jb wrote:For many years I kept a rusty 911 that I could not afford to fix and I eventually sold it for very little money but it did allow me to move on and I found it liberating to be free of it.
Your first post does not say that you have ever restored a car before, and I think that most people reading it assumed that you hadn't, and wrote from the experience of having done so themselves. If that resulted in what sounded like negativity, you might care to look at the expression on people's faces at the end of Grand Designs. And they very rarely say they'd do it again.
The trouble is, the path to the promised land always looks very straight, and it glows benignly on the horizon.
It's never just about money. I would wager that there is nobody on this forum who could, and pretty certain that there are none who would, hand a blank cheque to a professional restorer and ask for a call when they can come and pick the car up.
You also don't say what personal connection you have to the car which would mean you'd never consider selling it, which is the reason crowd funding is so ill-suited. But whatever connection you may have had, time will have changed it.
For example, I couldn't afford to properly maintain my 911, so I sold it, at a loss, and a graunch to the soul, but which if I'm honest also lifted it slightly, because I hadn't realised how much it was dragging me down, financially and emotionally.
One of the benefits of the sale was that I could finally afford to restore another car. Now that car I did have a personal connection with. It was the car I wanted as a child and sent off for the brochure of, and couldn't understand why my parents didn't buy it. It was the first car I bought, that I saved every penny for, and spent seven years in its company, and drove 3500 miles around Britain in when I was 26, I drove it round the clock, and then it got too rusty, and I put it away and vowed to do it up. Sixteen years ago.
And two weeks ago I dragged it out of the garage and started to restore it. So I'm at the end bit of the beginning bit in which you find yourself, and I ought to be over the moon.
Words cannot begin to describe the lethargy with which I am approaching this project. I dread that the person doing the paintwork will ring and tell me about another problem he's found; I hope he'll ring with a cast iron reason to abandon it. The passage of time has been so great, that I find myself pursuing it in some autonomic manner, that it is something I must do at all cost, that it is my destiny.
It's not only metal that corrodes over time.
