In the Beginning

I guess I have to start with an admission -- I'm a car nut.  Although it's been suppressed for a long time, I've been car crazy for almost as long as I can remember.   I think it started when I was about 12.  Our new car (a classic Cadillac Coupe de Ville) died in the garage for no reason and we had to have a tow truck come to tow it away.  All I could think about was that we had no idea what happened to the car and couldn't do anything about it.  So I started reading everything I could about cars.  It was probably the next Christmas when I got a car tune-up kit (tachometer, timing light, etc.) and off I went.  Fortunately for me, Mom and Dad let me work on their cars (or maybe they didn't realize what I was doing the the garage all the time).  Who lets their 13 year old kid do tune-ups on the family Cadillac?  Anyway, I learned a lot and maybe even did some good along the way.

Tom (my brother) got hooked too.  We also had a classic Ford Pinto (bright green) and we did almost everything to it -- brakes, exhaust, clutch, engine work, interior and numerous bodywork repairs (none of which looked very good).  We had a lot of fun with that car.

Then I was off to college and got the reputation as the car guy from NJ.  I fixed my friends cars in return for rides.  After school when Laurie and I got married, those guys gave me a full mechanics tool set as a wedding gift (and I still have it!).

When I could finally afford my own car, I bought a 1973 Chevy Nova (partly because it was only $550 and partly because it would be something I could work on).  I wish I still had it, but I eventually sold it to a kid who sold his pet pig to raise the money.  It was time to move on.  I got $600 for the car and was off to Chicago for business school.  I still worked on our other car a little, but it was getting harder to do as the technology advanced.  Combined with school, work, family, house, etc., etc., and the increasing complexity of cars, I thought my days under the hood were behind me.

Fast forward 20 years and I find myself on the other end of my work career.  Hey, what if I bought an old car to restore, work on and drive for fun?  It was an intriguing idea.  The problem is that those cars now cost $50,000 or more, and are more likely to be found in museums or car collections then being driven to the grocery store.  Then it hit me, I was thinking too small -- why restore a old car when I could just start from scratch and build my own.  That was early 2008.  I started researching to come up with a plan.  After I finished work in 2009 and took care of some long-neglected projects at home, Laurie gave me the thumbs-up and it was a go -- I was going to build a car!

This is what I decided to build -- a Shelby Cobra!

Then I started to panic.  Even if I can build a car, how do I get New Jersey to let me drive it?  Time for more research and the answer I was looking for.