Every project car you pick up, you did so with the best of intentions. The car will be awesome as soon as you fix those suspension clunks, find the right replacement engine, and then upgrade all of the other components to handle that additional power. The build might take you a year (or two…or three…), but the car will be awesome once it’s done.
The problem is, over the course of that year (or two), it’s easy to lose inspiration. Thus, enter Hagerty’s “Your Project Car Anti-Guide, written by Kyle Smith.
Isn’t Hagerty a car insurance company? Yes! Yet Hagerty is also a media company, with tons of useful and entertaining articles appearing on hagerty.com/media.
In this recent article, Smith tackles three tips that are often presented as advice to someone beginning a new project. The problem, he says, is that advice is not always ideal.
“The path for tackling a project car successfully is varied and meandering, even in the best scenario,” he writes. “Navigating it either forces you to go with the flow, or else you live a frustrated life until you either sell the car or reluctantly get it to a point of enjoyable driving and hope it stays there. Many people on the internet will tell you the ‘right’ or ‘proper’ way to go about fixing up, repairing, restoring, working on, or whatever other term you want to use for taking apart and putting back together a ... car.”
The problem, he adds, is that some of the advice offered by others is not always sound. Advice like to get the car driving first. “Not everyone enjoys an ice cream cone the same way, so why do we tend to think everyone enjoys cars the same way?” he ponders. “Personally, I vacillate between enjoying the drive and enjoying the work, so having something sitting at home in need of care is what I’m seeking out, sometimes.”
“Overbuilt is just right,” some say of project cars. Smith disagrees, stating that while future-proofing a build is not wrong, it’s just not necessary “if you are actually going to use the capability being built in. I won’t, so why spend the time and money when I could be buying gas and driving?”
Finally, there are those who question your intentions with the project. “While working on a few of my cars over the years, I’ve encountered two sets of people, in nearly equal numbers: Those who believe anything other than a restoration is a waste of time, and those who believe modifying a car in a way that had been done before is a waste of time and money,” Smith says. His example to the contrary is his LS-swapped C4 Corvette – a far from original idea. It was a lot of work for something that has been done many times by many others, he admits, “but after finally getting to the point in the project that I could do a strong second- and third-gear pull, I can tell you I don’t care how unoriginal this is. It’s exactly what I wanted and was worth it.”
The entire story can be found here. Go ahead and click – it’s a fun read.
Photo courtesy Hagerty / Jordan Lewis
