Re: What is the point of no return (restore)?

[Simon Favre <simon@domain.elided>]

To restore, or not to restore, that is the question. ;=)

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this. On one side you have
time/effort/money spent, and on the other side you have the joy of
owning and driving a really nice car. A lot of it depends on what you
want to do with your time/effort/money. No person has an infinite amount
of any of these. They also trade off against each other. If Bill Gates
wanted a show-class 105 GTV, he could have one done from the ground up
and never even break a sweat. More money means less effort and time. Less
money and less effort means a lot more time. If you can put a lot of 
personal effort into it, it takes less time and money. The problem most
people get into is that they grossly underestimate the amount of time/
effort/money it takes to bring a car back from the jaws of the crusher.
They fall in at the deep end and figure out years later that they can't
swim. ;=( Anybody with Bill Gates' kind of money isn't going to waste
it on a mass-produced GTV either. There's a Japanese billionaire who was
trying to corner the market in P3's a few years back. It's a big money
game, and the big money players drive the market for such services.

There simply is no way to break even on the restoration costs for a car
that's worth less than what a decent new car costs. A mass-produced GTV
will never be worth as much as a Tubolare Zagato, or an 8C2300. Now if you
managed to get hold of Horst Kwecht's Trans-Am GTV race car that replaced
his GTA and retook the under-2-liter championship, then you might have a
particular car that would justify a large expense, but these gems are few
and far between. The Abarth 205 Vignale Coupe that stunned the crowds at
Concours Italiano a few years back was restored from being crushed to the
door line in a warehouse fire, and without cutting off the old roof. It
took years, it took a fortune, but the last I heard, the car was on 
permanent display in the NY Metropolitan Museum of Art!

If you are going to embark on such an effort, you need to first figure out
whether or not the time/effort/money is available, including the support of
"She Who Must Be Obeyed". In most cases, it's She, but it could go the other
way. If you want to make restoration your hobby, and you have the time/
effort/money, by all means go for it. Some people like to do this, sell the
car at a huge loss to give somebody else some joy, then pick up another one
to do, just so they can always be restoring one. You also need to check the
supply of "beaters" to figure out if there's some better starting material
than the rotting hulk down the street that would cost you an extra 10 years/
10,000 man hours/10,000 dollars to bring back. Nobody should end up in
bankruptcy, an asylum, or divorce court because they can't stand to see what
was once a nice car get crushed.

Simon

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