Great Lessons Evan!! One painful and somewhat expensive one I've learned is it's much more enjoyable to make incremental improvements (with a plan) while continuing to drive and enjoy. The common approach (I believe) for a project is tear it down to a pile of parts that may take years to reassemble. Years ago (as in 15) I picked up a clean, original '68 Plymouth Barracuda convertible with auto and 318. It was a never wreaked, stock yellow with black top car that a local lady school teacher had bought new and had 90ish K miles. Everything worked, even the AC was cold.
Well I had big plans for the little car and there was an extra complete, ready to run 340 in the shop along with a good 727 torqueflight. So, I did a full take down with plans to build a nice driver, E5 red, 340 car. I then started doing a lot of pipeline work that kept me away from the shop for months at a time and after 5 years or I sold the now in pieces project car for dimes on the dollar.
I could still be enjoying a nice original car during top down drives on nice fall days, but NOOO.
I've used the lesson above to make many upgrades to my '51 that at most had it out of commission for a week or so and put close to 20k miles on it in the past few years . It's not a show winner but represents well, is safe and reasonably dependable as a light duty local daily driver.
RonR
