My Fiat 1500
I first started on this journey when I saw an article in Men's Journal magazine about restoring old MGs', believe it or not. I thought, 'Hey, what a cool idea. I have enough cash; I have the time...It's MY mid-life crisis...what's not to like"?
Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh...
But instead of finding an MG, I had my eye on this car I had seen snugged up behind the wall of a local garage. It looked like it had been there for years, which it had. . . fourteen, to be exact. The previous owner had brought it in for a new water pump in 1986 (!) and then just never went back to pick it up. "Life got in the way", he said. So I paid him $200 as-is for what he had and went my merry way.
My first step was getting it out of there and towed to a garage. You know how a person looks better in low light, like a bar, but when you get them out in the sunshine you kind of go..."Oh...hmmm..."? I had the same reaction as did the tow guy.
"What do you think?" I asked, after we had dragged it out of its burrow and lugged it onto the rollback.
"Well," he said, "It's gonna take a lot of work..."
This here's the drivers side front;
See the brake cylinder?
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This is the interior; gross, huh?
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Yes, it DID take a lot of work. After getting an estimate from a local garage, who informed me that anything can be fixed, you just have to have the money (in this case nearly eight grand), I decided that if I was going to spend so much I might as well get something which ra. This one became the parts car. My search began again.
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