Love this pic for some reason! This is the same place/position this thing would stay in for the next 6 months...to this very day, actually, although not for much longer but I'll get to that part later.
One thing I didn't mention yet was the importance of this build to me on an emotional level. As I said, I've had this car for 26 years...it's been wrecked by me, painted by me, disassembled more times than I care to count, stolen from my driveway by a couple of D-bags and totaled out while running from the cops. It's also been loved by me, hated by me and enjoyed by me, my wife and two young boys. But it was by necessity that I decided to turn this car into the car I'd always dreamed it would be. Shortly after my wife and I were engaged, she was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 25. After surgery and some treatment, we were able to move forward with life, got married, had two wonderful boys 11 months apart (that's a whole other story), and went about living. It was 7 years later that her cancer came back and had spread to her lungs, so again we went thru various treatments and therapies and we stayed positive and kept the faith and stayed focused on living. By age 37, it had spread to her brain and by age 38 she had won her battle and was resting in her eternal home.
I only mention this because I learned many things in those years we were together (20 in all)...many things about myself, about my faith in Christ and about how amazing and selfless a gift she was to me. Among those things I've learned and tried to instill in my boys is that at the end of this life, having watched my best friend take her last breaths, our legacy is the only thing we leave behind in this world that can continue to make an impact once we're gone. How we treat people, how we deal with people both personally and professionally is what we leave as a testament to our character.
So after being on the back burner for a long time, this project was born from a necessity to keep my mind focused on something productive as much as it was a desire to make it a project of bringing the boys and I together to build something we could enjoy while at the same time teaching them the same skills my Dad taught me...
I promise I won't rain on the parade again! But sometimes the back story is the main story!
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