| There are two ways to find out whom your friends really are: the day you blurt out you’re gay during a shareholder’s meeting and the day you decide to restore your first classic car. Everyone offers to give you help but upon the first phone call you learn that they really mean psycho-therapeutic help. But the two contributing factors in restoring your classic car are diligence and dilatants. Those who can’t do, teach. Those who can’t teach are the highest self-proclaimed experts in the world. | |
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| Choosing the wrong car to restore - a must-do prerequisite. Make sure that your dream-car has as few original parts as possible. |
Check to see if the interior is hopeless, if so, buy it immediately before it’s stolen in the middle of the night. |
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| Make sure your prized retro-resto is purchased by you because it needs more than just a few touchups. | Last but not least, absolutely everything under the hood MUST be totally original. |
| Choosing the wrong car is the first step. You must think about it financially. What car will have the least value in twenty years? Ideal car: the AMC Pacer. It has absolutely no chance of nostalgia status unless you’re driving it while wearing John Trivolta’s white suite from “Saturday Night Fever.” There are zero parts available since every one of them was crushed and turned into Kirin beer cans. And there are no more shop manuals since Iraq bought them all up for templates as mini-Pope- mobiles for Republican Army staff cars. It can’t be restored in great numbers so your claim to fame is guaranteed. THIS IS THE CAR FOLKS! Remember the Broadway show “The Producers”? Well, finding the right classic car to fully restore and then turning it around to make a whopping profit is the same paradigm. So, if finding the wrong script actually made money for the Producers then surely restoring a tragically neglected Pacer would become a Broadway hit in it’s own right. Actually, that’s not far off. Most people go for the quintessential “Lucky Strikes” rolled up in T-shirt sleeve 50’s American muscle car. The fact is everyone got the same idea. However, there are all sorts of reproduction and old parts everywhere for these cars. The real trick is to think of a car that has zero value today, roughly twenty-five years old and brings back memories of a bygone era. I guess that makes it 1985. It’s got to be, because the 70’s have already been taken by this generation that ironically thinks the 70’s WERE the 60’s. So, thumbing through the old cars book we’re searching for a car that has no value today, truly depicts the eighties, has some sort of “kitsch” value and might even be considered “cute” in 2020. High performance or handling cars? Forget it, the 80’s were the horsepower impotence stage of car-life. It took the early 2000’s for the car industry to rediscover drive shaft Viagra. If not the Pacer that what other lame car would fit the bill? Look at the Edsel that now sells for many times more then it cost originally. We need the Edsel of the eighties right now for Operation Restoration. So, please send in your choice considerations today and we’ll raffle off who gets to pay for this noble cause. This offer ends soon so hurry. Selling your classic car to a perspective buyer: have your wife stand next to your car with her arms folded and with this far away, tapping foot pissed-off, look on her face while you sit in one of those low-boy lawn chairs by the front grill looking like your ole’ trusty dog just died. The unsuspecting buyer will smell a bargain at which time you say you have to sell it for half of what you’ve got into it when in reality it’s double what you’ve got into it and he in turn negotiates you down to a price that’s roughly 50% more then you’ve got into it.  See you on Sunday at VCR.Thanks, CHRIS STONE |
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