Every Project Needs a Plan

In order for a project to be successful, certain things must exist. First, one must have a goal. Then you have to have certain rules and guidelines. You can't just go about it all willy-nilly. Then you need to break it down into small, manageable projects. But most importantly, you have to have funding.

The Goal
When we first set out, the car had been sitting in the garage for approximately 15 years and was missing some very vital parts (radiator, working gears in the transmission) and had a few extra things it shouldn't have had (boxes on top of it, gasoline in the gas tank). So, our first goal was to get it running. Basically, this would serve as a validation that the car was worth it. But, we needed a long term goal. Once again, we can't be all willy-nilly about this. This is where involvement in the MCA comes in. 2009 is the 45th anniversary of the Ford Mustang and to celebrate, the MCA had a big event in Birmingham, Alabama. They are planning a similar event (but bigger) for the 50th anniversary. So our goal is to be able to drive the car to the 50th anniversary and show it there (we're hoping it's in Detroit).

In addition to the above, we still have the main goals of:
1) Learn something about cars
2) Spend time together working on a car
3) Keep it stock

The Rules and Budget
Since one of our overriding goals is to learn something about cars, we can't just simply take it to somebody else to do all the work. That said, there's a lot of things that we don't know how to do or don't have tools to do properly. We hope to learn how to do many of those things, but there will be some things that we will have to pay somebody else to do. But, we're going to try to keep that to a minimum. This rule helps us with the next topic, the money. Theoretically it's cheaper to do it yourself.

We don't exactly have a big pile of money just laying around. So, we can't spend a lot of money all at once. Instead, we've gone with the approach of spending a small but sufficient amount of money each month. In our case, $200 per month. This allows us to split up the work into small, manageable projects. For those projects that require more than $200, we just have to wait a few months. With this approach, hopefully 5 years will be enough time.

The first two projects were what caused the car to be garaged to begin with:
1) The radiator was extremely leaky (and had been removed by my brother years before)
2) The transmission was broken (a pattern that has been repeated for the whole life of the car)

Subsequent projects tackled those things that deteriorated in the last 15 years. But each of these things are possibly worth their own post, so I must wait on the details and leave you in anticipation.