4 Tedious Moments Every Restoration Faces

Restoring a car at home, on your own, takes a lot of sweat and tears but also delivers huge rewards. The finished project is, in a real sense, a thing of your creation. If you do it right, you even have a functional thing that can be used for transport. To reach that huge payoff means untold hours of research and labor, some of which is enjoyable and fulfilling. Of course, some of it is straight-up tedious.

We're well aware that mundane and repetitive tasks comprise the bulk of the process when it comes to bringing an old car back to life or returning it to its original specification. Tedium tends to irk us when the work quality really matters, but the actual process of doing it is not particularly difficult or engaging. Or maybe the job is just especially time-consuming due to the care that must be taken to get it right. It's annoying to deal with work that has to get done when we don't look forward to it. Here are four examples:

Parts cleaning

The grease and grime that accumulates on various parts of a car while it's being driven doesn't seem like like it would add up to much, but anyone who has taken a car apart will tell you how surprising the amount of dirt and debris that builds up is. Disassembly can be fun because there is visual satisfaction of the car coming apart. Cleaning is just boring. It takes handling numerous parts and pieces, keeping everything appropriately labeled and organized, and potentially even transporting things to a separate location for things like sand blasting or chemical stripping.

Paint preparation

For every "paint jail" joke there is someone sitting on a rolling stool or standing in a paint booth, covered in dust with fingers that feel ready to fall off. Getting everything smooth, flat, and properly cleaned for paint or plating to adhere is the pinnacle of mundane and mildy frustrating tasks. There is no replacement for time and attention when doing this kind of work, as machines can rarely get all the nooks and crannies as well as our hands. If you want a good finished product, you're going to spend time here wether you want to or not.

Your day job

Even if you enjoy near-mindlessly sanding or sandblasting, watching the numbers on a spreadsheet rise and fall as paychecks go in and orders come out is often what drags projects to a glacial pace or at least slows them down to a waiting game. Restorations rarely make money for us at-home DIY tinkerers, so that means we need to keep a steady flow of money coming in to keep our projects moving forward. The most tedious job of any of my restorations has been my day job. Because a great day at work is also eight hours that project progress is halted.

Final assembly

The excitement and anticipation of having a beautifully organized and carefully prepared pile of parts ready to assemble into a functional vehicle again can be overshadowed by the monumental task of tediously fitting all those bits and pieces together properly and without damaging them. It sounds a little comical, but ask anyone who has accidentally put a deep gouge into fresh paint while shifting something during assembly and you'll see why in professional shops there is so much protection for various parts of the car during final assembly.