car restoration good or bad idea?

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How long is a piece of string?

How much of the work can you do yourself? How much of the work can you learn to do yourself? Do you have anyone around who can teach you? Can you weld? Can you do bodywork? Can you fix an engine? What exactly on the car needs to be fixed?

There are a thousand little jobs to do on any car resto. Took me two years to put a mildly rusty Fiat back on the road doing the work myself and it didn't even need any engine work in particular. What I paid won't help you since I don't live in America and cars as well as what you'd pay for parts are much cheaper than here.

If you're looking to dump it in the lap of a shop and have them do it all you can expect a bill of $10k+ with the sky being the limit. There are a LOT of hours involved in this sort of thing and you will be billed through the nose for them because the number of shops who can do this type of work is dwindling and their labour is becoming very valuable.

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>>18030516
i plan to do it all except the painting. the only other issue i can really find is the registration, since its a 1979 car and Australia has some wierd "vintage" car rules. ive never done welding but i know basics of engine rebuilding.

>>18030608
>Australia

Hello comrade, in that case I actually can help you.

No one at all would touch the Fiat for repairing the half dozen spots of body rust. No one. I had to learn to weld to do it and that was a shitshow because welding thing gauge steel is tough.

Spent about $1500 on parts and every single one of them was amazingly cheap, on top of which there was a new set of tyres, rego/insurance, etc. when I eventually put it on the road.

The "basics" of engine rebuilding probably won't help you. It's real easy to read about this stuff but the practice is a lot more difficult. And if the car has been sitting for a while the job gets even harder. There's no way to tell you exactly how much it'll cost to fix any engine problems without looking at it, but as a minimum you can expect to replace all fluids, brake pads and rotors, all engine rubbers (including possibly engine mounts), belts, the radiator fans on these tend to be shredded by old age, the radiator is probably full of sediment and may need to be professionally disassembled and repaired, carby rebuild and tune, and the list goes on.

All of that is before you get to the electrics. If you can swing a multimeter and crimp a terminal you'll get by but it's always a pain in the ass and extremely time consuming to trouble shoot electrics on these cars. You'll spend a lot of time cleaning up earth terminals and replacing split/rusted wiring to get it to run reliably.

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>>18030670
And both of those things are nothing compared to the body work. You can do the dodgy thing and use fiberglass but these cars already fold in half in a crash without doing that to yourself. Better to do it properly. That means cutting out, cleaning up, spraying rust converter and fish oil into any box section you can get at, bending up replacement panels (super difficult for anything with compound curves if you don't have the tools shape them), welding them in, painting, body working, sanding, more painting. It is easily the single hardest and most time consuming job that you will have to do and I can tell you for a fact that 280s rust like they have been for a swim in the dead sea.

There are no "weird" vintage car rules here. If the car was acquired legally and still has its VIN number you can register it no problem and it only needs to comply with the regulations of the production year. You can register it as a classic car but that's usually not worth it because there are restrictions on how much you can drive it and you need to be a member of a car club and such. Pain in the fucking ass.

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>>18030670
how much relating to electrics did you know before getting into the restoration? thats something i actually didnt consider at all.

i didnt consider body work being that hard too, maybe this is too much of a project.

also thanks for the licensing thing all i could find with google was about club car stuff

>>18030712
I knew lots, but I am the exception and not the rule because my father is an engineer who taught me a lot of things that I applied when fixing my car. The electrics in a 280 aren't as simple as in most cars its age because they have a rudimentary ECU as I understand it. Something to consider. An auto electrician will also charge an arm and a leg for the work.

But body work is no joke and I can't stress enough that it's the thing you need to look at the hardest. Welding the thin steel on cars is beyond difficult if you're trying to learn at the same time, and making replacement panels is time consuming and requires lots of fettling to get them right. The better the panel fits the easier the remaining body work becomes.

I say I spent $1500 on parts but I also spent about a $1000 on tools specifically for working on the car. That included a about $700 worth of welding equipment and gas but the rest included some pretty specific steel shaping tools. And that was what I spent despite having access to thousands of tools already. There were just still some things that I didn't have. If you don't have a full workshop like I did then you can expect to spend way more on tools.

First how much rust is in it. Not even worth it in most cases if its too rusty. I have a ford wagon I'm currently semi restoring. I couldn't give you a valuable estimate on pricinging since I do everything myself and get generally better than trade price.
But really the biggest thing to look at is the rust. Check around where all the panels meet, on all the pillars, around the doors, windscreen and rear window and anywhere else water could pool if it got inside.
Do you know the history of the car, if its been near the beach I'd recommend leaving it as it will only grow more rust.
Mechanically if its been sitting as anon said you'll be up for basics, and probably things like unijoints, it would be worthwhile doing timing belt/chain(you engine will be fucked if that let's go).
Wiring is piss easy, get yourself a multimeter and a workshop manual and just check continuity between where ever it is issues exist, wiring diagrams usually give you wire colours.
Also paint job will be your most expensive thing, especially if your planning on changing the colour, through you could buy yourself a spray gun and a compressor and save yourself a few grand. Or at least leave it the same colour and just touch up what need be.

>>18030733
You clearly havnt been taught to weld too well.
You don't want to run a solid bead on cars, just overlapping tacks, way wat way less chance of blowing through. One of the best panel beaters Ive ever seen taught me that. Also makes it easier to patch up shit welds.

why do people like zx's. theyre just ruined 240z's.

>>18030876
cheaper better fuel economy 2 +2 means added versatility. yes, everyone prefers the 240z but zx's always get trashed even though theyre good cars

>>18030826
The point is I wasn't taught to weld at all. I spent a couple of hours doing practice tacks and beads just on the work bench based on some tips I got from the shop I bought the welder at and the information I could find online.

I figured out the tack thing on my own but not before blowing a couple of holes in my steel. I would go around and put a tack in what were roughly the corners, then go around adding tacks to each side until the weld was sealed. It's not impossible to learn but it's time consuming and a bottle of argon isn't exactly cheap when you're going to burn through the whole thing just on practicing.

>>18030927
I only use gassless wire so that makes things a bit cheaper.
And well I've been welding for years so I don't really need a great deal of practice before cracking into a job. I could imagine it would take quite a bit of practice to pick it up on your own.

Something I would suggest for anyone looking to do their own repairs is start with the lowest wire feed setting and somewhere between lowest and mid range for amps, depending n the welder. I've just got a cheap little mig, has a dial for wire feed and two switches giving a low, medium and high setting. Ive been using medium with just above lowest wirefeed, generally gives nice penetration on panels without getting so hot as to blow through

>>18030972
Yeah I went with the gas just because I wanted to give myself the best chance of producing welds that would last without introducing too much opportunity for rust to start up in the spots I'd just fixed.

OP if you know someone who can weld then you have less to worry about, but if you're only looking to pay them a slab of beer you'll still need to do the replacement patches and prep yourself because that's a huge time sink. The alternative to hand-formed panels is that you might be able to find reproduction replacement panel sections from parts retailers (or indeed actual original panels that you can slice up and take what you need). These are a good option for really complex shapes but they can be expensive especially if you only need a small piece.

Also consider your earlier point where you were going to leave the painting up to someone else. I've asked around and a /good/ paint job begins at 5k. The best offer I got was 3k on the Fiat which was an absolutely miniature car to be sprayed in a flat red colour IF I delivered it to them ready to be masked and undercoated. Now I was prepared to do that because everything except the paint was in my wheelhouse but you can expect to pay twice that for a good paint job if they have to do the prep.

You will never get back what you spend. Stop watching "reality" TV. If you want the car for yourself and want to actually restore it, and don't run into any major problems, it will cost you about what a new car costs in parts. In labor it will cost you all your weekends for a year or two, depending on how fast you work.

If you want to make money, buy the a car, for scrap value, make it run, then sell it to some kid who don't know any better if you have no scruples.

Junk is junk. If you want it fixed it will cost more than a new car in parts and labor. If you want a good cool car, really buy a new one, and keep it. 20 grand over 10 years is less than $200 a month, including interest. And you will save on gas.

>>18031410
i dont have a tv, but what i mean is i dont want to sink too much into it to a point where theres just no worth.

>>18030444
my brother got one of these from my parents and drove it into a tree. these cars are over 30 years old now. If you want to restore it, there might be a risk that you'll need to buy another one just for spare parts.

A beautiful vehicle though.

is 'restoration' the biggest word people from the south know?

>>18031611
yeah of course parts are always an ass to find but whats worse is no one will insure it, only third party insurance.

>>18031613
It is a big word. Usually we say fixin' up, or just refer to the process as buildin' a car. Not because we are stupid or lack that fancy book learnin', we just like to talk like ordinary folk, so that ordinary folk understand us.