Restoration Owners: Phased Budgets, Spending Ceilings and Parts You Source Yourself

The difference is that a repair has a defined end state and a restoration has an intended one. On a unit of this age, opening a panel is an investigation, and the honest answer to what is behind it is that we will know when we look. Any shop offering you a firm total for a full restoration sight unseen is either padding heavily against the unknown or planning to have an uncomfortable conversation later.

The workable alternative is to break the program into phases that each have a real boundary. Chassis and structure. Skin and finish. Systems. Interior. Each phase gets its own scope, its own ceiling and its own end point where the unit can be closed up and moved if you want to stop for a year. Owners who structure it that way generally finish. Owners who start with everything open often do not.

Each phase is authorized in writing with a figure in it, and that figure is a hard stop rather than a target. When cumulative spend approaches it we stop and report, with photographs of exactly where the work has reached and a clear statement of what remains. You then decide whether to raise the ceiling, close the phase and take the unit away, or leave it with us while you think, subject to space.

This is more administrative work for us than a single open ended authorization and we prefer it anyway, because the alternative is the conversation nobody enjoys where the number has doubled and everybody is annoyed. It also keeps a project alive across budget years. An owner spending a set amount each year for four years gets a finished unit. An owner who blew the whole budget on phase one usually has a stalled project and a bad memory of the shop.

Investigation work does not price as a flat operation. Removing a skin panel to find out whether the frame behind it is sound, chasing a soft spot back to where the material turns solid, or determining whether a member can be repaired or has to be fabricated: none of that has a predictable duration and pretending otherwise means guessing. So exploratory work is booked hourly against the phase ceiling, at $210 for body and structural time.

You get the trade off in exchange. Nobody is padding an estimate to cover an unknown, so a phase that turns out well costs less than a padded quote for the same work would have. And on the phases where the news is bad, and on a unit this age there is usually one, you are seeing real hours against real findings rather than arguing about whether a fixed price should be revised.

Restoration owners are frequently better at sourcing than any shop, because they have spent years in the forums and know which three people in the country hold stock. We are glad to fit owner supplied parts and we will not pretend otherwise to protect a parts margin. Nothing is marked up on something you bought, which on a program of this size is a meaningful amount of money.

The trade is that fitment risk sits with you. If a reproduction part is dimensionally wrong, the labor spent discovering that is billable, and adapting it is more billable work rather than a correction on our side. Send us the part number and the source before you buy where you can, since we have seen which reproductions fit. Where we order a special item on your behalf, it requires a full non refundable deposit at order, because nobody can restock it.

• No markup on parts you supply
• Fitment risk on owner supplied items stays with the owner
• Send part numbers and sources before purchase where possible
• Special order parts we place carry a full non refundable deposit

We are a repair facility rather than a storage yard, and floor space inside the building is the constraint on how much work moves through it. A unit sitting between phases is a unit occupying space another owner needs, so the default is that a project goes home at the end of each phase and comes back for the next one. Plan a place for it before the phase closes.

Where a unit genuinely cannot be moved, because a phase left it non rolling for instance, we will talk about it rather than turn you out, and we will be honest about how long that can last. The more useful planning move is to define phases so each one ends with the unit closed up, weathertight and rolling. That is a design decision made when the program is planned, not something to solve at the end.

A standard valuation on a fifty year old unit looks at a model year and produces a number that bears no relationship to a restored example. The route around that is an agreed value arrangement, which carriers write on the strength of evidence rather than on enthusiasm. That evidence is largely paperwork, and paperwork is the thing restoration owners are worst at keeping.

So keep it as you go. Dated photographs of each phase, including everything that ends up hidden. Invoices for work and for parts, yours and ours. A written record of what was replaced against what was preserved, because originality affects value in both directions. A professional appraisal once the unit presents well. We produce our half as a matter of course, and there is a page explaining how agreed value differs from actual cash value.

One project unit, out of use by choice. Downtime is rarely the constraint here, budget and part availability are. What costs money is a phase stalling with the unit occupying space while a component is hunted, which is why parts are sourced before a phase opens.

• Nobody can quote a fixed price for opening a sixty year old wall
• Parts that exist in one place in the country and take three months
• A shop that wants the whole project or none of it
• A policy valuing a restored unit at whatever a book says about the model year