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As pretty much all of you know, I am 5 or 6 years into the two year project of restoring the GT. Yesterday some read the minor victory of finishing assembling the rear shocks and anti roll bar - which included drilling the holes for the brackets and making back plates to hold the brackets safely on both sides of the boot floor.

The idea of making the brackets and drilling and mounting them intimidated me for literally 10 months. When I finally bit the bullet, it took me about 3 hours all in (including fabricating and painting the brackets). Tonight I decided to keep up the momentum and start the brakes. When the car came to me, virtually none of the brake lines were still in place, so, no templates.

That said, when I went to unpack the brake box tonight, I realized that I had actually managed to have about 1/3 of the brake ends on the lines - and the lines are pretty much cut already, so, why the delay? No excuse really except time passes and as it passes it often gets bigger and bigger in my mind.

The crazy part is that I had borrowed a friend's brake flaring kit and lo and behold part of that was the gear to make bubble flares - who knew, so, everything is there now I just need to do it.

Why oh why does it take so long?!

JP, I looked at my Firenza for over 30 years and wondered if I would ever start working on it again. In my case it was the original DTV GRP front wings. They were a very VERY poor fit and looked awful, so I didn't want to start working on the car because I knew I would have to tackle them. As time went by in my mind they became the biggest and most difficult job to be done..... more anxiety!

Anyway, to cut a long story short I settled my mind that I would get the rest of the car to a state that the wings were the last thing to tackle, that way the work I was dreading began to to become quite insignificant as the overall goal was being realised.

In the end, they still needed a lot of cutting, re-moulding, shaping and bad words to get them done.....

I've also suffered from the anticipation being worse than the job - in fact all through the recent hot spell I've been dreading putting overalls on and actually doing any work on any of the cars. Of course, once I actually started it wasn't so bad, and I actually got some stuff done.

In some ways I've taken the opposite approach to you David on my current project - I'm tackling the worst bits first, so that when they're done, the rest of it will be much easier stuff that can be rattled off quite quickly.

Hi J P ,
If it makes you feel any better I'm also about 6 years in on my Firenza project. Working on average 1 full day a week on it, I'm now preparing it for paint and the final stages of restoration. Everyone and I include myself reaches that "when will it end" state of mind eventually. You will reach the finish line, you really will.
Regards, Dave.

Bought as a part finished project 1999

What part was finished? ....

It had an MoT