In 1998 or so I lived with a bunch of guys in a house we shared in eastern CT. The owner of the house Jim was our age and one of the guys that lived there and had us covering his mortgage with a minimal rent. There were two garage spots and so the owner had one and because of various negotiations one of the other guys Bill had the other. Bill became a DSM guy around that time, because the gen II Talon had just come out and he bought one new. There were a lot of crazy DSM experiments going on in that garage, many of them ill advised, some leading to crank walk. Jim got into Land Rovers and discovered the wonders of rust repair. Jim is a handy guy and basically ended up replacing most of one side of the rusted out structure on the Rover he bought with new stuff.
At some point this must have led Bill to think he could do similar things with cars, because one day he and a friend brought home a Triumph Spitfire with the idea that they were going to swap an RX-7 rotary into it. This idea had apparently come to them because the "Grassroots Motorsports guys did it." Now, this Spitfire was not running and they were looking at it as a rolling chassis for this experience. The car also had been sinking into the ground outside, uncovered, for a while... in New England. So, while they obviously got it pretty cheap, they still paid too much, as it was a rust pit. They set about disassembling this car down to the frame, which didn't take very long and found that it was pretty rusted on the frame. Repairs of one sort or another ensued for a few weeks, but it soon became obvious that this was a bad choice for such a project and would require much more work than would be worth doing in the end.
Rather than admit this though Bill kind of just let it sit there, in the garage, for a long time. When asked, he claimed there was work being done or that work would be done on this car, but really nothing was going on. Jim was a very tolerant, non-confrontational person and since Bill had the garage spot to use, the chassis just sat in there doing nothing for over a year while Bill parked his new Talon out in the weather. I found the whole thing absurd and urged Jim to just have Bill throw that thing out, but in the end it didn't get sent off to the scrap heap until Bill moved out.
One day prior to the end of all this though I was sitting around the house and happened upon a copy of Grassroots Motorsports whereupon I saw an article about swapping a rotary into a Triumph Spitfire. I realized that this was the impetus for the piece of crap in the garage and started reading. The highlights of the article for me revolved around how the GRM guys found a rolling chassis that had been garaged all of its life and was in nearly perfect condition for their swap and how despite this they described the swap as one of the most challenging projects they had ever done. Though I was pretty much set on my opinion of Bill, this kind of put the icing on the cake.
GRM, bad influence since 1984. 
