The fickle motorist who wants a weekend warrior.

In reply to solfly :

Can do. Give me a bit and I'll do a walk around video. 
 

Here you go. 
 

May take a few minutes. I just uploaded it. 

Harness bar burned in. 

Calling it a day. It's dark. I'm hungry. Got a lot done. Was hoping to be done with welding but the power was out for 4 hours so I did other stuff. 
 

Still to do: 

finish harnesses, passenger side entirely and driver shoulder straps  

install gauges

fill radiator

bolt down trunk lid

windshield

brakes

tires

20 days. 
 

Brakes arrived. Tires are scheduled to be on my porch when I get home. Parts house will have my bearings tomorrow. 
The drivers harness is ready for install. 
Fill radiator. 
Windshied 
DMV

Daily!

This week. 

3/5 ain't bad. 

I bet I have more time in installing these harnesses than I did in mounting the engine and fabricating a crossmember. Silly safety. 
gotta let the welds cool. I put a lot of heat in. Then the harnesses are ready to actually be installed. 
Then all the welding I have left is to patch a couple holes and make attachments for the trunk lid. 
 

Food break, then I think imma fill the rad and go for a little drive. 

And with this goofy selfie, I declare the harnesses done. 

Also, turns out when you chop the roof by 3" there almost isn't room for a helmet. Close!

New front brakes! New bearings!
Also, 1" wheel spacers. Partially so the wheels and control arms don't meet, but mostly so I can use the sweet center caps for these wheels!

I may want to roll* the front fenders. 
 

*hammer into compliance. 
 

Just kidding. The center caps are great, but the wheels were hitting the arms and it wasn't pretty. Fixed! Just the windshield and a couple small things left. Doing DMV Thursday am, gonna daily it starting Saturday, if not earlier. 
Also need to sit down with the file of receipts and do our build book. Hope that's not hard. 

Today we started planning our route. East! Ha! We're actually leaving the 17th and heading to my uncles place in north GA for a couple days, then south to Gainesville on the Thursday before challenge. Being ambitious, if the car goes well we're going to try to get to Amarillo on day 1. Google says 12 hours. That's a long day in a normal car. 
 

17 days till event. 
11 days till departure. 

Also, need a fire extinguisher. Hardware store I guess. And the last thing I had to order was a long yoke for our spare diff. It's a spooled 3.50:1.

Math says we'll be approaching redline at 100mph, which is ideal, as that's the 1/4 mile speed I'm hunting. 
 

But we plan to do the trip (out, at least) on the open 2.47 gears that are in the car because 406ci, carb, and no overdrive. 
 

Stoked! 
Nervous. 

E36 M3 E36 M3 E36 M3 E36 M3 E36 M3 E36 M3 E36 M3. 
 

Dug the title out so I could go to the dmv in the morning and get this heap registered. We haven't done that until now because we didn't want to pay all the fees and insurance for 18 months on a car that wasn't being driven. 
 

The title doesn't have a seller signature on it. This is a big problem. Someone has penned in "see survivorship affidavit" dated 2012.

I don't have that. 
 

Call the dmv. They say the process for registration in this case is to file for "insufficient proof of ownership" which is a 90 day process and the car cannot be issued a temporary registration. 
 

There is a bill of sale with the title dated 2016, but the name on the bill is not the name on the title. Not the last name either. And it has no year or VIN. Just says Ford Thunderbird. It does have a phone number. I called. Straight to voicemail "that has not been set up yet"

So I call the dmv again. This time I get someone different. Awesome. "I have a car and bill of sale but I lost the title somewhere. What do I do?" 
I need a bill of sale (which I think I can get) w/ VIN, valid drivers license, proof of insurance. Then they will issue me a 30 day temp tag while I "find the title if I can and bring it in"

This is potentially catastrophic. Hopefully it works out ok. My insurer opens at 9 tomorrow. 

Damnnnnnn

The guy we got the car from lives a couple blocks from my parents. I ran over and he signed a bill of sale. DMV tomorrow. 
If they give me bad news, we have potentially 2 options. 
1- dad has a trailer, but no tow rig. FIL has a tow rig, but not sure he'd let me take it that long and that far. Also that truck is 200 miles away from me. 
2- 2021. 
 

Option 1 would be a hard sell. If FIL let me take the truck, that's all well and good but the big draw for my dad has always been the road trip in a sketchy racecar. Not sure he'd even want to do it in a 24 year old diesel. 
Option 2 would allow for a true testing and shakedown. We'd have time to install the good heads and cam and actually go fast. I'd have time to save more dollars for good shocks and such. The car would be better, but postponing a trip this big could be a fairly sure way to make it never happens at all. 
 

This sum bullE36 M3. 

So I'm not saying it's a good idea or anything, but insurance is WAY more important than registration when it comes to driving on the road, at least by my understanding.

In reply to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ :

Oh itll have insurance. No worries. But I'm not driving it out and back without some form of registration. I'm worried enough about driving it with registration. Pretty sure it meets one or more instant-impound violations in every state we'll be going through. 

Dad ruled out towing. Wish me luck at the dmv tomorrow!

Good luck!  

So this post may be long and have little to do with the car and it will almost surely jump around. Feel free to skip ahead. 
 

I'm exhausted. Between working a very physical job, drastically changing my diet, helping as much as I can with the kids, and now adding a dog in the mix, I'm just burning out. I don't mind admitting it. 
 

I'm not as comfortable financially as I was last year, and plans that seemed easy are less so today. The $2000 challenge being one. What i had planned was $2000 for the car and $2000 for the journey, split 50/50 with dad. But it turns out that the car actually costs way more. Things that are not in budget add up quickly. Tires, brakes, fluids, safety. Poor planning on my part. Add in the mix my general poor impulse control and bad money habits and I don't have as much stashed away as I'd like. I'm sure I'd be ok, just not comfortable. 
 

Time is such a misused thing. I have two young children and a wife who need my help. Especially my wife. She deserves more than what few breaks I can give her. All the time I spend playing with the car is probably best described as irresponsible. Weekends, evenings that I can't get back. Sometimes I feel incredibly guilty about it. I work hard and I make a big effort to be involved and be a good dad/husband, and I could argue that I deserve time to take care of me, but maybe I've crossed a line. There's no trouble at home, but there's trouble in my head. 
 

Sometimes I get discouraged easily. Topped off the radiator and found another leak, right by the one we just fixed. Then I found the brake lights aren't working. Those two things put me in an even worse funk and I had to pack it in for the night because my head was in such a bad place I couldn't concentrate. I know these are minor, but they didn't feel that way. And we have 8-10 hour days planned for the drive. That's a fast pace in a car with no windows, hard seats, and all the noise. I'm confident we can fix it if something fails, but that means more time away from home. 
 

Im nervous. The car is untested. When I first filled the fluids and started it, I was in such a rush and so excited I may have missed things. When I checked the oil the next day there was a ton of water in it. I hadn't pulled the drain plug before, and water may have been in there for a while. We did have the thing outside for over a year with a tarp loosely covering it, but the exhaust ports were open-ish and I suppose the distributor wasn't tightened and maybe water got in from rain. But maybe it's a mechanical issue. I have spare heads and gaskets, but I do not have time to replace them. That makes me nervous. I have no idea what the transmission is. Saginaw 4 speed, but what kind of torque can it handle. Maybe it was for a 4 cyl and has fragile innards. What if I forgot to tighten a critical bolt? I've touched literally every fastener on the car, chances are I screwed something up. 
Point is, I always planned a couple months of testing before we set out. I'll be lucky to get 5 days of testing. 
 

My thoughts are mixed. I'm going to see about getting insurance and tags in the morning, but if it doesn't go smoothly, that may be the catalyst. 

In reply to barefootskater :

If you click around the forum, in the grand scheme of challenge builds being one year late is practically early.  Do what makes sense for you.

It's ok.  It took me 10 years from the time I started on my first attempted challenge build to the time i made it with a car that was tossed together from a field to the track in 4 months.  I threw everything i had at the car for that time, and I didn't pay enough attention to my family.  I know where you're coming from.  We can look back now joking about how I painted the car on our anniversary, but I painted the stupid car on our anniversary.   Stop and play with the kids.  The event and car will be there for next year.  

Working on life balance is hard, admitting that we struggle with it shows the selflessness we do possess. Anyone who looks down on you for battling this situation isn't worth concerning yourself over.

You have the right mindset. Go talk with your insurance agent, go to the DMV. If things go well, let that help guide the path forward. If not, take a stroll around the forum at what others are planning for next year; 2021 Challenge is gonna be lit!

Also don't forget to have fun.  If it's not fun what's the point?  I used to be a miserable shiny happy person at events, because racing is srs bzns.  You know when i had my podium finish?  The year i said berkeley this i'm here to have fun with cars with my family and friends and laugh and play and eat some good food and whatever happens happens.  

Insured. At the DMV. I hope they're in a good mood. 
 

*edit. 
The lady was very friendly. Unfortunately, the dude I got the car from (who's name and signature are on my bill of sale) never registered the car. I have no way to get it registered right now. Time to drop back and punt. Maybe a solution will present itself. Maybe. 
 

Also maybe we drive the Mudstain. It's slow and handles like a wobbly shopping cart, but it's still sorta sketchy and uncomfortable so maybe dad will want to do the trip that way. Maybe. 

We're talking about having the car shipped out, and flying in. If that is the case, the car will not be coming back to UT. It would be for sale for what we have in it. Otherwise we'd take the powertrain and axle and leave the car with someone for whatever it may or may not be worth. 
 

At this point, neither of us is interested in the car for regular use, and neither are interested in storing it for another year. So the trip may still happen, but the circumstances will change. 

Put the tag from the Mudstain on the Challenge car and tell anyone that asks (i.e. Po Po) that you rebodied it?

In reply to hobiercr (FS) :

99% chance we'd get away with it. But I'd never convince dad. We're working on a plan. 

Flying/car transport is out

Towing is out

the only real possibility we still make it would be in my mustang. It is reliable and under budget, but very slow. It is also for sale. Might be a good adventure to drive out and sell it, then figure out how best to get home. 
 

It'd be a real shame to not run the car we've built, but with no reasonable way to get it there and no desire or ability to store it another year... we do what we have to do. It'd be a shame as well to waste a hote reservation and the money spent on mailing the decal package and entry fee (I know at least some of that would be rolled over to next year)