Drawing inspiration/blatantly plagiarizing @Clatter 's great thread title I thought it post up some details of my X project.
A little back story, I have wanted a project/toy car since i was a teen, other priorities always pushed it down the list and i never pulled the trigger. In 2022 my Dad finish his retirement build of a 914/6 Marathon de la Route restomod tribute build and we did a father son trip to Le Mans Classic driving from Northern Scotland to Le Mans and back after he had only 300miles on the car. After that trip I got a bit more serious about finding a car but post covid pricing and life continued to conspire against me, I wanted something Euro 70's or 80's, as a Brit I am more of the Chapman school of thought than a muscle car guy. X1/9 had often been floated in conversation with my Dad as a viable option but I hadn't seen the right car come up.
Fast forward to October last year and I saw a post on another Italian F car forum, one whose subjects are far outside my means, listing an 82 X1/9 for sale with an intriguing story. It was being sold by the original owner, having babied the car in Texas for 2 years driving about 40,000 miles calamity hit and the car was inundated by a flash flood. The car was underwater up to the middle of the instrument cluster for about 10 mins before the water receded. The story goes that he jumped in and stripped the car quite thoroughly that same day pulling the full interior, disconnecting, and drying almost every part on the car. He moved the car from Texas to his Fathers house in Iowa and planned to rebuild the car and converting it from FI to carbs. The build never happened, the owner moved to Alaska, his Dad intended to pick up the project when he retired in ’95, many parts were procured, plans were made, but the car sat in its dismantled state from 1985 to 2023.
What attracted me to the project was a) the price tag and b) the lack of any bodywork or chassis issues – the car is almost entirely rust free. A combination of having been undercoated by Zeibert the day it was collected, never having seen a salty road and having been in heated storage for the duration of its dormancy has left it looking, for the most part, like a well kept 2-year-old car. I suspect that no 40yr old project car in the PNW can boast this! The seller was incredibly open about the state of the car and took the time to make sure I knew what I was getting myself into, later conversations have me suspecting the sale was driven by his wife, the car itself was in a storage unit costing $250 a month!
I tried to find the easiest way to get the car from Des Moines to Eugene, Oregon. My hope was that I could have it picked up and delivered but in its dismantled state there was no way all the parts would fit into the car and the risk of parts going missing etc. led me to the conclusion that I would have to collect the car in person.
(Picture from the original listing on F-chat below)
A little back story, I have wanted a project/toy car since i was a teen, other priorities always pushed it down the list and i never pulled the trigger. In 2022 my Dad finish his retirement build of a 914/6 Marathon de la Route restomod tribute build and we did a father son trip to Le Mans Classic driving from Northern Scotland to Le Mans and back after he had only 300miles on the car. After that trip I got a bit more serious about finding a car but post covid pricing and life continued to conspire against me, I wanted something Euro 70's or 80's, as a Brit I am more of the Chapman school of thought than a muscle car guy. X1/9 had often been floated in conversation with my Dad as a viable option but I hadn't seen the right car come up.
Fast forward to October last year and I saw a post on another Italian F car forum, one whose subjects are far outside my means, listing an 82 X1/9 for sale with an intriguing story. It was being sold by the original owner, having babied the car in Texas for 2 years driving about 40,000 miles calamity hit and the car was inundated by a flash flood. The car was underwater up to the middle of the instrument cluster for about 10 mins before the water receded. The story goes that he jumped in and stripped the car quite thoroughly that same day pulling the full interior, disconnecting, and drying almost every part on the car. He moved the car from Texas to his Fathers house in Iowa and planned to rebuild the car and converting it from FI to carbs. The build never happened, the owner moved to Alaska, his Dad intended to pick up the project when he retired in ’95, many parts were procured, plans were made, but the car sat in its dismantled state from 1985 to 2023.
What attracted me to the project was a) the price tag and b) the lack of any bodywork or chassis issues – the car is almost entirely rust free. A combination of having been undercoated by Zeibert the day it was collected, never having seen a salty road and having been in heated storage for the duration of its dormancy has left it looking, for the most part, like a well kept 2-year-old car. I suspect that no 40yr old project car in the PNW can boast this! The seller was incredibly open about the state of the car and took the time to make sure I knew what I was getting myself into, later conversations have me suspecting the sale was driven by his wife, the car itself was in a storage unit costing $250 a month!
I tried to find the easiest way to get the car from Des Moines to Eugene, Oregon. My hope was that I could have it picked up and delivered but in its dismantled state there was no way all the parts would fit into the car and the risk of parts going missing etc. led me to the conclusion that I would have to collect the car in person.
(Picture from the original listing on F-chat below)
