Well guys, let me make one thing perfectly clear because some of you just don't seem to be getting it.
My wife and I did not buy this car for the purposes of having a car. We've been down that road well over a dozen times in the past, and that road ran the gambit from daily driver to show car. There's nothing we haven't done with these cars, and the end result has always been we keep them around for a few years, get rid of them for one reason or another, usually moves, and then five or ten years later something motivates us to get another one.
Our problem this go around is we're now too old and experienced to go wasting a ton of money on getting a car restored or worse, turned into another show car that's gonna sit around 99% of the time and collect dust. If we were gonna do another car we wanted to do one that we could drive the crap out of and not have to worry about loss of resale value or investment, worry about storage, worry about how much we're worrying, etc. So we started looking about seven years ago but not with much enthusiasm because the market for collector cars was just nuts with investors and flippers.
It wasn't until 2011 or so that we started going back to car shows and talking to people and all I heard from everyone there was "Oh gosh, it's soooooooo expensive to have a car these days. It's soooooooo expensive to get parts. It's soooooooo expensive to this that and the other thing". That's when I ordered the first Year One and CI, and Paddock and other catalogs that I hadn't seen in over a decade and was like WTF! "They want how much?" And that was when the seed of thought was placed in my mind that there had to be a better way to get a car back on the road.
Then through some serendipity, a kid in my neighborhood got a hold of the rattiest 70s Chevelle I had ever seen. Total POS, but his was the first 70s car I had seen driving around with someone who didn't have grey hair in a long time, so I started talking to him about his car and he was telling me "Oh gosh, it's soooooooo expensive to have a car these days. It's soooooooo expensive to get parts. It's soooooooo expensive to this that and the other thing". And he had the Year One et al catalogs as well. I asked if he had hit the old car junkyard in Middleburg? Nope, never heard of it. Did he use ebay? Nope. Did he use a Chevelle forum? Nope. Did he hook up with Clay County Cruisers? Nope. He was working at Burger King and trying to rebuild a Chevelle using Year One, CI, Paddock, etc. That was when I found my inspiration for our new project.
So I can appreciate all of you'alls commentary about "wow, that was a dumb thing to do" or "I would never do that". Of course you guys would never do that... you don't have to. A kid today does, which is why we set the challenge up the way we did. I was able to take my car from a beat to **** car with a tree laying on it and no interior to a car that was invited to three car shows just seven months later and do so for under $5k, which let's be honest is a feat not a one of you could do in a million years, except maybe YY1.
Then we wanted to extend the project to not just making the car look and drive good, but go with a performance upgrade. This went nowhere nearly as smoothly, but that's okay. Like I said, we're documenting everything that's been going on, and will be going on. So you guys who are all "oh man, you really screwed up doing this", I'm cool with that. Just be sure to thank me when you run into a problem with a vendor in the future and you look up my posts on how to deal with bad vendors and apply that information to get results instead of coming on here and whining about how some dude ripped you off.
