Fit and (Don't) Finish

This is not an excuse to pull a DNF and give up on a project. Anyone who's been following this saga knows there have been plenty of opportunities to do that and occasionally motivation, too.

Instead, this is a rap on not being an optimist. That sounds dreary; let me try again: This is a rap on how to be a callused rivet-tough realist. They say that an optimist has more fun, but a pessimist is more often right. I've found both to be true, but a pessimist can't attack a project of any scale by starting with, "It's all gonna burn someday." You'll never get out of bed if you start there.

By the same token, the optimist also goes by the title 'cheap dreamer' and the DIY crowd is FULL of them. As a recovering cheap dreamer, I can tell you exactly what that looks like: All you see are the stars, all you smell is the sizzle, all you hear is the roar of the crowd. It is just as bad as the pessimist, but you usually spend a lot more money and still fail to achieve your goal...because your goal was either an unattainable utopia or a mislaid motive in the first place.

My restoration of a 1972-1/2 1302 Super Beetle was such a thing. I started with the idea of fixing up an old lump, dented and dinged, but mostly in moderate running condition and in the end had dumped well over $8000 and eight years into the utopian dream of creating an objet d'art which was a PERFECT reference restoration of exactly how the vehicle looked when it was delivered to the Anderson Family of Redwood City, California in May of 1972. It was perfect. Really, amazingly perfect. But I had lost the plot: This was no longer a vehicle I could drive for fun, it was an objet d'art fit for displaying at the Stiftung Auto Museum in Wolfsburg, Germany not for driving around and taking wear like a real car does.

I let my goal get away from me and realized in the end that my utopia wasn't sustainable. All that effort to fulfill a dream that hadn't been what I'd really wanted to do: I wanted to drive.

So while I'm clear-eyed on the subject, I though I'd comment on what twenty-five years in the hobby has taught me about fiddling with old cars on a budget. This is for someone who is a realist, or wants to be. The pessimist will stop reading now, "because it doesn't matter, 'cause everything goes wrong." The starry-eyed optimist will stop reading now, because they might not like the taste of the truth to follow. The courageous realist will suck it up and see if there's something worth learning.

First, what is your goal? I let my goal drift on that Beetle and made myself and my wife miserable as I chased a unicorn. We'd have been having fun driving it for many years if I'd just tuned up and sorted the few bum items. If you don't have a clear goal in mind, you're going to waste a lot of money and a lot of time and maybe not get what you want in the end.

So after you've defined your goal and nailed it to the barn, you've got to measure your resources: physical, financial, psychological, and your most un-replenishable resource, time. Having looked those four goons in the eye, the realist can then decide with the cold cash-register heart of a banker what he's really capable of accomplishing.

I'm going to be really brutal here:

You have four buckets in your life that resources flow into and out of: Physical, Emotional, Time, and Money. Almost everyone understands the money one: If you spend more than you earn, pretty soon you're out on the street. If you have a deficit in physical resources (such as, you're disabled) then you're going to constantly be taking from the other three buckets to make up for it. (It will be hard on you emotionally, everything takes more time for you, and it costs more just to get by.)

If you have good friends who can offer moral support, that can sometimes make up for a lack of financial resources. "I'm poor, but I have friends, so I'm ok." This is where it gets real: You've got to have a reasonable balance of all of these resources to succeed in your project...any project. If you throw everything in all four buckets into your business, even if you become successful (refilling the time and money buckets) there's a good chance that you have ruined your health and broken your own ability to maintain relationships. How many stories do we hear about dying young with all the money, bodies and relationships wrecked? The 27 Club?

I'm not saying I like this. Frankly, I hate it. I want to do what I want to do, and to hell with everything else. (Said by me at my most selfish, and by every punk 14 year old.) But that isn't the budget we have in life. The buckets are. You replenish and draw from each at need, and the person who "doesn't worry about one kind of bucket" isn't free, they're crazy. Think about that for a minute: its true.

The pessimist quits before they begin: they're a hoarder of their resources. The 'cheap dreamer' assumes that all of the buckets are bottomless, and gets jolted by a sudden stop when they hit the bottom of one or more buckets and there is no more.

Be a realist. Consider what your buckets really look like and then spend your resources wisely.

When the Tigers Broke Free

 

I'm hoping someone eventually reads this.

The fundamental idea of this site had been to document a collaboration of smart people working to make it practical to take COTS (Commercial, Off-the-Shelf) parts and with a minimum of fabrication (buy, rather than build) get a standardized Subaru transplant instead of having everyone re-invent the wheel themselves. So much for that. I'll come back to why this project failed in following post, but until then, I want to talk about my Bus.

My 1977 Deluxe was rescued from a downstate Delaware barn in 2012. The last time it had run was 1998. When I went through the engine to see if it could be saved, what I found was a Type4 that had been pounded almost to slag, which explains why it was parked and left. At the start of this project I was committed to doing a good job building my own engine, only to discover that the engine was a boat anchor. I even bought a replacement case, crank, steel-backed bearings, intending to put it back on the road. But the more that I looked at the outlandish expenses, the terrible parts quality available (or just no availability at all) the more I swung toward the Subaru re-power.

My Bus sits on its 6 ton jacks in a clean, dry garage now. Unfortunately, it has sat there since 2013, and not for lack of trying. No, I haven't lost my job, or been through a divorce, or any of those other horrors that often doom projects to being sold off as 'basket cases.' The Subaru engine and all of its parts are fabricated and installed, or have been at least dry fitted. There is rust repair to do, and interior work and so on, but the biggest stuff is in place. So what has changed to cause me to write this?

In 2015 my parents were both diagnosed with cancer. My father was dead by August 2016. (slowly; it was awful.) My less than sympathetic employer was clearly lining up to pink slip me. I didn't give them the opportunity: I jumped first to another job, then a year later to a contract job, then to my present job. This is after 13 years with a single company. (And the Bus had to sit.)

Then 2020 happened, not beginning in March, like it did for most people. Instead we started the year off big: my mother died of her cancer in January, I had hernia repair in February while simultaneously acting as my mother's estate executor. We locked down in March with everyone else, and then my adopted aunt died of cancer (secondary to lockdown) in July. With the help of an exceptional realtor, the estate sold my mom's house and we liquidated my mother's financial assets in record time...DURING a pandemic. (And the Bus had to sit.)

To make the family home sale happen quickly, I had to evacuate all of my parents possessions, which meant much of it came to be stored in my tiny garage already full of Bus, my shed, and inside my already too small house, all during a pandemic, and while I was still recovering from hernia surgery, my kids were doing school from home, and we were all stepping on each other's feet. (And the Bus had to sit.)

Then a 'thing' happened. A much larger house nearby came up for sale with a large property, a separate shop building, and a lot of storage space. I bought it with our share of the money from my mom's estate. You'd think this would be ideal. Finally a place to work on the Bus! But the house was in poor condition and required a lot of repair before we could move in. (And the Bus had to sit.)

During the time we would have been running around arranging items to move, my wife got back a strange test result from a CT scan. Result: Appendix and gall bladder removal surgery. Which left her in recovery from surgery just as pandemic school was starting for my kids again, and with no energy to pack.  So I had to do all of the packing and arrange for transport, while working 50 hours a week from home. (And the Bus had to sit.)

Just before we moved, one last 'thing' happened that changed the whole trajectory of the Bus: My wife told me (and in 23 years, she has rarely "told" me anything) that I had three choices with the Bus:

1. Sell it to someone who will finish it.
2. Scrap it, so that it is not hanging over my head.
3. Send it to a mechanic in Connecticut who has been a good friend and very helpful with my own adaptation designs, and pay him to finish my work.

I squalked. "But...but! Now I've got this SHOP! It is HUGE. I'll finally have the space to finish!" She pointed out to me, not unkindly, that my problem hasn't been lack of space: It has been our lives being constantly turned up to 11, screeching feedback for the last decade. So 1, 2, or 3. But that vehicle doesn't roll onto the property until it can do so under its own power. "I have spoken." (And the Bus sat.)

I have neglected to go into detail about my daughter's verbalizations about suicide, her questioning her gender-identity, being sexually bullied at school...that both of my kids are on the Autism spectrum, and that both my wife and I have different forms of depression. These items are just the foundation of sand our lives are built upon. Then, add a pandemic year. 

Being the stubborn type, I opted for #3: Send it to Connecticut and pay someone I trust who is hyper-competent to finish my vision (and probably improve on it, since he has built several conversions and know what works and what doesn't.) This is the best thing I can do.

So while I'll probably archive some of this content to thesamba or somewhere else, there will only be two more posts here. The next one will be why VolksarU failed. The last one will detail the Bus returning to the shop here in New Jersey as a driver, not a project.