car so there were a lot of improvements made to this car the factory didn't exist cloth Bradley GT and the Bradley is designed to continue like a VW chassis type set so almost all the Bradley gts and Bradley gt2s are put on the VW chassis the only difference you may see you have options and bra Deli marketing it this way you can have a VW drivetrain you can have a Porsche drivetrain or you can have a Corvair drivetrain I've seen cars with all three but you can imagine the VW is the most Common cheapest and Porsche Ferdinand Porsche actually designed the Volkswagen so they are very similar with two air cooled engines built in which is exactly how this car is set up with an air cooled engine with the
engine in the back well of course no water pump or radiator or Anything like that that's because it makes it easier especially a rear engine car if it has a radiator you'll be dealing with hoses front to back and all that stuff I've seen people do what people have got there Get creative and put the v6s in there and you can you can fire a v6 horn in there I've seen this done before but it does require putting the radiators on the front and custom and fabrication and well that's not common and a lot Trouble to get it right it's probably not much better than you can fill up those volkswagen engines and make them go fast yes people love the sound of volkswagens one of the things I love about this car It's a VW engine when it sounds like a little race car
you're driving it so it's really just when you growl and accelerate and hmm
driving like a six cylinder Ford engine doesn't even sound like that with the right aggressive exhaust so it's A beautiful car Jim uh you mentioned a lot of this don't get it right so tell us tell us about that aspect of it this is a kit car designed for
a guy that is easy to buy and create himself is right that Really part of the problem with kit cars is a lot of people will take them and read the marketing they'll advertise these kit cars think about yourself might be good gosh bradley said anyone can use a little know how what happens what you get Their kits, will come completely disassembled i mean in bags you will put your bolts in their bags labeled and numbered and you will get this really nice book i have a back It's literally like putting the assembly manual together with your car I always tell people it's kind of like if you go to the hobby hall and you buy a model car kit like you would have all your instruction pages you would put together Part assembly vehicles when we say here we are again talking about electrical we're talking about suspension we're talking about all your mechanical parts engine to your transmission you know we're talking about your braking system we're talking about potential the air because by the way the air conditioner is an option on the
bradley gt2s and the other i actually have air conditioner but it 's an expensive option so not a lot of people have them, it's really rare so i think it's for And the design
weekend warriors was another one last year I spent about half of it learning about these and researching these and what I found was most of them ended up incomplete and sitting in someone's garage usually a mess a lot of the time you find them so when you It's unusual to find one that's done really well like this one does er they'll sit in people's yards in their garages for 40 years Absolutely, this one was actually in the barn when the previous owner found it in the 70's Where did the guy get it start it got it and realized it was too much for me, probably parked it in the barn waiting for the next owner decades ago got it and probably thinking I'm just going to paint its maybe i 'll put a new engine in
it rebuild the engine i'll be driving no time he ended up literally redoing everything spent a fortune on the car cause i remember you told me a bunch of receipts and stuff Well over 40 000 started restoring this car wow and a lot of time several different suppliers worked on it, that's really another difference between this car and a
lot of other kit cars, this is not a DIY project this is a professional who Specializes in mechanical work and electrical and bodywork and all those things and a lot of times people try to do it themselves, that's why a lot of Kit cars all end up being grotesque or semi-finished and the car you mentioned forty five thousand dollars won't bring in forty five thousand no I've never seen any bradleys would bring in Almost that um there are some kit cars in the kit cars that will make the world of real good money you know twenty to thirty thousand dollars or more uh more like cobras and like you absolutely love cobras and those are almost in another class because usually Cobras are well done well I'm talking cobras from 30 to 75 000 for kit cars Cobras of course original are much more than that but there are also lamborghini ferrari umm look like tributes or companion cars
Ferrari and Lamborghini factory those can cost A lot of money usually those are built on a fiero
platform not a vw platform so from a performance perspective there is no more performance than a vw engine if the fiero is a tired car but those tend to go a bit more made in the 80's than in the 70's like so and i worked on a couple of figs in the arrow
80's uh i remember about the funny engine i had one that was a manual transmission i had to use to replace the clutch it had the engine mounted on the chassis that spin d down you take two a bolt undoes everything and literally spins and hangs under your car can change it and flip it back up is one thing i remember about the funny fiero just some tricks friends so show us my car Know you mentioned this some upgrades like uh the way the headlights are done it's an upgrade uh uh you can do find some new glass to put on the top
doors is really one thing that differentiates this car from Come on the
bradley GT is all glass the plexiglass on this car is designed specifically for this car it's not borrowed like a 280z or something like that or a corvette gt well first gen they actually borrowed Of course you can still get this windshield today with a windshield designed for this car by a certain company that went out of business decades ago and the only way to get one of those windshields is to find their original So unfortunately this particular glass is prone to fogging so a lot of times when you find a usable windshield the fogging and sorting can be pretty bad happens glass delamination here is tinted it just really almost ruined the windshield windshield it's like a pair of plies of glass between the layers , yeah i think that's what happens there if you have if you find one without a windshield well it's pretty much rendered it's totally worthless because it's hard to find a windshield Glass so really the only way to get windshields is to find a parts car and get windshields out as each year goes by as imagining there are fewer and fewer of those available because there is no Bradley gt2 windshields huge market but the top glass is what you look like talking about those It's actually plexiglass those are designed to be these plexiglass are you in the right place that's what these are new old I'm completely from stock
factory installed here I replaced the hardware you know I told you it's rusted a little bit but these Come out to give you that t-top effect and one of the things they talked about when they reviewed the car back in the late 70's and that's how you get it's really cool panoramic 360 degree view so you actually have a nice Visibility when you're in this car
other than driving in the mirrors these are factory mirrors and they're a bit tricky so you're definitely looking over your shoulder a lot but in the kitkar world they're actually pretty good for uh
side view mirror but yeah all the other glass is only for gt2 so in the center
side glass now only this part rolls up and down remember see that was that ford gt40 has that kind of glass i've seen in what other cars
yeah that's Race car inspired, well that's a couple of good things first the glass, didn't break the window mechanism inside it's just a guide to drop it at an angle down into the door it's just a slight angle then it just comes back and it should be here The little tab hangs on
right here let it close the little tab all day so there's no crank like you're pushing something Exactly it's a bit gt40 inspired there's a gt40 style kit that's also a popular car but this One of the good things about the car is that it's fairly easy to drive as it's easy to get in and out I'm a little over six feet and my GT has good head clearance there's a jay leno video of the gt1 where he's actually looking at the windshield top jalen know big guys like 62 or something like that but totally can't use gt1 in any way this fits bigger guys i mean i'm not a small guy i fit in there ok i noticed you Sitting here I mean your head is on the top of the glass when you 're sitting there you're high up and yes my head is about here when I'm sitting there me and you can see the seat sits pretty Low really very little anything under the seat pan between the seat itself and the floor there is just a little track that slides the seat back and forth and it 's designed at an angle that doesn't recline it's a fixed seat that you slide down the seat kind of lets You're disappointed further into the car it probably won't slide very far back I wouldn't think just a little just a little the mechanics of this guy are actually finicky but the passenger seat works fine yes they are of course a four speed they replaced the VW Auto transmission all factory gauges with these really nice phantom um gauges gauges original all gauges will be those gauges yes and there will be your speedometer your tachometer your oil pressure and all the other things just like that they just replace it with the more modern We have
a fixed steering that doesn't lean so you know how it sits exactly how it's going when you're driving it's actually a pretty good height for that
I'm cool yes you sit low , so it's not like driving a vw beetle where you're sitting a little bit higher, kind of like a higher viewpoint, it feels like you're driving a sports car because you're sitting really low in the car and the center of gravity of the car is low Of course you know gt2s a lot the way they look has to do with the way they build the stance of the vehicle my first gt2 the wheels were set back a little they weren't big enough tires they were the wrong wheels this you can see the tires coming Got very close to the edge and fills the wheels very well now that's what I 've seen in
As you mentioned a lot of them will have tires that don't fit them look like their vehicle doesn't fit uh with the wheels right or they don't Big enough I've seen this on a lot of guys they kinda I said they were weird looking the same thing as uh with uh suspension they somehow weighed the car correctly they had some weird Stuff, you'll see one corner of the front end higher than the other, I think it's further accentuated when you have the wrong stance amateur body kit cars yeah when they don't get you know it's just right because you want the wheel setup The factory car is about like this you'd expect this kind of clearance yeah well it's a thing that makes it look more like a production car than a kick car those uh rims look very much like the brooklyn you mentioned you have the brooklyn one brick floor sv1 i own and those very similar to the brooklyn sb1 uh wheels i believe these are the wheels
bradley sent the gt2 as my last gt2 had these exact wheels so i think they are the same wheels One of the things I would like to point out
is the bumper that changes a bit like the car gt1 so this one no longer has the factory front bumper but from the factory it has a five mph fiberglass bumper shock bar like a lot of the 70's Same with cars so it can actually have mid impact and crash these are called nerf bars these are common on hot rods i don't think these have the same eh five mph impact but these are mounted to the frame so if i get into a crash this absorbs some of the impact but a lot of people remove the factory bumper because it's not very pretty it takes away the design but they do leave the factory with a rear bumper that's very similar to the
front bumper the look of the front bumper isn't Super attractive bumper but it absorbs the crash to a certain degree if you don't get into an accident at all because in the end there isn't a lot of protection in the overall vehicle the steel roll cage that runs on the
driver and passenger is right there Well yeah it actually runs right here it runs behind this and runs all the way around so there's actually a steel as a sort of rolling support bar but it's all fiberglass like a corvette but the difference is there's no reinforcements here , so it's pure fiberglass so in a really bad crash all you have is a skin of fiberglass protecting you is one of the downsides of kit cars yes you can't reinforce it either because you make the doors too heavy yes Makes the whole car too heavy Exactly you want not to get into an accident because it's not a daily driver you know it's uh friday night is right yes I'd love to never drive it work
every day or something like that thing but it does have air like a vent system it does blow the air right but no ac no a/c but you can have it like um there is room for if you want to add a compressor but even with fresh air It's really good to blow in there because it does feel uncomfortable in these cars without
any fresh air because even though they have this really neat um side view mirrors yeah it doesn't use a lot to pull the air yes The air just blows up here it's minimal and you mentioned you changed this yes so it's a factory style one that's a new old stock logo I found um the other one was pitted and missing the black paint, So that's exactly what the badge looked like in 1978 and 1979 black background like that eh Bradley gt1s don't have those logos this is bradley only for gt2 so by that time he might have generated a little bit of income he has generated some The ability to stuff is more like he wants to be right and I think I think they're taking a risk means you know they're trying to make it more like a car for consumers to drive every day yeah so they're making an investment To make it happen you know they're hiring designers to make things more functional and drivable so they're definitely an investment but by the end of the 70's everything I read said Bradley was in trouble financially Up on Bradley they have sales offices all over the
US they are basically ready to take orders for these kit cars and then they will literally ship the cars from all over the US I think they are based in Minnesota but they were in the late 70's Struggling they came out with an electric version of this at the end I've seen a few they put a bunch of batteries in the back so you have a bunch of batteries back in there you can imagine a fiberglass car the suspension to the right might not be very ok
it but they tried the electrical route i read about a rival fiber optic factory for at the time bradley hired a few of their guys to enter the company then bradley couldn't recover uh went bankrupt uh sold the production gt1 and gt2 arrive Right
another company I know they didn't do any of that with me they never did that basically stopped the race almost yeah it could have been that what yeah yeah so tell us the headlights on this thing are ok like I told you before a lot of cars from the late 70's and early 80's uh even the 60's are vacuum operated this electric I think it's cool to operate actually you'll think about what goes wrong by looking at them and being with them, But that's exactly what they're supposed to be a bit slower these are fully electrified a lot of the versions are vacuum that creates another set of problems like you said uh cars when you first start them they're cold they don't have them There is no vacuum so it took so took a little while to get them to build up and you get a little hole in your line and you have the vacuum as you said before the pressure issue I have a brick floor and those are vacuum operated If you rev the engine, where can it make the headlights go up and down under certain conditions so it's weird you know you don't want your car or you'd blink yes one of them will fail and you only have one The headlights that will come up yeah these are interesting and you can see the work like uh they work well you can see there's a little stop right here to stop it from going further so it just stops there and uh they Just before the stop the body is there so it gives you the biggest headlights yes it fits well so you can tell it's well designed yes they took some time funny it's just one of those little features of the car Less kit cars like because gt uh the original gts didn't have the pop up headlights they just hid the headlights just turned on yeah so let's talk about taillights this now they use something from another type of vehicle taillights tell us this , so the taillight lens itself and only the lens is from the uh school bus
that time period I'm sure all of you know the ones I remember them being on my school bus yes definitely and these probably have been used through the 80's style taillights so the benefit of that of course if i lost a tail light i could find a pair on
ebay easy umm just the lens everything else about the tail the light is juice specific the wiring of the bulb itself is all gt2 designed well my feeling is when he The designer when he was designing this
put it together they wanted to kinda have an afterburner look at it so if you look like the back of a mid jet
1960's and 70's they have very afterburner Similar to that and that's what I got from them is afterburner looks like it's a bulb that can brake lights running lights and turn signals all in one circuit well it's probably 11 57 boom I think it's just a little small The little light bulb inside is a pain to change the light bulb, well, you actually The whole assembly has to be pulled out because it's not just these screws that hold it in place Well, there's a bracket that goes on to the mid
tail light that's actually a mounting bracket that's pressure held in place and here you have to pull it out and then the whole assembly comes out and replaces Bulb uh it takes about 20-30 minutes it's not a very good design but you know it's typical kit cars have stuff like that cause no access anywhere else you have this insulate you so you put you do dynomat Or someone else did another generator there yes yes he did I think he did it under the
rug he did a really good job it was definitely necessary and reduced the heat hmm but yeah this one you lay on Your body back and you start from the bottom yeah now what that is friend this is a dynamat this is a thick thing almost like it has uh asphalt kind of like rubber you stick it on and the sound canceling they use for car stereos is the most important so it will be used for engine sound canceling so tell us this engine you say this starts at 1600 yes so everything i've read says it starts at 1600 The previous owner sent it to California to be rebuilt and there's a long list of things they did when I originally got the
car it had split carburetors on it but it was too much for the car's engine at idle Was stuck at the time so we ended up going to a single two barrel carburetor now it's running perfectly would be a weber double weber well this one in particular can't remember if it was a weber or not but weber is pretty typical it's definitely pretty typical So the other thing I see here is that generators are not automatons so that's back in the day friends it's actually that old system now is it 6 volts or 12 volts is 12 volts can now is typical of that time of course Yeah I think it was the late 70's and even VW's were 12 volts for them, well a couple of things I would point out is the fuel filters all the oil filters in here the thing now, the oil filters kind of Change the booger bear inside here don't get the oil anywhere you know it's actually not bad uh we changed the oil I got the first time yeah it really didn't mess me up think it's the same as Its the fact about things like back pressurization it might drain out of it
when you shut it off the hose is right so there's very little there just a little bit in the filter yeah thats this thing is a cool Well put together and beautiful guys that 's the beauty of
VW engines they're simple they're strong they're strong they're exactly right I asked my VW mechanic you know what I should be The gas you put in and use is basically like you know what you want to put it in yeah these big Multiple engines are acceptable and yes they can run on various fuels it's really tough yes um well Jim it's a beautiful car now what we're not getting into is back here the passenger seat isn't just the back deck kind of like I've seen 280z people hmm try to put I've seen people try to put the seat back but it's unrealistic really doable cause you know your your drivetrain everything works in the middle so I mean you can fit small , it's the manual you said it was a huge manual so if you know you bought one in 1978 and I'm going to end this here then you'll get one of these and well basically here's your step by step it has an intro from gary bradley this guy like i said his name is not actually gary bradley uh two company founders are named gary and bradley so they created this fictional man and call him gary bradley wow so that's like his intro his dear bradley gt2 builders and they have a customer service number and all the contact info you need company but uh so if you buy Got one assembled there are instructions on what to do when they come assembled then if you buy an unassembled then there are instructions and everything from body prep to your name the way you see the rear bumper so it's even It's definitely a lot of work to show you the kind of drilling here and that it's a lot of work and again I think a lot of people don't realize there look how it's angled right there and I'm telling you how the glass slides back in there um , it's your real mechanism simple one of the benefits of course is very few
disconnected wires in there
your speedometer attack oil pressure fuel gauge well all that's right that's your center chip wow it gives you a lead All these things right in the foot position and in the connector so you get your harness logo right there you get your harness and you just plug it all in that's the idea so yeah it's nice and cool little ie really cool, this thing is interesting yes, yes, yes, some stuff, and then you know the front and the back there looks like a cool, yes, it's very nice one Great car thank you this car is for sale jim for sale I have listed it on ebay hmmm I think it has uh 6 or 7 days from today it's the 17th ok well a week or so to go yes is that the whole sale on ebay is done or you have uh reserve so there is reserve i also had a good offer selling locally during the auction i have been in the past too uh it has been over on stock
ebay no not yet it's not in a reserve ok but someone looking for a really cool car i don't think you can probably find anything better than this The better one out there I'm inclined to agree it looks pretty awesome, I've seen a lot of them and most of them don't look nearly this good exactly right they don't look that good very cool can I sit in it jim yeah go ahead i'm gonna sit in it guys im sure its not easy to get into it really not that bad i have an aztec seven card is worse aztec seven is worse Aztec 7 if you have a chance look it up this is like a cybertruck cybercar
kitkar world looks like a cyber car it's cool you think it's crazy aztec 7 looks super crazy What does this do and what is that little knob from the factory for the heater control well vw exactly how much this car has I'm not of course it's like shutting the valve back on the engine to push more here The heat so you get the warm air into the ke then what's the version here and that's your reverse lock toggle oh ok so you pull it up in reverse to back up your safety feature so you don't get into accidental reverse very Cool very very neat you're right you lie down you're really low to the ground you can even slide I mean you know your training can slide down a little more height I usually slide down as much as I can All you can do is limit the distance to the door My head is cool let me see if I can get out feet stick out and you pull yourself out oh yes yes it 's not too bad um thank you so much Jim for showing us I You're welcome friends if not really nice car and friends have already jumped on ebay and bid on the bradley gt two right there so if you want to support this work make sure you subscribe like and then join , help us get more videos out there yes [music]
