I'm the Hall of Shame Founding Member
Ragcat, you've got nothing on me!
I did the exterior body restoration on AlphaCat back in '83. Beautiful paint job. The next Spring I decided to 'finish' the car and detail the engine compartment and underside of the car. I started ripping it apart on Mother's Day of '84.
I was going great guns for a couple of months. I had the front fender aprons and core support replaced (brazing was the extent of my ability at the time). Same goes for both front and one rear floor. I had rebuilt the engine. I was making real progress.
Then my father came back to live with us. He started questioning everything I did, looking over my shoulder constantly. "Why do you need to do that?" "How come you're spending so much time and effort on an old car." "You're wasting your time." etc., etc., etc. I got tired of his constant kibbutzing so I just stopped working on it. That was July 1984. I haven't really worked on it since.
I got married in Nov '86 and trailered the body shell here to the house and stuck it in the garage, much to the consternation of my new wife. She is somewhat understanding because we had met because of our cars. Since then, I think I've spent one day ripping the car even further apart. The body shell now sits on six jackstands with no drivetrain, no front clip, no front or rear suspension, and no interior. That's how it has sat since 1986! Since then, mice have shredded my headliner. Thank goodness the seats were in storage elsewhere! I don't even know how to put things back together again! Heck, I don't even know if I still have all of the pieces! I've sold some of my 'spare' parts over the years and I ended up selling one of AlphaCat's original front seats instead of the parts car seats. Ooops!
AlphaCat has gotten so buried under stuff over the years that the standing joke at the house here is whenever I'm looking for something I've misplaced, my wife says " Why don't you check the trunk of the Cougar?"
BetaCat isn't much better. At least it was able to drive to the new house. Since then it has just been sitting, too. At least I built a new 'hobby' garage in 1989 to keep the 66 Comet and BetaCat out of the elements. They did have to spend a couple of years outside 'seasoning', so even their condition had gone downhill to a degree. Now nothing is driveable any more.
I'm seriously thinking about selling all of my hobby cars. I just don't have the ambition to work on them and finish them off. In my darkest moods I've thought about just dragging the hulks over to the junkyard across the street, but so far I've resisted.
With the price of parts that I saw in Columbus at Spring Swap, I may just sell off my stash of NOS parts, or sell the whole shooting match as a giant model car kit for three cars -- you figure out what goes with what.
According to the Columbus show prices, I'm sitting on a couple of grand worth of NOS parts! Two complete sets of wheel opening mouldings -- at at least $100 per piece! The NOS rocker mouldings were $500 each! a pair of NOS rear seat trim panels... Then I have a couple of shelves full of headlight doors, marker bezels, grille surround moulings, and miscellaneous emblems and such. My cars aren't worth what the NOS parts are!
To say I'm really depressed and discouraged would be the understatement of the year.
Well, do I win the Hall of Shame award?
