Amongst my many faults, I'm a bit of an impatient bloke. I hate waiting for anything, from food service at a restaurant to watching some wombat slowly overtake a truck in the fast lane. Either of those situations gets my teeth grinding impatiently while I'm internally yelling "Where's my damn food!" or, "Get on the gas, wombat!"
So I probably shouldn't embark on "project" cars; my temperament just isn't suited to waiting for all the stuff that finishing a project entails. And as most of you will know, there're lots of things you end up waiting for on a project car...
Getting The Money Together
Inevitably, projects start off with a small lump of cash you figure will be "plenty" for the four of five stages you've got planned for your dream car. The timetable says "3 months", the workshops are lined up and the car goes off for its first stage ("engine" I can hear most of you cry and I'm a bit of a sucker for that one too). The first stage, again inevitably, bleeds your cash lump completely dry, whereupon you have to start scrimping - and suddenly your project looks like it's going to take 3 years not those planned 3 months.
I hate that.
The Inevitable Compromises Start Creeping In
Hmmm, I can't afford the expensive, high compression forged pistons... wonder if the stockers will hold up if I shave the head? Hmmm, I can't afford the big valves and three-angle valve seats... wonder if I can just get a little porting done instead? That internal vision of Mega, the Wonder Car starts getting hazy about this time. This period of project doldrums inevitably induces long hours in the garage kicking the aforesaid project car for costing so much money, along with wailing and gnashing of teeth Old Testament style (or more likely Old Hollywood style if TV was your main babysitter). All those jobs you should be doing seem to go by the wayside (like cleaning up and painting all the cheap bits, or polishing the metal parts that should be shiny, as per your original - though now distant - vision).
Waiting For Work To Be Finished
There seems to be a single rule with workshops when it comes to finishing a job on time.
They can't.
The only exception to this rule is that when you haven't got quite enough money, but expect to have it before the work is finished. In this case, the workshop will have finished the job in record time and be ringing you about it. I'm pretty sure this is related to a strange law in the Universe which operates something like this: The amount of money available in the Universe isn't constant, it's directly in proportion to how much is in my bank account at any one time. When I have money, everybody has money and they don't care too much about mine. When I have no money, nobody else does either and they ask me for some....
Waiting For The Glue To Dry
Upon reading a small biography about Jackson Pollack, it turns out that the artist who created "Blue Poles" (a huge, abstract painting currently owned by the Australian National Gallery, and purchased not without some controversy) used a variety of, um, unorthodox techniques and materials in his electrically-charged, stringy-splatter pictures. Amongst the splatters of paint on his canvases can apparently be found ground glass, blood and most of the other oozes, secretions and expectorations that can be coaxed from the male body (yuck, I hear you say, which is what I said too).
Until I read that article, I hadn't realised that I was the Jackson Pollack of the garage world. OK, it's a small complaint, but I hate glue and should probably leave anything to do with glue to somebody with a clue, as I usually make a stringy boo-boo all over the top of whatever I'm trying to glue. (Reading that back, perhaps I'm the Doctor Suess of the garage world, but I'm digressing). Whether it's carpet strips, underbonnet sound insulation or yet another child's toy I've accidentally backed over on the driveway, the strings of super glue or contact cement drape artfully around the work area as if Mr Pollack himself were invisibly guiding my uncoordinated, er, hands. Add to that the fact that there isn't a car I've owned that I haven't decorated with body claret (via grazed knuckles) and you can see I'm somewhat of a genius.
If you count the first car I owned, which would drop random amounts of broken glass into the driver's footwell (thanks to a past broken windscreen), a few furtive sexual encounters in back seats, and I think I've got Pollack's gig nailed. Minus the faeces, I think.
Waiting For That Special Part
Thanks to the wonders of modern communication, you and I can directly contact that small, specialist workshop in Italy or the UK and order some obscure nubbin or high-tech whatchamicallit and wait six months for it to arrive, only to find out that Grubby Joe at the local CarBarn had a box of them on his shelf gathering cobwebs for the whole time. This is something you only find out in desperation on Sunday afternoon when you got to fit your obscure nubbin, only to find out that you're missing the neoprene O-ring that is an integral requirement of fitting that part. And Grubby Joe smiles as he charges you for a whole nubbin.
Waiting For Your Engine To Run In
The trials of engine rebuilding are manifold. The super-quick disassembly is followed by weekends of careful examination and measuring of parts. Ancient, hardened gaskets come off only with days of careful scraping and copious amounts of gasket remover. You suffer endless hours of cleaning the block and head fluid passages. Finally, all the new bits have been ordered and arrived - gleaming new pistons and valves, new valve seats and guides, rings, bearings. You've plasti-gauged yourself stupid with the bearings, double checking everything. You spent two days getting the cross-hatching in your cylinder bores exactly right, a tedious game of trial and error with a hone. You spent 6 months waiting for that special OEM gasket set to arrive (that Grubby Joe had, again, on his damn shelf, and you had to buy to get the missing thermostat gasket). You've loaded the chambers with plasticine to check that your big valves don't hit the hi-comp pistons when fully extended with that outrageous camshaft. The engine is assembled, tightened and torqued to perfection. It's carefully dropped into the car, hooked back up to the rest of the drivetrain, wired up, fueled up, filled with oil.
You want to hear it roar, feel the promise of all that extra power you should have liberated with that expensive tuning gear. You can hear the sweet mill scream around toward redline in your mind, "getting rubber in all four gears" just like the Beach Boys "Little Deuce Coupe", but wait! You've got to pussy foot around the suburbs for weeks, driving like a pensioner who's just dropped their glasses.
Why? Because you've got to run it in!
Waiting To See How It Turns Out
Ever wonder why you see so many advertisements for finished projects? Usually at scary, unrealistic prices? There's a single phenomenon behind most of them. The owner built exactly what he thought he wanted and ended up with something he didn't really want. Being unrealistic about the outcome of a project on a ten-, twenty- or thirty-year-old car seems to be fairly common amongst those of us prone to a rose-coloured glasses view of the past. Getting to the end of a project on a twenty-year-old car, and finding out on the first drive that it drives like a brand new, twenty-year-old car might be revelatory if you've never driven anything else, but is only depressing when you have. While the basics of chassis and suspension design have altered little in the last 30 years, the execution has left the majority of older cars well behind. If the initial reaction to that first, face-draining drive of your 3-year project is "What have I done?", the second reaction will be "How do I get out of this?". Of course, your bank account is now empty (and then some, owing to the fact that everything cost five times as much as the original estimate), so you try to sell the car with a "recoup" premium that nobody in their right mind would pay. Hence the ads for $20,000 RWD Celicas.
I wouldn't buy one either.
So there you go. If you can't tell already, I'm definitely in the teeth-grinding thrall of despair that is the project doldrums, with little advice to offer to anybody about how to get out of them.
About the only real piece of advice I've gained is about the works of Jackson Pollack: don't stand too close to them.
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