Know Your Muscle Cars: How to Know What You Have

There are a lot of things you need to know when buying a muscle car to restore, As I say in almost every article that I ever write, it always helps to have a love for the muscle car that your planning to buy and restore, the restoration process in long, and time intensive.

A muscle car restoration can be a lot of fun to do, or it can be one huge pain, plan it out carefully, know what needs to be done to restore the car that you've chosen, parts can be very hard to find for some of these cars, the aftermarket has a lot of parts, but not all of them.

As they say, get all of your ducks in a row, track down parts suppliers for the hard to find parts, and get comfortable with what the aftermarket offers, inventory your project car, this is always the first step in the restoration precess.

Here is what I mean by inventory the project, is generate a list of all the parts that need to be replaced, and the parts that you can reuse, this will give you an idea of the cost that your dealing with on your specific project.

Every car is different when it comes time to restore it, I realize that you can't get a complete list of the parts that you'll need with out tearing in to the car, but here I'm speaking of the parts that are obvious, the parts the you can see you need upfront.

Beyond that you'll need to start tearing the car down, and that is another article, my biggest thing that I always tell people when they restore a car is to have fun, if you lose interest it can have a devastating affect on you, and your restoration project.

The whole idea of restoring a car is to have fun as you do it, get your family, and friends involved, and by all means make sure that you don't buy a car that to hard to complete for your first attempt at a restoration.

Before you buy the car think about the difficulty level of the car your looking at, evaluate the project to make sure that you, or someone that you know as the technical know how to help you fix the things the you can't fix by your self.

I love helping people develop a passion for American muscle cars, and a passion to restore, or hot rod them, it's such a great felling when I hear that my articles have helped somebody restore a muscle car, and put it back on the road.

If you take a few things in to consideration before you start the restoration of your car, you'll be able to complete the the job, and I can speak from experience, there is no feeling of satisfaction like driving the car that you just restored.

Inspect the car before you buy it, take a notebook with you, and divide one of the pages in to two coulombs, on one side write things that I can do, and on the other write things that I need help with, write down all the things that you find in those two coulombs.

Ask your family, and friends o to help with things that you don't know, you'll be surprised what some of your friends might be able to help you with, the things that you can't get help with, you'll need to farm out to a professional restoration shop.

After you know what you need to farm out, you can figure out a budget on that part of the work, after this you should have a pretty good idea of a starting price, it will change so you need to be ready for that, but it should give you a good idea.