Finally a real start... At this point in time I had the car more or less mechanically road worthy. It ran nice, and performed fairly well. Apparently a little too well one sunny September afternoon, after leaving a stop sign rather "briskly" I was confronted by one of the local “Keepers of the Peace” (Police Officer) he proceeded to write me a ticket for racing? I’m not sure whom I was racing but never the less I found myself a nice chunk of change lighter in the wallet and after I had paid the ticket I received a Notice of Suspension of my driving Privileges. NOT COOL.. I dealt with it and “served my time” About a month before I was due to get my license restored, my good friend Eric and I had decided that as nice as the car ran it looked like crap. The oil stained primer on the fenders and on the rest of the car needed covered. So we figured that a month should be plenty of time to get any other body work done and find a couple of needed parts and toss a paint job on in and I would be golden! Little did I know that just a few short months before in September I would be driving the car on the road for the last time in 6 YEARS.

We decided to get rid of the several layers of paint that were on the car and start from scratch. Without the funds and resources to get the body media blasted, we did the work by hand with chemical stripper and a PILE of razor blades, really not very fun stuff. I knew there was some body damage underneath the layers, and we found some ugly stuff. That just gave me all the more opportunity to learn. Baptism by fire so to speak.