42 replies to this topic

[j...]

This is exactly what I an planning to do, I am lucky I have a doubled garage and a single car port! Question could you upload some pages of your workbook so I can see what format you are using to record things? jas

[sibhs]

Here's my tip.
We all take plenty of photos while stripping the car. What I've done is use those photos as my computer screen background which change every 5 seconds. This already has prompted me on few things I might of forgotten about. It's also motivating to see how far you've come.
It's genius! :-)

Edited by sibhs, 17 February 2014 - 01:51 PM.

[TerrA LX]

Battling on solder, kudos to you mate.

[Bigfella237]

G'day all, I just joined the forum and I still have much reading to catch up on but this is a great thread, some sage advice above no doubt learned the hard way in some cases.

 

One thing I'd add, before you do anything else, is research.

 

Read about others' experiences, go to car shows (take thousands of photos) and talk to people who have been there and done it all before, learning from their mistakes could save you a bundle of time and money. This also makes your planning stage a little easier, there's nothing worse than being almost finished a project and seeing a mod that you wished you'd done... "Oh well, there's always next time".

 

For me, the two hardest decisions in any build are what wheels and what paint colour.

 

For the latter there's nothing like seeing a colour on a car in the flesh, but if you're picking colours from a paint chart I'd suggest you prep a few spare panels (like guards or bonnets) for paint, get a litre of each colour mixed and paint/clear a panel for each choice so you can take them out into the sunshine and look at them side-by-side, it may also be worth looking at them under various other lighting conditions too (like street lights, neons, mercury vapours etc.), especially if you intend to display the car at indoor shows. Some colours come to life under certain lighting, others tend to bleed away.

 

There's an age old saying: "The wheels maketh the car"

 

Take the roughest beat-up looking car and bolt a nice set of wheels on it and it instantly looks tough. Conversely, you can spend $50,000 on a project but if the wheels don't suit then people won't give it a second glance.

 

Next up, it's been touched on here already but IMHO needs to be emphasized, if you plan on deviating from OEM at all, an engineer can be your best friend or your worst enemy. Make an appointment to sit down with a few different engineers for an hour before you commit to anything, take along your list of mods plus photos, sketches, diagrams, blueprints, napkins or whatever else you have and discuss what you plan to do with each engineer, then you can pick the one you like and you've already started a working relationship. This might cost you even a couple of hundred bucks but finding the right engineer will be worth their weight in gold later on, I can't tell you how much it sucks trying to get something passed by some cranky old German guy who has no interest whatsoever in what you're doing.

 

Depending on the level of modification you may even need to have the vehicle inspected before you start (chassis stiffness for example) and several intermediate inspections just to ensure you're still on the right track. Unless you're very experianced I do NOT recommend you just go ahead and cut up your car, then turn up and expect an engineer to pass it that day. Every engineer has his or her own interpretation of how things should be done, hell I've even seen one engineer fail something and another think it quite acceptable!

 

Lastly, and this is just the way I like to do things, once you have a plan and know what you want, try and purchase as many parts as you can before you put a spanner to the car.

 

There are several advantages here; first you get to keep driving the car instead of having a stripped-out shell sitting around while you save up the money; secondly you can save a lot of money due to price rises and being able to buy parts when they're on sale (as opposed to "I need it now so I pay whatever they're asking"); and perhaps best of all, once you start the build there's much less chance of losing interest because you can't afford to do the next stage, it's amazing how motivated you will be when you have all manner of fancy parts sitting on a shelf just waiting to be bolted on!

 

And if the sky does fall in and your pavement pounding project never sees the light of day again, I've found that the right parts never seem to lose their value anyway, in fact you may just find something you bought ten years ago is now rare as hen's teeth and worth three times what you paid for it!

 

[myss427]

I always plan and budget, but somehow it always takes and costs double!

[ben23]

Bought my Torana end of September 2014, was running and registered but little more than a month later the old 173 ate a timing gear. That was the biggest buzz kill and to be honest I wanted to go back and smash the bloke given how much I paid for it, but at the end of the day thats not something you can see coming, took me forever to fix it because I was just so disheartened. Was out of rego by the time I fixed it and now its in a workshop rented by 2 mates and I and we have our 3 cars in there now and pretty much it took me a year to get started on the car because of that timing gear. Now I'm jumping into it and hoping to have it somewhere near completed within a year. Bodywork and rust is the biggest hurdle. Seems I should have been a panel beater/spray painter, seems to be the most expensive part of a build. As an auto sparky I've done some pricey jobs on customers project cars but never in the range of 10k plus like paint and panel work.

[ben23]

An Econovan (of all vehicles, I have a thing for these particular vans which stems back to a van that belonged to my father up until I was 8) was my first project and after 4 and a half years I gave up. Had a nice little warm 2 litre built for it which still sits in my garage today, did about half a km work and cam bed-in. Motor cost around 3 grand including brand new weber 32/36 and other bits. Probably spent 5-6 on that van all up. I wish I had finished it, but it obviously wasn't meant to be.

Pulled the motor back out and scrapped the shell. Did my turbo Paseo project during which time I bought the Torana and didn't really touch until October last year. Now, June, and I still haven't finished the front end rust repairs. Bought a Express van as a new daily after selling the Paseo and had to tinker with that as well of course haha. I think being an auto sparky by day really kills the passion for cars by night though which is why everything takes me forever. Does anyone here work on cars/trucks for a living and find it hard to not get sick of your own?