I understand & hear your passion. Sometimes passion will not pay the bills. With what your are proposing, sounds like to me that you would be just trading & moving dollars around. No real profit in the bank.
Let me hit you with this....
With your skills, have you ever considered a "rent a mechanic"? Or as in the medical field it would be called a "traveling Mechanic"?
For instance Joe blow has "x" needed done to his Trans Am. You show up, live with the person paying the bills, work on or restore the car to mutual satisfaction & then go to the next job or home to TX.
Granted Joe Blow needs to be able to provide you with certain things to do the job, plus room & board & meals too. Hopefully you get the idea.
Wanna make a trip to WV to test it out?
Stan
I do this, but on a local level most of the time (although I have gone and am willing to go to other states for extended periods). Now I only work non daily driver types of cars, trucks or whatever. Limiting yourself to say just 1st & 2nd gen F bodies starting off will really limit your potential customer base. You need referrals to get going and keep going.
Ignore the whole Build A Bandit type thing and trying to get builds of entire cars. Building/rebuilding an entire car gets way more involved and costs a LOT more than most customers realize. Shops are full of cars being stored while the customer comes up with more money. Meanwhile the shop is paying rent and has the insurance responsibility for the car. Better to do work, get paid, move on, return when customer is ready for more.
If you're gonna paint cars and want to stick to the same body style I'd avoid 2nd gen Trans Ams in the beginning. They are one of the worst cars to do because of all the pieces that should be painted separately. It takes a lot of extra time, materials, and space to do all the pieces and then assemble. Many customers think a paint job is a paint job whether it's a very simple car like a Dodge Dart or a TA. So they won't understand why it should cost a grand more to do a TA than the Dart.
I have a few builds I'm working on at any given time and a steady flow of small jobs doing performance upgrades or restoration type jobs. Some work is done at customers homes/shops, some at my home garage/shop, and some at a commercial shop a bud has with a lift etc. Where I do a particular job (or portion of a job) depends on the customers desires and whether it'd be easier/safer to do a job at a particular place. Labor rates are different depending on location.
I'm in Southeast FL and a lot of people build home shops here. I work for several people who have built home shop areas with various levels of equipment from nothing more than the most minimal of hand tools to fairly well equipped shops where I rarely need to bring anything to the job.
I usually have a couple long term full builds I'm working on at peoples home shops and then fill my schedule with shorter jobs. The owners like that the car is at their home so they're not worried about anything happening to it and they can spend money at a pace they are comfortable with rather than feeling compelled to spend more than they would like to at a particular time. If they don't feel like spending money on or working on the car for a month or two and going away on vacation it isn't a problem. They don't feel obliged to continue having work done to the car because it's at a shop taking up space. I just work somewhere else till they want me back.
It works out well for the car owner who can do whatever work on the car they want to do themselves whenever they want because the car is at their home shop and also have someone else working with them or doing the rest of the work they don't want to do themselves. Having someone else working can really speed up their build.
Works for me because I can be working on lots of cars without storing and being responsible for them while waiting for parts or funds. I get paid when work is done and very little overhead like rent/utilities. When a job takes a lot more time than normal due to problems the customer sees that because they're often there to see the problem so I get paid for my time. In a regular shop environment the shop ends up eating the extra time for some jobs because they don't want to try to justify it to the customer fearing the customer will think they're being ripped off.
I'm currently working on full builds of a Factory Five GTM and a 69 Camaro vert PT build at home shops. With a build like the Camaro I'll take something like the subframe away and strip it, get all the mods done for say a DSE stage 3 setup, paint it, and then bring it back to the customers home shop to reinstall. Meanwhile the owner can be working on something else.
I took a pic at a customers home last week while on lunch break during a complete rewire of a 67 El Camino. There's a 12 car garage/shop in back of the El Camino filled with Tri 5's and late 60's Chevys. This customer prefers to have me just work at his home shop and refuses to leave a car at a regular shop overnight, even if it's me working on it. If I need a lift he'll trailer the car to the shop so I can work on it but will not leave it overnight. Brought it to the shop with a lift for a day so I could do brakes and tomorrow I'm working on it back at his home installing dash/gauges etc.
Like Texas the sun is hot in the summer months so I've got a portable tarp and some strong fans I use if I'm working outside or in a non AC garage. It's cooler where I live near the ocean but it was 97-98 when I took the pic below. With the awning and fans it isn't bad. The full builds I'm working on this summer are both in home garage/shops with AC which is nice, so I try to schedule my work there for the hotter and more humid days.
My home shop. Was making custom length plug wires, adjusting valves, and some other underhood work on the Chevelle.
I have a couple shop area rooms behind the doors. One for clean work and one for sandblasting, fabrication etc.
