Thanks. The car is my baby. Exactly my age, to the day. My dad bought it new with no intention of keeping it, but I learned to work on cars on it and grew attached.

However, it got parked outside for 20 years before I had any money. It was shot. Dad gave it to me. I gutted the interior and using like-new finds at junkyards restored the inside. Then I had a custom engine built for it...which lasted 1500 miles. JE pistons admitted fault - they had told me they were making me special pistons that would work in an alusil engine, but they were wrong. They admitted they were wrong. But because there's no warranty on their stuff, the most they would do for me was make me a new set of pistons and I would just pay the cost of the materials, but I would have to find and pay for my own sleeved block...which doesn't exist, and I looked into the very expensive custom options and it wasn't worth it, so instead I spent $10k building a whole new engine (everything was done after those pistons...well that and the first engine builder must have been in on the whole thing because he screwed me too, which I realized once I saw the underside of the heads. His response? So sue me. Just beautiful.

I had it painted between the install and when it died.

Then, when it died, another $10,000 later and I was back in business, needing only 1 more part (it was driving fine, has about 4k on it, but that one last part would make it run perfectly), and then this happened.