FLAT ACRE EDITION! – American Iron Javelin update

Well, it’s been 5 long months since my last update. What the hell have I been up to? Here’s what happened. Shortly after getting the car back from Evil Genius I got an opportunity to buy my dream property. Jeff offered to sell me his old place! It’s a FLAT acre north of Petaluma in the “country”. Anyone who’s followed this blog knows I’m incline-challenged so flat is a huge deal for me.

But before I could buy the place I had to sell my house. So, that kicked off a 3 month project of getting my house ready to sell. One of the first things that happened is I put the race Javelin on my trailer and put them in Jeff’s field. That opened up the garage and allowed us to fill it with stuff to declutter the house for staging. We also did a lot of repairs and upgrades to the house. All this took time and had me completely busy every weekend and after work. Then we finally got the house on the market and had to live in a semi-staged house for 2 weeks while trying to sell it. Luckily we got a good offer and were able to sell the house.

At the same time we were proceeding with the purchase of the new place. Lot’s of driving up north to meet the septic inspector, house inspector, etc, etc. But we got it done and finally moved in on August 1st.

Now, you probably don’t give a rat’s ass about “real estate” but the point is… this place has a 25×40 shop, a lot of black top and a big field out back that’s just itching to get filled up with more project AMC’s. It’s the perfect setup to continue my campaign for AMC road race domination! The other huge bonus is instead of being an hour away I’m now only 15 minutes from Jeff, Joe, Dan and Matt. And only 30 mins from Sonoma Raceway! Plus I’m not the weird guy with weird cars up here. Everyone has trucks, trailers, race cars, old military halftracks, tractors, horses, etc, etc…

So after moving in on the 1st I was able to bring the Javelin back to it’s new (old) home and also bring the Gremlin back out of Jeff’s field. This is the first time in 10 years that everything I own is in one place!

Unfortunately, this is the busy season at work which means I’m on lockdown for another 6 weeks. So no real progress will be made on the Javelin until late in October. But at least I’ve got room to operate once I do have time to get back at it.

So here are pictures of the shop (with the awesome epoxy floors I had done before moving in). I’m very far from having the shop setup and am not sure if I’m going to keep the current tool box/workbench arrangement. I need to get some shelving a drill press and an engine hoist. And am thinking of putting in a utility sink.

And the Gremlin? Not exactly sure what I’m going to do with it. I want to build a AMC daily driver (small car, 6 cylinder for mileage) but I also want to build a low cost track rat so I have an option to run something cheaper (in terms of tires, gas and blowing up motors) than the Javelin. So stay tuned to see which way I go…

love that floor!