My current daily driver as she sits. Looks good from this angle but you can't see the damage from someone backing into the passenger side headlight, the big dent on the passenger side rear quarter that I popped back out, leaving paint to chip, and the horrible bondo job leaving different areas of the paint cracking and bubbling. It doesn't look bad from a distance but is in no way pristine.
As such, a replacement was in order. I still drive this car daily, but the engine which was freshly rebuilt less than 30k ago with high compression pistons, a mild bore job, ported and polished 2 liter head on 1.8 liter block with performance street cams and valve springs, stainless oversize valves and a full 2 1/4 inch exhaust from the header back will be going into this project car after a good cleanup and repaint. The car was painted by a local guy who specializes in accident repair. I chose him because he had a flawlessly polished up newer Corvette he drove daily, a half dozen customers cars in various states of repair from fresh out of the ditch to perfectly blended repairs that I could not identify even when he told me where the repair was done on the car, and a very nice looking paint booth. He also had a good sense of humor. This man was slow, and anytime I caught him doing any body work he was sanding, shining a bunch of lights on it from different angles, furrowing his brow and sanding some more. Perfection in the eyes of an insurance agent was nowhere near the goal. It wasn't his work unless you could not tell that the car had ever been in an accident, no matter how hard you looked. I told him I didn't want the holes in the front of the car anymore since the heavy steel bumper would never be reattached to the car again. Settled on a 3 stage, extremely new type of paint that was designed to look as good as new 30 years down the line. The primer was so gorgeous I thought the car just hadn't been polished yet when I checked in on him. Anyway, enough babble. The car is nowhere done. I've picked up the doors and such, but not the actual body yet. It was just pulled out of the paint booth 4 days ago, so what you see is how she sits at this very moment. I'll be posting here quite often with updates, likely on my own thread. PICS!
And yes, I will be daily driving this car as well, and no you can't talk me out of that, or the choice to throw some dual webers on the 1.8 and shoot for 150hp at the wheels. No point in putting stupid amounts of work into a car unless it can make you smile every single day at least twice a day. I'll carry a flamethrower for the soccer moms who door ding me. Worth it.
[/URL[URL=http://hostingbytes.us]
[/URL[URL=http://hostingbytes.us]
[/URL[URL=http://hostingbytes.us]
[/URL[URL=http://hostingbytes.us]
