What does it take to complete a complicated build in a modest two-car garage? Ask Patrick Caherty, a fixture at our $2000 Challenge going back to the early days.
After some 15 years away from the event, though, he recently returned with his mid-engine, V8-powered MonZora, a mix between a 1965 Corvair and a 1994 Corvette. He started the project back in 2018.
“The GRM Challenge inspired me to push my garage skills,” Patrick reports. “Before this build, I had never welded anything.”
His advice on tackling a daunting project–major or not–when you may or may not have the space? A reader asked Patrick about his $2000 Challenge experience–basically, what to expect when you’re expecting–and Patrick shared the experience with us, f-bombs and all.
Plan for it to take up all the space. Seriously. A two-car garage is barely enough when you’ve got a disassembled car and a bunch of tools that take up floor space (band saw, two welding carts, welding table, cherry picker, etc.) and I was constantly moving stuff in and out and around.
Moving stuff around eats up valuable time, and inevitably leads to, “Where the heck is that _______ that I just had five minutes ago?!?!”
Plan for it to take up all the time. Seriously. Clean stuff is easier to work on, but making stuff clean takes time. If you don’t own a parts washer, get one. $100 well spent.
Get one that uses legit petroleum-based solvent, not Simple Green or Purple Power. If you live somewhere that you can keep it outdoors or keep it on wheels so you can roll it outdoors to use it, that’s best. They stink, but they are the best way to degrease and clean stuff. I don’t have one, so I used a bunch of cans of Gunk and Brakleen and a lot of cardboard for cleaning stuff.
Plan to get lost along the way. Seriously. I’m a visual person, so the dry erase boards were critical to my success.
Get a big dry erase board and put it somewhere within easy reach. Keep a couple smaller dry erase boards around for sketching parts you need to fabricate or listing the finer points of the major task you’re working on.
Leave enough space to put a checkmark or write a date or whatever next to each bullet point on the list. And check them off as you go. It is rewarding to add a checkmark next to a completed task.
And when you realize one task really has three sub-tasks, list them all…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Grassroots Motorsports Online Articles…