I've had the opportunity to visit some pretty impressive car collections over the last few years. Some have been very eclectic while others have a common thread running through them. Being an automotive junkie, I've liked them all and wouldn't turn any of them down. I'm not exactly sure just how many cars you need to have before it's considered a "collection," but for argument purposes it should probably be over six and they should all be ready to hit the road at any given time once the call is made. This last stipulation leaves my "collection" out. I have more than six cars, certainly more than I need at the moment, but only a couple can be driven.
When I think of a collection of cars, the type that comes to mind is something like Jay Leno's Big Dog Garage or the Ralph Lauren Collection. I don't know how many cars Jay or Ralph has, but any one of them would be the crown in most of our garages. But with this type of collection comes the responsibility of maintaining them and having them serviced and ready to run all the time. If you have their resources, it's not a problem.
This past summer while doing some traveling, I started wondering if it's actually possible to have too many cars. Now this is a radical thought for me. I came upon this question while visiting a friend who is just a regular working guy who has managed to assemble a nice group of hot rods. Notice I didn't say collection as he only has four that qualify under the "they have to be running" rule. His group consists of the too-nice-to-drive hot rod, the driver hot rod, the muscle car, and the muscle truck.
Doesn't really sound like a problem, does it? But the more we talked about his cars and my own projects, it became clear it wasn't all roses. The main difference between the cars I have and his is that I can store mine away, rarely go see them, and don't have to worry because they're not road-worthy. On the other hand, his are all painted and running so leaving them out in the elements for long periods of time unattended isn't really an option.
There's very few of us who can afford a crew to maintain our toys and the warehouse needed to house them. And I'm guessing that if you have more than four inside parking spaces you're in the small minority.
The more I talk about and plan my buildups, the more I start thinking about what I'm going to do with them once they're finished. I have a two-car garage with no room to park a car at the moment, but I have room to expand out the rear for a couple more. And there lies the catch: If I take the money to expand the garage, I don't have the money to build the car; if I use the money to build the car, I don't have a place to park it. So I'll have to resort to what most of my friends with more than a couple cars have to do and find some other people with more space than cars and borrow some spots from them. The problem with this solution though is that it becomes a chore to go and retrieve it when the sudden urge strikes to take a particular one out for a cruise. So the car sits out of sight and out of mind unused until you make the effort to go get it. Of course then the battery is dead, the gas has gone bad, or the tire has gone flat.
Although I'm not ready to give up on all my projects just yet, I have started to take a hard look at the ones I'm pretty sure I'll never get to and am wondering why I'm losing sleep over trying to find places to keep them. I've decided that I need to thin the herd. Now I just have to decide which ones are the keepers.