Re: Stainless Steel Frame

["Dave Swingle" <dswingle@xxxx>]

The creator of the SS frame, Bryan Pearce, is still on the list. He 
may join in here, but is pretty busy with real life. 

To date, there has been exactly one of the frames manufactured, the 
one on Bryan's car. He has now driven it as his only car for several 
years and tens of thousands of miles. The car is a year-around daily 
driver on the salty winter roads here in Chicago, and the frame looks 
exactly as the day it was built. It's not especially pretty, he did 
not polish it up to a mirror finish. It just looks like industrial 
bare stainless steel. No sign of cracking or deterioration.

As far as restoring a car with a rusted frame, you'll see all kinds, 
but in general if the frame has rusted badly enough to warrant 
replacement, you'll need many of the parts that are attached to the 
frame as well. I've seen a few, and the fuel fittings, brake 
fittings, small brackets, and even the trailing arms may be junk. And 
you are correct, in most cases any car that sat around long enough to 
rust like this was outdoors, and all of the topside stuff (interior, 
rubber seals, dash etc) is garbage too.

Nick (NJP548) may want to pipe in her too. He is doing that same job 
(to a standard frame) and can vouch for the degree of difficulty (not 
too bad) and amount of small-parts changing you'll have to do (lots). 

If you are planning on paying someone to do all this ahead of 
shipping to the UK, you'd better have a very full checkbook. 

This sort of thing is impossible to estimate on a "ferinstance" 
basis, it is tremendously variable based on the condition of the car 
you start with. 

Honestly, if I had my heart set on investing in the SS frame, I'd 
probably start with the best car I could and sell off the (good) old 
frame to someone else. I would not want to put this kind of 
investment in a marginal car. It would probably be cheaper in the 
long run and you'd end up with a much nicer car. If this sounds like 
the $20K speech+frame, it probably is. But you'd have the closest 
thing to a bulletproof lifetime DMC that you could. 

Dave Swingle


--- In dmcnews@xxxxxxxxxxx, "John Dore" <dmcjohn@xxxx> wrote:

> 2. A DeLorean with a rusty frame probably was never cared for 
> properly, so there might be a lot more wrong with the car. Suppose 
it 
> sat for a *long* time, could someone who brought a similar car back 
> to life tell me how much this might cost? For example what would 
> 
> 3. How many hours might it take a DeLorean Service centre to change 
> the chassis, including swopping over parts from the old chassis?