We often hear a lot about stalled restorations, or the stressful race in getting the car ready for the Spring Thaw, so here are some tips to help you get it done on time…

Partner with your parts guy.
In this day and age most of us buy our parts online, but it’s high time we all went back to a local parts source. Through the Spring Thaw I met a VW parts supplier, and he’s really become a partner on this project. He’s seen far more restorations then I have, and often suggests parts or order of assembly that I hadn’t thought of.  And while his business is selling parts, with me he allows returns and works hard to be competitive at price. It’s refreshing to be able to pickup the phone and say “it’s rear brakes time, can you order in the stuff” and not have to click through 18 pages, only to find out when the parts arrive I totally forgot I would need flex lines. How do you find a good parts guy? First, ask around…and then commit. Make a series of orders with him, and show you’re a ‘return’ customer. If he starts to ask about how your project is going, and shows genuine interest…you’ve found one.

Post a build thread.
Stop wasting hours surfing other peoples threads and questions, and instead start a build thread. Every time you get frustrated or burn out, it’s great to go back and witness all the things you’ve succeeded at. Keeping the story going, also helps to keep you going on your project. And the best part? Build threads with regular post counts attract those experts who surf forums regularly. Stuck on a problem, a simple post about it will result in answers being directed right at your project. Lastly, the encouragement from other enthusiasts on your posts is a huge boost after a tonne of work.

Implement “The Harrison rule”
Years ago I was burnt out on a rally car project which had sat for a long time. My buddy Harrison finally snapped me into it, by implementing what became known as “The Harrison Rule”. The rule is simple: Spend a minimum of one hour each day in the garage. You are allowed to work more hours in a day, but you can’t “bank” or miss any hours. Thus, two hours tonight doesn’t mean I can skip tomorrow. During your one hour a day, you don’t even have to touch your project! You might clean the work bench, sweep the floor, I’ve even just sat looking at the car for an hour. After a few nights, however, you get bored and touch the project. You might just turn a few bolts. Soon you find yourself excited to get back in the garage because you can once again seeprogress on the project. Eliminate the TV. the internet surfing, the sitting back on the couch, and suddenly an hour a day becomes available. The Harrison Rule has saved me from more projects then I could count.

Hopefully these ideas keep you from having the perpetual “project” sitting in your garage!

-Dave

Sitting in the CCA garage right now is a bare Volkswagen Beetle pan. So far in the first two months I’ve managed to strip the car down, repair the body, and prep the pan. The last month has been quite a bit slower though, as I’ve accomplished nothing more then mounting the transmission, shift rod and shifter. True, I did manage to squeeze a Porsche 5 speed into the Volkswagen floorpan, but the entire job was nothing but frustration. Two transmission rebuilds, plenty of cutting and welding and then finally 39 hours to setup the shift linkage so I could get all five gears and reverse while using the stock Beetle shifter.

While I have a mountain of things to do ahead of me, the experience has taught me just how insane some of you are each year. There are a few things I just don’t understand about this restoration thing  though. Like….

Where did all the parts go?! 
When I tore the car down, I put every nut, bolt and part into a ziplock bag, labelled it and placed the bag into one of three plastic bins. Now, as I go to rebuild the car, I can never find the bag I need. And why does the “front suspension” bag contain both the left and right side bolts, but the “rear suspension” bag only has 1-side? To make matters even worse, I tore down two other parts cars, labelling the parts as well. Why is it when I can’t find “rear suspension bolts” for my car, none of the parts car bins have them either!?!

Where does all the money go?
Back when I had a running, driving, car, the finances were simple. I needed something, I bought it. If I needed something big, I saved and I bought it. Most importantly, though, once I bought something there was a appreciable difference. Silent bearings, good brakes, new cosmetics. Now I just have boxes of parts, a floorpan…and no money. I’m working, I’m getting paid every two weeks but the car remains just a floorpan and there is no money. I knew restorations were bad, but this is black-hole suction!

Why doesn’t this fit!?!
Seriously, did an evil elf sneak in here with a hammer? Parts that came off the car were cleaned up, restored and painted…you’d think they’d fit. None of that seems to fit without grinding, drilling, modifying or dancing an ancient ritual found on the internet. I suppose, in hindsight, I should have just built a stock restoration…maybe then things would go together?

(this one is for Warwick) When will the mess stop?!
I think its about once a week that I announce I’m finally done with the grinding, cutting, drilling, welding and spilling. “Don’t worry Warwick,” I tell him, “it’s all clean bolt-together stuff now.” Um, I started in September…it’s the end of November. I mean, it has to stop before the car is driving, right?

-Dave

P.S. Stop in tomorrow to see my four tips for making it through a major restoration…

The discussion originally started on another event’s email list. One of the members posted to say his Ferrari would be participating for the last time, and he was likely to sell it. A brief discussion on the Ferrari ensued, and then the real truth behind it’s ‘retirement’ came out. The Italian machine was heading to storage, as his wife wasn’t too pleased about the latest purchase…another Ferrari. It was then that Scott Fisher joined the conversation. Whether your garage hosts a collection of Ferrari’s, or simply dreams of a $500 project, you will probably relate to his words. Hopefully, we all learn from them too.

…So a whole slew of years ago, I rode along with a buddy looking at a car he wanted to buy.  His girlfriend was riding along with us, I was in the back seat and we were talking about the car all the way to the seller’s house; she was silent — not exactly an icy silence, at least not until viewed in retrospect.

Well, it was a smoking deal — won’t go into the details (and of course, names changed to protect the guilty and all that) — and he bought it.

And I was then forced to witness the most humiliating chewing-of-a-new-orifice that I had EVER, and have ever SINCE, beheld a woman giving to the man she was supposedly in love with.  It was embarrassing, not only because of the specific and minuscule nature of the demands she made (“and would it KILL you if ONCE in a while you wore a shirt with BUTTONS?”), but because it was being performed in front of a third party.

We rode back to their place, I got in my MGB and headed back home.  On the way I stopped at the local Safeway and picked up a bottle of chilled champagne, my wife’s favorite beverage.  I walked in; she was sitting at the table doing some art or craft, and smiled at me as I approached her.  When I held out the champagne, she beamed.

“For me?” she asked.  “What’s the occasion?”

“Because you’re not Sue,” I said (not her actual name).  I explained the evening, and she just shook her head sadly.

Kim (my wife’s actual name) got many a bottle of champagne over the next 20 years.  Whenever a guy said he couldn’t buy a car because his wife would kill him, I’d be there.  Whenever a woman handed a guy a list of things to do before he could leave the house, I’d be there.  Whenever I’d read a Craigslist ad where a guy was selling his Jensen-Healey to buy a Honda Odyssey because they were expecting their first child, I’d be there.  I’d be all around them in the dark.

Kim passed away suddenly last June, a few days before our 31st anniversary.  Our own daughter even gave me grief for the car I purchased as Kim’s memorial — not coincidentally, a Ferrari, which is what prompted this outpouring.

So goodbye, Kim. I miss you like meat misses salt, and I owe you a posthumous bottle of champagne because our daughter isn’t YOU.

And neither is anyone else.

But it leaves me in a position that is enviable in at least one way.  I’ve faced the worst thing in my life and survived.  So If I ever lapse into a relationship with a woman again, and she gives me the least bit of grief for ANYTHING car related, I’ll have the strength to quietly start putting her shoes in a bag and never speak to her again.

Because if what my friends have had to endure is any indication, there appears to be a never-ending parade of controlling, joy-killing women in the world, but there’s only a finite number of Ferraris.

I’m just saying.

–Scott Fisher

Scott's 1966 Ferrari 330 GT 2+2

]]> http://www.classiccaradventures.com/2010/09/of-women-and-ferraris/feed/ 3 http://www.classiccaradventures.com/2010/01/the-personal-touch-online-vs-real-world-retail/ http://www.classiccaradventures.com/2010/01/the-personal-touch-online-vs-real-world-retail/#comments Sun, 03 Jan 2010 18:18:43 +0000 Warwick http://www.classiccaradventures.com/?p=378 By Dave Hord

I had the unique opportunity to grow up in both the pre-internet days, and the post-internet boom. To folks just a few years older than me, I’m one of those “internet kids” who have always been attached to a computer. But, I’m old enough to appreciate the days when one had to use magazines, the yellow pages and a physical store to go about finding car parts. My younger days were spent reading Dad’s HotVW magazines, planning out the parts I would one day buy for as-yet-unpurchased vee-dub.

Fast-forward about 20 years, and I finally got around to buying a Beetle of my own. As is tradition in my family, I low-balled on a bit of a fixer-upper and soon had it sitting in my driveway. Before purchasing the bug, I had spent a couple of months catching up with some magazines, as well as the now-common practice of surfing the internet forums. When it came to actually buying parts for my car, however, I was fully immersed in the whiz-kid world of internet shopping.

It’s difficult to deny the convenience of shopping online. Catalogs expand and unfold with simply a click of a mouse. Should a description be missing, the manufacturer’s website is right at your fingertips. Still unsure about a particular part? A simple search on an enthusiast forum is likely to tell you everything you need to know. For most dealers you’ll even be told before you order whether the part is in-stock or backordered. I live in a fairly small town, and the closest air-cooled parts specialist is a two-hour drive away.  Can you imagine driving two-hours these days to find out a part wasn’t available or sold before you arrived?

It was at least a year that I was singing the praises of easy internet shopping. I could plan jobs ahead of time, order the parts, and know they’d arrive on Friday for weekend wrenching. I was confident I was getting great pricing deals, and always got exactly what I ordered. The problem with getting exactly what you ordered is perhaps we aren’t actually the best judge of which product we need. I over-spent on expensive items where the cheaper option would have been more then adequate. Vice versa, I broke or wore out cheaper options when I needed the better quality option. Have you ever tried to return an item to an online retailer? It’s not always so easy.

About the time that I was starting to see cracks in the internet masterpiece, I met some gents on the Spring Thaw Adventure. They happened to own the local Vancouver VW specialty parts store, and by the third day we were discussing why I purchased online versus locally. In the end, the best reason I could give them was that purchasing from their store vs. online would mean I’d have to pay for shipping. My online retailer offered free shipping for most of my orders. “We can work that out,” Art suggested “don’t worry about the shipping.” With that, I began to order from their shop.

We’ve all heard stories about how things were “better in the old days”. Well I must admit, my experience with buying parts over the past year has me longing for the ‘old days’ where we used to have to get to know the retailers we worked with.

Art, and his brother Rob, have taken the time to get to know me and my project. When I call with a list of things I need, they’ll often have a suggestion on a particular brand and explain why it suits my project and budget. When it came to shipping a heavy rear-disc conversion kit, Rob simply decided it would be worth taking a Sunday cruise with the family and brought it right to my door. Returns on bits I ordered and didn’t need have been seamless, and at one point they even offered to take a return on some cylinder heads I didn’t even buy from them!

I’m not suggesting every retail shop experience is going to turn out as well as mine has. But when it comes to classic cars, I think you’ll find that getting to know the owner and counterperson at a specialist benefits your projects in more ways than one. I only see Art and Rob at the annual car show and a couple of club events during the year, but our mutual interest in similar classics, combined with a mutual effort to get to know each other has resulted in a great friendship. There’s no reason you can’t develop an equally great relationship with your parts specialist just by simply taking an interest in their projects, and their business. Try doing that with a webpage!