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Reply to "Starting my Build"

@TreyG

I'll be honest with you - Finishing the build on one of these cars is a lot of work, way more than 40 hours, so keep coming back here for moral support.  We all want to follow along anyway - building vicariously through YOU (and the girls).   Yours is well on the way to completion already so it won't be like starting from zero.  My son helped me as he was going through high school and college, when he was around, and we have had a lot of fun with it in the years since - He now owns a Porsche 996:

I bought my CMC body in 1993, but had no place to build it in, so I first had to add a bay to my garage.  That took about a year, doing all of the work myself after foundation install.  It was a 16' X 24' gem of a shop, complete with forced hot air heat.

Where Alan Merklin gets his cars painted in 2 weeks, it took me two years but I also was working at a place that was growing 300% per year, most of us were working 70+ hours/week so I didn't have real time for the car until I retired.  Then I got it road-worthy, started it up the first time and the engine seized.  Spent 2 weeks tearing it down, repairing it and re-assembling it, screwed that up, got the case welded and repaired and finally got it back together.  It's been running fine (more or less) since:

So it was on the road, but it had a rough interior and no dash pad.  I convinced myself that I liked it that way.  

I went to the first Carlisle Speedster gathering in 2004 and we drove home in the rain for over 3 hours with no top, so to keep from having to dry out the entire interior again, that winter I added the top.  Oh, and this was garage (and house) #2:

Then, other goodies got added, like Kafer bracing, anti-sway bars, a wind blocker in the roll bar, new bearings in the transaxle, little things like that.  Later on I added the dash pad (at house/shop #3) and swapped out the Porsche 914 seats for something more comfy ( at house/shop #4).  

We didn't know what the heck we wanted when we retired so we tried different places, only to eventually return to about where we started after 15 years.  

And a year or two after that I added a VW Gas heater in the Frunk, since I never had heater boxes on my engine:

Currently, I'm working on heater mods that will give me better heat modulation and enhanced safety, but that's all I have planned for this winter.  I don't have heat in my current shop, so car things tend to take a back seat unless I can do them inside the house.  These days, I mostly just want to drive it so it's nice that it seems to be really reliable and ready to go anywhere, any time.

Yes, the "Madness" runs deep in this one, but I'm trying to live with it.

Gordon
The "Speedstah Guy" from Massachusetts

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