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Buying someone else's project car is fraught with peril.
I'm watching a drama unfold on Facebook where someone sold a car to another which, promptly, grenaded once the new owner took possession.
He is, understandably, pissed at the seller.
The seller is maintaining that the car was running fine when the buyer bought it.
It's probably true.
The thing about lots of hot-rods is the mods are ticking time bombs.
It's fine, until it's not.
You have to pray that the person doing the mods both did a good job and picked a combination with some longevity.
You see the route to and from the Hot Rod Power Tour littered with the failures.
Even without mods, most hot rods are 20+ years old. A lot of them have significant miles on them already. Buying a car like that, even bone stock, there is always a risk that something is working fine now but might be about ready to go. Often without any notice. Adding mods just adds more variables to the equation, as you noted, the combination of mods itself and the quality of work installing them.
ReplyDelete-swj
There's also the matter of due diligence regarding rust, body repairs, suspension etc. There's a YouTube channel I follow that regularly shows cars from auctions or dealers with bright shiny paint and absolutely terrifying bodywork underneath that is often failing after a few miles of test driving
ReplyDeleteI've seen this in person also. Someone I know bought a 63 Impala SS that looked pretty decent. At least until you looked closely. It was an older resto-mod that he thought would just need a little freshening up. His plan was basically to replace some trim and re-spray. Unfortunately under the paint was a lot of serious horror... badly repaired rust-throughs done with completely wrong things like pop rivets and plastic filler (way too much filler). Rather than proper patch panels things had been ham-handedly fabricated out of scrap metal and screen to hold bondo in place.
DeleteChances are a lot of these "repairs" probably would have been failing fairly soon, as you say. Plastic filler really shouldn't be used for anything other than small imperfections, not for filling large areas or fabrication. It tends to crumble when abused.
Anyway it ended up costing a whole lot more to make right and taking a lot longer than expected.
Caveat Emptor.
-swj
I just experienced the "It's fine, until it's not". I drove my 1995 Impala SS from mid Florida to Topeka, KS for the annual Impala meet. I had just driven 1,300 miles to Kansas, around town for several days then 700 miles back down to Jasper, AL. Left the hotel in the morning and the original alternator, which was working fine for 28 years and 183k miles up to that point decided not to work anymore. Luckily O'Reilly's in town had one in stock and I swapped it out in 20 minutes. - Marv
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