Thank y´all for the helpful hints. I´ll follow up on ´em.
Actually I bought this car from Troy and had it shipped to Germany! Let me tell y´all, getting it through German inspection to get plates, etc was an adventure to say the least 
... German bureaucracy is nothing to laugh about and should never be underestimated!! You can´t imagine all the things I´ve learned. But in the end I´ve got it on the road...phew!!
If anybody is planning on bringing one over to Germany, I can certainly coach him through the process.
Back to the issue with the hardtop. As I had previously said, I had started wanting Kirk to build one for me. I was out in CA at the time and had already made a sizeable down payment. Timing was bad, he was already selling the business and the new owner told me he´d move the business to Arizona.
Meanwhile we had been moved to Germany. BTW, someone had asked where we´re at in Germany. We´re between Darmstadt and Mannheim.
To make a long story short, it went back and forth, the prices that Kirk had given me all of a sudden changed under the new owner, the body was not even delivered from Mexico...they put me off...and off... To avoid any potential additional bad surprises, I´ve tried to get them to sign off on the build sheet with the agreed upon prices...impossible! In the end Greg said he could not build the car. Communication with them was a nightmare. After six months had gone by and no progress, I told them I wanted my money back!! In the end they did return the down payment and we parted ways! Not a real pretty experience though.
Whatever, it cost me a full year, still bought one for my wife´s birthday...just one year later!
Apparently not much seemed to have changed! I´ve sent an email with a technical question to Vintage a couple of months back.....never even got an answer! So much for that 