4 Tedious Moments Every Restoration Faces
Restoring a car at home, on your own, takes a lot of sweat and tears but also delivers huge rewards. The finished project is, in a real sense, a thing of your creation. If you do it right, you even have a functional thing that can be used for transport. To reach that huge payoff means untold hours of research and labor, some of which is enjoyable and fulfilling. Of course, some of it is straight-up tedious.
We’re well aware that mundane and repetitive tasks comprise the bulk of the process when it comes to bringing an old car back to life or returning it to its original specification. Tedium tends to irk us when the work quality really matters, but the actual process of doing it is not particularly difficult or engaging. Or maybe the job is just especially time-consuming due to the care that must be taken to get it right. It’s annoying to deal with work that has to get done when we don’t look forward to it. Here are four examples:
Parts cleaning
The grease and grime that accumulates on various parts of a car while it’s being driven doesn’t seem like like it would add up to much, but anyone who has taken a car apart will tell you how surprising the amount of dirt and debris that builds up is. Disassembly can be fun because there is visual satisfaction of the car coming apart. Cleaning is just boring. It takes handling numerous parts and pieces, keeping everything appropriately labeled and organized, and potentially even transporting things to a separate location for things like sand blasting or chemical stripping.
Paint preparation
For every “paint jail” joke there is someone sitting on a rolling stool or standing in a paint booth, covered in dust with fingers that feel ready to fall off. Getting everything smooth, flat, and properly cleaned for paint or plating to adhere is the pinnacle of mundane and mildy frustrating tasks. There is no replacement for time and attention when doing this kind of work, as machines can rarely get all the nooks and crannies as well as our hands. If you want a good finished product, you’re going to spend time here wether you want to or not.
Your day job
Even if you enjoy near-mindlessly sanding or sandblasting, watching the numbers on a spreadsheet rise and fall as paychecks go in and orders come out is often what drags projects to a glacial pace or at least slows them down to a waiting game. Restorations rarely make money for us at-home DIY tinkerers, so that means we need to keep a steady flow of money coming in to keep our projects moving forward. The most tedious job of any of my restorations has been my day job. Because a great day at work is also eight hours that project progress is halted.
Final assembly
The excitement and anticipation of having a beautifully organized and carefully prepared pile of parts ready to assemble into a functional vehicle again can be overshadowed by the monumental task of tediously fitting all those bits and pieces together properly and without damaging them. It sounds a little comical, but ask anyone who has accidentally put a deep gouge into fresh paint while shifting something during assembly and you’ll see why in professional shops there is so much protection for various parts of the car during final assembly.
I’m in it for the driving. All of my projects are focused toward getting it driving or getting it driving better. cosmetics are a secondary consideration. I am putting a Borgeson steering box on my C3 (drive better). I pulled the pitman arm off of it, since it gets reused, and cleaned all the grime off of it. I was thinking as I did so that there are a ton of people who would have spent an hour super-cleaning it, priming it, painting it, then waiting a day or two to put it back on so the paint can cure, then bolting it back under the car where it will never be seen again. Nope.
I get it… everybody has their thing, but I have watched a lot of people over the years get hung up on spending time cleaning and painting things at a point in a project where you don’t even know you have a success path yet
Different strokes for different folks !
What you consider something to avoid I consider “mechanical therapy”. 🙂
I get it, especially something when it’s to be driven and not shown. My projects probably tend to be in between what you prefer and a show car. I like the undercarriage clean and painted, but that to make it easy to work on in the future as much as making the underside “pretty”.
I get that approach, as that’s what I do with my daily driver cars. My collector cars generally get a more comprehensive clean at least, and may be treated to a rattle can “restoration” if nothing more. My days of scrubbing an aluminum intake manifold with a toothbrush and Lestoil, though, are a distant memory. Enjoy what you like!
I do full restorations. Nothing like bringing a neglected car back to life . I’m do a 30K mile 68 GT500 with almost all of it’s original components on it. That means restoring the original alt, PS pump, radiator , water pump and all steering components. At the end of the day it won’t be a “NAPA” built car. In terms of a resto I look at in in micro and not macro as in one part or one area at a time.
At least you’ll have a 6 digit car when done. No sense in being so meticulous for a $30K car.
What about the tedium of constantly having to explain to your (parents, significant other, spouse, neighbors, boss, etc.) the legitimate reasons that you needed to drag home yet another project?
one of the VERY few plusses in being a widower – jus’ tow it home!
I’m so very lucky. After 40 years my dear sweet wife lets me bring home any car I want (no more airplanes or motorcycles) as long as I can sleep in it.
^This
cool, so that means a hearse or ambulance qualifies!!!
A more comprehensive list would have beed depressing.
Chasing electrical gremlins. I HATE them.
I totally agree with that one! Cleaning, prepping for paint, assembly… I find those rewarding since you can see your progress. Electrical gremlins are invisible. I’m pretty much to the point where a new wiring harness is a fundamental step (yeah costly) to tak ethat pain away.
So are vacuum gremlins under the dash. BUT got lots o practice laying upside down in the dark undrerreaches of the dash.
I think the worst is thinking you’re getting the correct reproduction part and they arrive after long wait and they’re NOTHING like what you removed, then you are searching to “good used” or the holy grail, NOS originals. I have had NOS originals look slightly different or from a different vendor. Total hair ripping out nightmares. Even when new, the replacement parts are “good enough” or “functional replacements”. Total bullshit.
Get a British car and go crazy!
And THAT is the big reason, if at all possible, a replacement OEM wiring harness is the first item on the list !
Or on a street rod fab your own with exactly what you need, and ONLY what it needs, no reason for the bird’s nest that’s not required. ALSO, learn how to make PROPER SOLDER JOINTS, avoids 99.9% of problems down the road.
Everyone outside our hobby either “gets it” or they don’t.
That is until they go for a ride in one of our hard won creations…
A fabricator/racecar-builder buddy & I always joke about “building another monument”. I view the “tedium” as small tasks that are steps taken towards building something really nice & clean. Same principle as enjoying a great meal, one could say.
10% interesting… 90% boring. Readers will continue to go away as interest dwindles in repeatedly boring articles… just like flying has.
I suppose Kyle could use someone else’s car pictures to accompany his great stories. Bikes and Corvairs are cool and the processes are relevant but maybe a change of scenery would be cool.
The whole idea is to get to final assembly… 50 years ago my 62 MGA was through the paint shop and ready for me to install the rechromed parts, new interior etc that were bought over the recent winter while the mechanical and guts were attended to… My desire was to sport an absolutely beautiful result for Summer…
The woodwork on a woody station wagon–especially when you’re much more adept at sheet metal work and not a cabinetmaker.
I had to replace all 19 flat panels on my woody restoration (a ’49 Fiat Topolino), fasten them in place with 175 1/2 inch nails, then cut and fit four half-round molding pieces per panel (76 of ’em), with a further 350 3/4″ nails. Each nail hole had to be pre-drilled or I’d split the oak molding. The horizontal ribs on all three doors were mortised into the door frame, and the tenons were all rotted, so I had to make new tenons, mortise the ribs, and toggle each tenon in place (18 of ’em). Oh, and the ribs were blind doweled from the back side, so I had to drill out the dowels before inserting the ribs, then re-drill and insert new dowels, cutting them off flush on the back side. And since all this woodwork shows, not only from the outside but from the inside (no interior upholstery panels on the doors or quarters) it had to look nice. Then there was the varnishing…
Only one woody per lifetime!
@Mike- Sounds like that project would take a lifetime. Glad your survivors didn’t have to write in about it.
I find the cleaning fun. Painting is for someone else, not me.
I really enjoy making an original part look like new. It’s kind of therapeutic 🤷♂️
Tedious moments? You forgot two. Troubleshooting and problem solving. Waking up in the middle of the night trying to figure out why the car does that thing. Then trying to figure out how to solve it.
Rebuilding the brakes, rewiring the entire electrical system…
Amen to electrical; not in my basic skill set, even after 65 years of horsing around with cars! Our restomod ’51 Chevy 2-door had to have a complete rewire and instruments, air conditioning, electrical wipers and fuel injection. Sooo… I have a nice EZ Wiring harness (19 circuit) and their Dolphin brand gauges,plus Newport wipers, Vintage Air A/C-heat, and FiTech EFI — all with their own wiring, different color codes, etc. It looks pretty nice, 99% done, but will it all work? Did my best, but I only hope so! I can’t afford a professional electrical tech at over $100/hour locally. Upside down in no time! Sorry to whine, but it was Dad’s car, rediscovered and recaptured, now for my son! Ole’ Wick
I’m actually one of those rare people how love electrical problems. Working almost entirely with British cars and Lucas wiring, I find it a nice distraction from any problems in my daily life to spend hours testing wiring and comparing it to the factory wiring schematic. Most of the time it involves removing the previous owners brain fart ideas to “improve” the factory system.
And hope the “factory wiring diagram” is correct. Even the precise Germans get it wrong. I’ve found more than one mystery wire in my BMW 2002s that don’t appear in the shop manual’s diagram. That’s when things get both interesting and frustrating…
There is something to be said about dealing with the zen of “tedium” In our rapidly-moving eastern-world focus, doing something just for the fact of doing it is a rare experience. I refinished a 75-year old dining room table recently that belonged to my folks. I didn’t use any chemicals to strip the original finish. I hand-sanded from 60 grit to 200 grit and it came out pretty acceptable for my first woodworking project since junior high school (1966). I was lucky that it is a straightforward design. I have also rowed eight-million meters on a Concept 2 rowing machine. over the past six years. Maybe I need a hobby like bull-fighting.