Terry Banicki wrote:
>
> Looks like this topic struck a chord, everybody chimed in. And let me
> set some perspective. A friend of mine works on model A's. My favorite
> quote of his is, 'To get restoration right, you have to rebuild the car
> three times'. I'm not looking to get a show car the first time, just a
> decent safe driver. At this point I'm just trying to do some project
> management. Estimate dollars and time. Identify and evaluate risks to
> completion. I don't want to get in over my head, financially or
> technically.
----snippetry------------------
Terry, this might be the worst advice you ever got, but it's sincere:
Hope I'm not being nosy; I mostly just lurk here. I'm restoring a Victor
TF for a friend and using it for transportation while I reshell my
Cooper S, crunched in a wreck last fall. This list has been wonderful in
helping me find parts and advice for the TF.
Here's my advice, for what it might be worth, not just to you, but to
anybody considering one of these projects.
If you're willing for life to be a bit of an adventure, & if you really
*really* want to do a thing, my advice is to set out to succeed in it no
matter what, and just be like water in your persistance: if you fall in
a deep hole, fill it up and move on. I would rather fail in a grand
undertaking that has captured my imagination and to which I have given
my best than to never have tried.
A Classic Car restoration is a little bit like "investing" in electronic
gear, since the restoration will almost never be cost-effective in terms
of pure dollars and cents valuable time, just like the way the
electronic gear will depreciate and be superceded before the ink is even
dry on the credit account.
What you get from the gear is the *experience of using it* and keeping
current on the latest technology by doing so and, depending on how you
apply it, that can be priceless.
A proper restoration of a Classic Motorcar is possibly one of the most
valuable exercises in character-development and the honing of manual and
mental acuity available in these times. You might spend $3500 on a
rust-bucket and invest thousands of hours and several more thousands of
dollars and a certain amount of humiliation and bleeding knuckles and
end up with only a $10,000 car in the end, BUT, you will also have
matured and persevered and learned and studied, so that the final
product is not the automobile, but an entirely improved *person* to be
from now on. Not to suggest that you should neglect your
responsibilities to your family or the telephone company, but
"cost-effectiveness" doesn't have a very good handle on the real rewards
of carrying a project like this to completion.
-Rock
--
Rocky, JJ Cale Band & Pratchett Books: http://www.rocky-frisco.com
Rocky's Mini Cooper Page: http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/6437/
Mini Books: http://www.geocities.com/MotorCity/6437/rockboox.html
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