Car motivation for a kid? Am I nuts?

Tell your wife whatever lies you have to, as long as you get a new project to wrench on. You sly dog. Seriously though is seems like a good idea in theory, but when I was a backwards baseball hat wearing' Punk I bought my VW GTi (the T-bucket of my gen.) with my own money fabbed all the performance parts in metal shop did all the work for the re-spray other than paint. And I still drove that thing like a loon. I'd stuff it in ditch spend $25.00 on a new control arm and go do it again, but then I'm an idiot. It actually sounds like a cool idea and a great way to spend time with your kid and maybe even teach him a thing or two.

 

My plan exactly. The kids are gonna build their first rides.

And if they're really not into older cars, I'll tell them they have to get an afterschool and summer job for a couple years or so just to afford a crappy import.

"what you don't like it? well that's the name of the game with new cars, you bend over and get ass raped, you pay 100 times more than it's actually worth and all it will ever do is depreciate in value so you'll never get back what you put into it but sure be my guest. You work hard enough, you can buy whatever you want" .... ... "or.. we build this god damn hot rod together at no cost to you and you can be the biggest attention whore you want then later sell the thing for twice what we put into it when you get tired of it and we'll build another one that's twice as cool."

Hopefully they're just totally into it which so far I think they will be.

 

Many thanks for all the replies . . . it sounds like I'm going down the right path. I ran the rundown past him for the first time -- no promises, no firm commitments. His eyes lit up like a kid in a candy store. I found an early Sweptline Dodge truck and he flipped out on one of the old factory paint jobs. I don't know if I can find some older tin within a reasonable budget or not. (I'm about two too many car projects into the garage and purse-strings already. Heheh!) I'll see how this goes and update info from time to time.

 

I bought my two sons shoebox's for thier cars. My youngest is 15,and he can't wait to start driving it. He cleans it and we work on it when it needs something. My older son wanted something he could mess with and make it his own. We're gonna repaint it and do what he wants to do to it. Great bonding tool. My dad never was a car guy. He didn't work on cars but he really liked them. He hated modified cars,"leave'm stock",he used to say. I don't think they will ever feel about cars like I do but they definately,but they love their cars.

 

I have always loved cars but had a somewhat limited ability to fix them. Lucky for me I had friends that could do what I couldn't. When my sons were young we started by looking at rod magazines and talking about our likes and dislikes then graduated to working on their own cars. I now have two sons 21 & 27 that are head and shoulders better than me at building cars and while that is great the best part is on a Saturday we hop in the Burb and put on a couple of hundred miles on back country roads looking for old tin. It costs gas 60 bucks food 40 bucks 5 or 6 hours with my boys, priceless. The best part is that they don't even know we're bonding, they're just chasing tin.