i can appreciate your thoughts. i did one of my Barracudas - a 68 fastback Formula S 340 4 speed Turbine bronze. i put 2600 hours into the car and it is probably 98% original. i refinished, rebuilt or restored every nut, bolt and system on the car. it's not a "museum piece" but just a nice driver. that was 10 years ago now and i'm getting a little less "flexible" and motivated to crawl all over a car these days. i'm currently working on a 69 383 4 sp S fastback and my 69 M-Code Cuda. both those cars are really kicking my ***. as a person gets older, the "tough" and "tedious" stuff seems to be more of a challenge. i'm willing to pay someone to do some work but i won't trust my cars to anyone under 50 - and finding someone that age or older that knows these cars is getting more and more difficult as time passes. i practiced law for 28 years and at the end, pretty much assumed everyone lies about everything all the time. AND - it is dangerous to put a lot of "trust" in a stranger. so i now worry about sending my cars to someone and then having them remove all the valuable OEM parts replacing them with after-market repo junk or just stealing the parts outright. yes, i know - it's tough being a paranoid person. however, i have been working on cars now for over 50 years and i have stories and experiences of mechanics as "thieves" dating back to my high school days. probably the ONLY way i would drop one of my very original cars off at a resto shop is if i took about 100 pictures of every single valuable part on the car and showed all the pics to the shop Manager when i dropped the car off telling him that if every single thing in my pics were not on the car when i picked it up, i would make a career out of making sure someone got arrested and prosecuted for theft. see, with this kind of attitude, i'm probably limited to the shops where i could take my cars.
