Lets hear some project purgatory stories

Ever have a project car that just pissed you off to the point where you pushed it to the back of the garage.  I have two such projects.  One is a former race car MGB that a friend of mine dragged out of a field.  At some point in its life it was used to pay off a bar tab.  Started life as an SCCA showroom stock racer then strayed into the land of flared fenders, gutted interior, crazy mods autocross car.  To say it needed a complete restoration is understating things a bit.  Did all the metal work.  Fabbed new removable front fiberglass fenders.  Made one heavy in place rear fender.  Wanted the other side to match so I made a tracing and carried it to the other side.  Made that fender out of heavy fiberglass as well.  Heavy enough to lift the car by the fiberglass fender lips.  Never bothered to eyeball both sides at the same time and they didn't come out the same.  Now I need to grind away one side and remake it.  Pushed it to the back of the garage and have only moved it twice since then to sweep under it.  That was some time around the year 2000.  Can't stand the site of that car and I wish it would go away, but nobody wants to buy a cheap flared MGB in raw fiberglass.  Some day I'm going to have to finish it.

Second was a TR8 I bought to flip.  It was just about an exact clone of the one I had just finished restoring.  Platinum paint, blue plaid interior, AC, 68,000 miles, 100% bone stock.  Only difference was one has a luggage rack, one doesn't.  Difference in mileage was only about 200 miles.  Got the car home, went thru the mechanicals, started prepping for paint, went to order new seat covers, and whole world stops.  Turns out the blue seat covers I had ordered just one month before for the other TR8 were the last set they had.  That was 5 years ago.  Has a happy ending thou.  Last week I get an email, saying seats are now available again.  Freshly covered blue plaid seats now sit in my dining room along with all of the carpet, gaskets, window scrapers, emblems etc. to finish the car after paint.  Problem is its 30 degrees and I can't paint for a couple more months.  Hey at least the car has done its time in purgatory and I can finish this thing and get it to a good home.  Guess I'll sort thru the mechanicals again in the mean time.

I don’t feel as bad now about pushing the chevelle into the garage and giving up for 5 years after half the roof came off in the form of bondo when I peeled off the vinyl top

A friend once told me that I have Stockholm syndrome with regards to the 323. There have been many factors that have kept me from getting it where it needs to be, but thankfully, in large part due to the friend, it's to a point where it no longer feels like a burden and the non-twincharged motor should be in it's home this calendar year. (Hopefully before October). 

Mine went from purgatory to selling them.

Back in '94 I bought a Giulietta Spider restoration project.  Got all of the parts, sort of started it a few times, and realized I'll never actually finish it....  took 20 years from the start to selling it.

In the middle of that we bought a Giulietta Sprint that was not supposed to be a restoration, but it turned into one.  It left my home the same date the Spider did.

The amount of work just got to be overwhelming, and my enthusiasm had waned enough to let them go.  Still kind of sad, as my dad had a Giulietta Spider that was only a 1000 cars before the one I found.  Would have been nice to drive one.

Alas, the GTV we bought after getting married is still in our lives, and is a great car to drive.

It seems like any vehicle I buy is doomed to project purgatory.   

Wow, and I thought taking a year to get the Manic Miata through inspection and do a timing belt job was bad.

I've got a '91 VW GTI 2L sitting in the garage. It needs a fuel pump and fuel filter. Mileage is somewhere around 55K, so it doesn't need much else, but it's been sitting there for 15 years. I'll get to it one of these days.

My Trans Am is a classic case of this. Since buying the car in 2002, I've had no less than 6 other "side projects" come and go, the latest being my Dodge Power Wagon. I've been "doing the floors" for about 4 years now.

I have, however, been pecking at it more and more in the past couple years. Last year, I did get most of the P/S floor done, installed a new gas tank, rustproofed the rear of the car, and got it running after laying dormant for a few years. I'm hoping to finally finish the floors this year and replace the starter with a better Powermaster unit that's more up to the task so it doesn't leave me stranded like it's done so many times.

My duster regularly gets put in time out (purgatory).usually while i build something completely different. 

Ive never had one stall so bad it was sold. However, when they piss me off enough, or i decide i want something different, i can't make them leave quick enough. 

In reply to DeadSkunk :

I'd happily take it off your hands.  Just in case, ya know....

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The love affair with my Miata seems to be over.  The car just sits in the garage collecting dust.   When the car had the tiny engine it was fun, now that I put in the slightly modified 1.8 the car is no longer any fun. .... I'm not sure that makes any sense. 

My original screen name was RealMiniDriver, if that tells you anything. 

In ~2005, I bent some front suspension parts, parked it in the garage and started taking it apart. ~2006, I dragged it to (the back room of) my workplace. Never touched it, until last Spring, when I sold it.

In reply to Doc Brown :

I know a guy looking for an NA Miata in the mid Atlantic region, if you want to part with it. 

Yep. My Mr2 spyder has been sitting in the driveway for a few months now. I rebuilt the engine in it, spending a fair amount of money on machining and parts to do it all right. It spun a bearing after about 1,000 miles. I rolled in new bearings and it seems alright, but it makes me sick to my stomach to think about pulling the engine and doing the rebuild all over again. 

I have an AE86 I bought in 2001, worked on it while daily driving it for a few years, and it has been largely sitting while I’m pissed off at it but also can’t bear to sell it for years:

https://grassrootsmotorsports.com/forum/grm/on-the-verge-of-selling-my-ae86-how-much-work-to-put-in-to-increase-odds-of-selling/149745/page1/

My '76 Ducati is on the bike lift in purgatory at the moment. Had to replace the ignition stator and ended up re-wiring the bike.

It's cold and gross in the shop right now and my heart really isn't in it so I'm taking a break until the weather warms up.

I have gone through a succession of Triumph TR7's. My last running one is (still) in the driveway. After AAA towed it home after puking oil all over I-81 and coming to a clattery halt. In 200(4?) I think. It's been living under an increasingly decrepit car cover on pavement, so things could be worse. 

A few things killed my TR7 enjoyment

 - Having a Miata (first a NA, then 2 NC's) which gives easy top down driving with no mechanical drama. Every day. 
 - Having a growing family. At this point, the kids are starting to launch on their own paths into life, but still not a lot of free time for hobbies these days.
 - Having a TR7 shell in the garage. Our old house had a 2-car garage as part of the house, so I could pull "her car" out and use that bay for things like oil changes & quick maintenance. Now all mechanical work has to be outside. For the past 19 years.,..

On the bright side,

- The shell in the garage is a TR7 Spider, and my 3rd son and I have plans to bring it back from 'shell status' to a 2020 Challenge contender. er, participant. 
- I just picked up a TR7 coupe for FREE and while it doesn't have much going for it, I should be able to grab its wheels and cut the hardtop off to turn the shell into a "rolling shell" so I can actually move around in the garage

Back to the back burner. The TR7 in the driveway is still dead to me. No good reason why. But once I have the Spider running, away it will go. Considering it's been parked for 15 years, maybe I should just sell it now. Dang. 

Ever since moving last year, I don't physically have the room work on the Rice Rod anymore. The next step requires body-off-frame removal, which means coming in from the side with an engine hoist. I have maybe 18 inches on each side of that car, and one side is full of the tools I no longer have room for. That car, marooned in my tiny bullE36 M3 rental shed, is nothing more than a 2,000 lb physical embodiment of my ever-growing regret of moving here and leaving my old life behind. I get depressed just looking at it. 

This month marks 1 year since I last worked on the Rice Rod and that makes me very sad. 

If I don't get the SVTf back on the road by summer it'll get shunted out the door. If I do get it back on the road it won't take much to shunt it out the door. 

In reply to maschinenbau :

I wish you were closer, I’d love to be able to help you with it.

I only ever had one purgatory car. I like to think I learned enough from it to not get into that debacle again.

Back in my young whipper-snapper days I was hopelessly into Fiats. I've owned 23 of them over my lifespan. In my very early 20s I decided to try to pick up the pinnacle of Fiats, the Dino. I actually preferred the coupe over the spider, which was a good thing since spiders were 2-3 times as much to buy. So I found the one above in Pittsburgh. Italian exotic car prices were starting to shoot skyward and my belief was that if I didn't buy one then I'd never be able to afford one. So I borrowed much of the $5500 price tag for this one and drug it home.

It spent several years parked in a rental garage at which point the clutch seized to the flywheel. I had to partially pull the trans to make it mobile again. I laid under a wreck in a weed-infested private junkyard in Virginia to get a replacement fuel tank for the crushed one in my car. I spent a lot of money with a guy in California to buy bumpers that didn't have those ugly overriders on them only to get a box full of badly dented, scratched and bent parts that would have cost a fortune to repair. Couldn't get pistons to rebuild the smoking engine. Found after closer inspection the entire driver side had been wrecked at some point and the door was from a different car and there was ample filler in the remaining panels. It sat in my garage after we bought our first home for several years until I accepted that I was never going to have the money or ambition to restore it.

Then I couldn't find a buyer because it was a weird-ass exotic car that needed a restoration. I wound up trading it for a '65 Skylark convertible in slightly better condition...and wound up selling that a few years later for a whole $3500. So I learned:  no big projects, no exotic cars, no buying cars on speculation that the market will change in your favor.

2009. I build an S52 E30. Turner Equal-length headers, 3.5" MAF, tune, etc. Put down 235/235 @ at the wheels on the dyno. Ground Control suspension, Wilwood brakes, I did stuff like pull the front subframe, have the reinforcements welded in then blasted and powdercoated. Year before I had driven to Shreveport to put get an all black sport interior to replace the beige, etc. 

350 miles after the swap is complete, it LUNCHES the head gasket. I was so upset, I had a buddy help me put a new headgasket on and then just parted the whole car and had the shell sent off to the junkyard. 

Cleaned up the shop, get it set up with air, water, electric, install lift and other fun toys over 4 years to get a nice drive in workplace.  Then I have a triple bypass heart attack thing.  True story, 2/7/2019 when the stupid (smoking, eating heart killer food, ignoring pains and clues) caught up with me.

Bruce

Let’s see... it’s my project by proxy but not truly mine either. SWMBO’s rusty junk Mustang currently doing its best wheelie in the driveway. I pulled the motor to freshen up the heads and swap the exhaust around... Then I found two rotted front frame rails at the shock tower, known problem in rust belt cars. It has sat since ‘04 and she refuses to let it go even as it’s a cobbled up POFS that’s even been partially flooded. Oh well...