Thursday, 15 December 2016

Posting #2 

Wow! I can't believe how fast my first year of retirement has gone. My Daytona Project has seen some progress but to anyone looking in from the outside not much has happened.  I spent time taking two "Auto Restoration" classes at BCIT in the spring, took a couple of fishing trips, and went in our 5th wheel on a 7200 km. tour of Arizona, California and Oregon. Oh, it was so much fun I almost forgot that I also got talked into dusting off my old books and doing one more 10- week class of students at BCIT.

Shop Work:

  During all of this I started to dismantle "Daytona 1"(2 dr-Sport Sedan) and had lots of fun learning what really held this thing together. It really didn't take that long till it was all apart and stored away. Many pictures were taken to aid me to figure out where and how things fit together when and if the day comes to put this thing back together! Before starting I built a "safety cradle" out of 4 old camper jacks to hopefully prevent me from being crushed if the beast falls over on me. I will also use them for lifting the body off of the frame when it comes time for that. You can see them in pictures.

As you can see from the pictures this car is even far more rusted than I originally thought.  I went through a few phases of actually abandoning this project all together and getting something different to start with that wasn't quite so scary and more at my existing skill level.  Glad to say now that I got over all those fears and have progressed on to the stage of getting a donor car "Daytona 2" (4 dr Sedan) and now in the process of trying to figure out how I can cut and hack things and glue them back together to look like the original "Daytona 1. Magic Wand maybe!!

"Daytona 1" and "Daytona 11"  now on rolling stands awaiting decisions on their fate. The more I look at them, I don't think there will be much left of "Daytona 1".
When I close the door at night and turn out the lights, I secretly hope they may be of the opposite sex and I will come back in the morning and find they have produced "a new shiny replica". Nope -not that easy!!

To see more photos copy and paste this URL to your browser:                https://goo.gl/photos/iNzK2PGqN9k4PWHa8