This looks pretty sick

Like this.

Agreed.  Very nice.

@Lane Anderson  @550 Phil   You have great taste, The Outlaw I am building is a clone of that Emory Aquamarine Blue w/ the fiberglass tonneau and fairing, wheels are polished aluminum wide five's, Type 1 2165cc ,  similar dash and baseball glove leather interior. https://luxexpose.com/emory-mo...nsitional-speedster/

@Alan Merklin - This seems like a good place to encourage just that, that you abandon the “this can go either way, stock or outlaw” and commit to doing this car the way it should be done.

It’s a pie-cut traditional body, with operational side intakes, and a turtle tonneau that’s already fit to the car. It came with a 2165 and big wheels. It’s really, really focused and special. It can’t be everything to everybody.  

It needs a spartan interior, paint, and the right buyer to flog it like it was meant to be flogged. I see this car in flat black in my mind’s eye.

This car has one purpose - one road to travel. I’m hoping it goes down that road.

Alan you should keep that one for yourself. 

I think aluminum seats like Ron Mullis' car would be perfect - pricy, but perfect.

This seems like a good place to encourage just that, that you abandon the “this can go either way, stock or outlaw” and commit to doing this car the way it should be done.

It’s a pie-cut traditional body, with operational side intakes, and a turtle tonneau that’s already fit to the car. It came with a 2165 and big wheels. It’s really, really focused and special. It can’t be everything to everybody.  

It needs a spartan interior, paint, and the right buyer to flog it like it was meant to be flogged. I see this car in flat black in my mind’s eye.

Keeping in mind that I am building this Outlaw to sell, it needs to attract a larger market than a specific track style outlaw crowd. With said, I'm not going with the large 17" smoothies with the short wall - hard riding 205 40 17's but using the 195 65 15's that Emory used and mounting those on new polished 15" aluminum wheels that Greg offers as an option.  The Speedster came with a new complete baseball glove leather interior, the dash will be body color along with the hardwood dash brow I just purchased from Serria Madre. It was a lengthy challenge to get the scissor carriage top frame to fold down into the tub, have room to clear the fiberglass tonneau cover and also be able switch out to the cloth quarter boot and have the top look correct when up.  the fresh 2165 with get a chassis mounted external fan oil cooler and cosmetics.  I had the transmission specifically built to match up the engine and tire size. 4:12 R & P with Weddle parts = Super Diff HD side cover, Steel shift forks, 10 tooth Spiders etc etc. Conservative 4,5000 up shifts ...first gear 3.80, (24 mph) 2nd 2.06 ( 41 mph) 3rd 1.26 ( 64 mph) and 4th .082 final.   Paint will more than likely be Aquamarine blue, but Porsche GT silver is a possibility as well as Onyx - black.   I've been dry fitting everything to the body that will take another 66 hours, to finish then it gets disassembled to go to paint around January 15,  While at paint fora few weeks,  I have some 92 hours of chassis hours to address, once back from paint it's yet another 104 hours to complete the build.

I think that that car, in Aquamarine Blue with that color interior and as an outlaw, would be freakin' awesome!  You sure wouldn't see another like it.

You might if I build one.

I guess.

But the thing is, a car is either an outlaw (focused, out of the mainstream, and a bit of a thumb in the eye of the status quo) or it's not. If it's meant for mass-consumption, it can't be (by definition) an outlaw. It seems pedantic, but there's a point.

The world has a lot of vanilla. That car was born to be pistachio double-fudge, with a maraschino cherry on top and a double-shot of espresso on the side.

It's a special car.

When you,ve got 3 years to wait for a car, probably 2.5 years before the build even starts you think about a lot of possibilities.  I've gone from Conv D to Coupe and now I'm thinking about just doing a speedy.  If I build a speedy it will be this Emory car but with different colors.  Outlaws are unique and yes they aren't for everyone.  But isn't that the point.  I agree with Stan.  If you are going Outlaw, you have to go all the way. 

Yes it will show as an Outlaw aka Emory clone first but have to option to quickly change it out to a speedster with a top ad side curtains too.  No one to my knowledge has ever built a speedster / outlaw that can wear two different hats. I could, very well be wrong but my hunches seem to play out with all the prior builds always seem to easily find their mark. If I were to build it to keep it, I would have all aluminum interior, hood center filler, fabricate a gas tank cover (as Ed did) , shorty Lexan windshield, exhaust ports out the back of the lower body etc.  BAT will be the parting venue when completed.

@550 Phil posted:

As in good sick.  New VMC speedster.  That headrest rear tonneau would look great on an Outlaw. 

Not sure why, but I like that.  Looks sort of familiar.

I can come down to WV with my ball peen hammer to distress the gas tank cover for yah to make it look like “Hans und Fritz” made it.

I’m pretty good with a hammer…..

@Gordon Nichols posted:

I can come down to WV with my ball peen hammer to distress the gas tank cover for yah to make it look like “Hans und Fritz” made it.

I’m pretty good with a hammer…..

Our door is always open Gordon, so much to see and do here to ~

My IM Conv D had a removable soft top with custom vinyl bag, a hard top and a rear tonneau with head rest. I ask myself every day why I sold that car.

Because you wanted something faster...

@Bob: IM S6 posted:

Because you wanted something faster...

True. I should have just sucked it up, kept the IM and bought the Spyder even if I had to borrow the money. I was putting 2 kids through med school at the time. Now I’m waiting 3 years and spending a lot more money to put a 356 back in the garage. And I’m keeping my Spyder.

Yeah, you should have kept it and just put a hi-po Suby in it. It was already watercooled. Hindsight, sometimes it sucks.

That would almost have been a no-brainer to re-engine. New engine and ECU and harness. Everything else could stay the same. Do a 5 speed trans too.

@550 Phil posted:

True. I should have just sucked it up, kept the IM and bought the Spyder even if I had to borrow the money.

They do come up from time to time, you know. Perhaps the solution is to buy one, then send it to the elves in Breman to make it everything you'd like it to be.

Pat Downs has all the parts for my Type 4 other than my Dells. I’m committed to building a 356 of some type. If I can’t get this right after 3 years I don’t deserve a nice car. The one thing I know for sure…it will be pure Outlaw.

Phil.  Yours is a cautionary tale. I think quite seriously about selling my IM6 once in a while, to get something a little more convenient.

But I'm afraid I will regret it if I do.  Never would I be able to buy another.

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Abstinence makes the heart grow fonder.

With the lessons of the past that most of us have had, why is it so hard to avoid making the same mistakes again?

I sold a low miles Gen A Miata in immaculate, unmolested shape for a pittance, never imagining that would ever be a thing, or hard to replace.

It's very likely that, before long, any clean replica Speedy (even pan-based) will be worth what a nice driver 356 coupe is going for today. (If you watch BaT, we're not really that far away right now.)

If there's a soft spot anywhere in your heart for these things, think twice before letting them go. Then, think again.

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I was pondering the same this fall, Bob. How much do I actually use it? How much could I get for it?

Then I took the Spyder to Smo and absolutely USED that car like a cheap whore. It took all the abuse, and asked for more. The car and I were truly one, and I had a hoot of a time. I'd be crazy to sell it, it's just too much fun. As all "right" cars should be. There is no way to duplicate what it is. I'm in tune with it. And it has tolerated me.

My advice to my kids. And I’ve only learned this and have not lived every rule. Try to keep the same job. Buy a house and pay it off. Buy your cars and keep them as long as you can. The most important one. Marry and love only one woman. Break the last one and it will really cost you.

she got the goldmine...

You kinda lost me at the “keeping the same job” part.  I’ve always done pretty much the same thing, just spread out over six different companies.  Otherwise, I’m good on the rest of your points, Phil.  It was all a growing experience, right?

I pondered selling Pearl for a while this past year and kept it mostly to myself.  I mean, Kathy can’t ride in an open car without worrying about it so I miss out on having her along.  I should have scooped up Tom Marantz’s Suby Coupe when it came up, but I didn’t.  Drove a 996 and a Cayman S  to try them out, but they’re really not the same as my Speedster - They’re just too refined an experience and I might just as well drive my Nissan.

No “woe is me” going on here, just coming to my senses.  Pearl is exactly the car that I want.  She didn’t start out exactly right, she just sort of evolved there over 25 years.  The right suspension, the right amount of power in the right places, the right seats, some great heat for New England’s climate, the right amount of noise (well, maybe a little more of that than I should like) and definitely the right colors.  And then I remember that I built her, turned every nut and bolt, agonized over how she should look or perform.  I did some really successful things and some that I had to go through a few tries to get them right but now she’s about perfect.  I would be crazy to let this car go.

Amen to Phil's points. I can understand selling if you're no longer able to drive it - but selling it for any other reason is going to bring a lot of remorse later on. Guys with automotive ADD always end up wishing they'd just held tight.

For a physician, changing jobs is always a financial penalty. There are the years you work for a decreased salary to make partner and begin profit sharing. There is no pension money in the first year of any new job. I’m sure for other professions changing jobs isn’t a big deal. But for docs it’s best to get a good job right out of the gate and stay put.

I contemplate selling our Speedster from time to time as a couple of you know. My back creates challenges that make getting in and out, and driving for long periods a problem.

But I just can't seem to pull the trigger.

My most overused excuse is that I need to do this or that to get the car ready for sale. Then I seem to put off doing "this or that".

Convenient, but dishonest.

My daily, the Cayman, is actually harder to get in and out of than the Speedster,  I don't think about selling it, but I wouldn't miss it much if I did.

@Panhandle Bob wrote: "the Cayman, is actually harder to get in and out of than the Speedster"

YES!!  That's what I found, too.  I was all ready to pull the trigger on a Cayman S until Kathy and I had to get in and out.  That stopped things, right there.....

@550 Phil

You're right - For those of us in the computer biz, changing jobs is pretty easy.  Lots of people find their place and stay there for decades, like my neighbor, while others set up a 3 - 5 year schedule for job hops and promotions.  The Holy Grail is to land in a start-up just taking off and quickly grow with it over 5 - 10 years and then cash out, but that takes a special breed of risk-taker - many start-ups just flop.  You quickly know if the founders and product line have the Schnapps to grow the place at that point in time, because everyone knows everyone in this biz.  

You have to be willing to uproot your family if a promotion means relocating.  That is often THE deciding factor.  I passed up a couple of interesting positions that would have moved us to Texas, NorCal or overseas, just to keep stability in the family.  Looking back, that was still the right thing to do.  We never had to move from 1977 - 2001 even though I changed companies four times.   You just had to make sure that your new salary was enough of a bump to make it worth jumping ship for.

@Gordon Nichols, I found your comments about changing jobs in the computer business interesting.

My daughter worked for Apple.  She quit and went to work for a start-up.  It turned out they didn't actually have a product to sell.

So, she has been looking for a new job and didn't want to relocate from Los Gatos, CA.  That really limits one's options.

She just took a job with a robotics company in Oregon so she will be commuting between California and Oregon.

My last gig was a ten-year-old startup whose product line met a sudden "End-of-Life" but the founder, an IC "Chip Guy" found a product with potential and re-built his company around that product and it's development team.  They then started looking around for the "right" people to pull off building up a new company - Honestly it was going from solid state computer memory boards to spinning disks - like apples and oranges.  They hired in the "Gang of Twelve" of us, all with different specific talents in different functions to literally build a new company from scratch before they ran out of money - We called it the "You Bet Your Company" period of two years.  Fortunately, while they did run out of money in 1988, they were given more life by several investment capitalists, got the product out the door, turned the place around and made it big.

Very few start-ups can come back from the ashes like that.   Most of them either implode or quickly drift into the shadows like Digital Equipment Corp, Prime Computer, Compaq (which got sold to HP), Sun Microsystems (bought by Oracle), even the IBM personal computer division (which got sold to Lenovo in China).  

@Michael McKelvey

Send this along to your daughter.  I hope she has as much fun as my friends at Boston Dynamics seem to have.....  Watch all the way to "Happy New Year!"

Hey Guys! if you still get a smile on your face every time you take your car out for a blast and find youself staring at the car in the garage or looking back at it as you walk away....it's not time to sell!  When it's gone ...it's gone LOL

@550 Phil posted:

My advice to my kids. And I’ve only learned this and have not lived every rule. Try to keep the same job. Buy a house and pay it off. Buy your cars and keep them as long as you can. The most important one. Marry and love only one woman. Break the last one and it will really cost you.

Moving or changing anything always is a costly experience.  You do it for family reasons most times and hopefully never for a family split up which is the most costly for sure.  

As to job changes, anyone self employed with ownership has a business component which always has a ramp up curve to restart as it does take years to get the ball rolling so to speak. Salaried people also get hammered for salary and pension transfer issues.  

My uncle a high fluting exec with GM once said,  get everything locked in by 30 as you need the rest of the time to build a pension if your company has one otherwise the window of growth is too short.

There are many many people who ended up having to work much much later in life due to life circumstances some for bad luck and some by their own choices.

@Alan Merklin  My vote is for a dark grey at least the colour is conservative.

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@550 Phil posted:

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...For a physician, changing jobs is always a financial penalty...

This holds for many professions.

It was certainly true for my wife — a public school teacher. Most teachers have a contract with a school district. They build seniority, climb up a pay ladder, and build pension credit with that district. Change districts and all the clocks reset (sometimes a job just a few miles away lands you in another district). My wife stayed in the same district for 37 years and retired very well off, but it can take many years to get to the top of the pay ladder, and that plays a big part in what kind of pension you will draw. If you're a teacher, it certainly pays to find a good job early and stay put.

My situation applied to work in many other fields. Years of experience in one job may make you a 'journeyman' when you hire on somewhere else, but doesn't help your pension benefits. I ended up spending 30 years at my last newspaper. The last five of those were not fun, but I was pretty much forced to finish my time there by the realities of how pensions work and how the job market generally treats the gray of hair.

I was lucky, though, that my employer paid to enroll their pension with a federal agency that insures pensions. When the company failed a few years after I left, I continued receiving benefits uninterrupted because of that. Many aren't so lucky.

And yeah, I know, for most self-employed small businessmen there are no pensions. But that is just one of the many things few of us consider when we are young and invincible and time stretches out in front of us to a vanishing point on the horizon.

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"But that is just one of the many things few of us consider when we are young and invincible and time stretches out in front of us to a vanishing point on the horizon."

EQUALS =  Superman

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Yeah Ray, my career would have probably been more profitable if I'd had me some X-Ray vision.

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