A thought excercise in Challenge rules/ethics, if you will.

Brett_Murphy wrote: I have another question. Let's say that like so many people on the board, contestant X has been collecting car parts for years and has a bunch of stuff laying around. Realizing that part Y sitting in the back of the shed would be perfect, it is put on a challenge car. Contestant X has no idea how much the part was bought for 10 years ago, but he did buy it used. Looking on Ebay, he finds that the same part is available for $100 used in very good condition, $250 new buy it now and that a used one with scratches on it sold last week for $75. Am I correct in understanding that the part can budgeted into the build at $75 since his was used and has scratches on it? Likewise, if a part like a turbo manifold is fabricated out of $10 of stainless steel, the budget on it is $10, even if purchasing a manifold at retail costs $500, right? I've decided I'm going to build a Challenge car. It's going to be slow and take a couple of years, but it is going to happen.

You are 100% on the mark. Take Bryce and the n600 as the example to your second question. He bought a legit set of brand new Kirkeys to put in the car after challenge. Realizing he would have blown his budget clean out of the water on that build with those, he went ahead and got some scrap aluminum and fabricated his own set. Cost to him? Few bucks in scrap and some time.

Additionally, I have come to understand the FMV rule to be exactly as you state it. "what you can get a comparable version of it for". Someone correct me if i'm wrong, I'm having fun with these rules lol.

The whole "spirit of the event" is meant to showcase people making something from nothing. I remember a story a couple of years back where (the hongs maybe) bought a car, and ended up with a bunch of really sweet Password JDM parts. But since they had to FMV them, it would have put them over budget, so one of their more creative welders essentially clone the part. Cost to them? Whatever the steel was that they used. Solutions like that and the one that Bryce did are heavily encouraged, because it really is about who has the most skill/best thinking, not who can open their wallet the widest.

Gasoline wrote: John Doe has no mechanical skills/tools. I pull a motor and transmission out of a truck for him. He gives me the motor for getting him the transmission out. Motor is priced at full FMV and my labor does not reduce the cost...correct?

assuming the truck is junk and was bought specifically as an engine/trans donor, i'd look at the numbers two ways:

1. FMV of the engine by itself, and
2. half of the purchase price of the truck

and i'd hit my budget for the lower of the two numbers.

Gasoline wrote: John Doe has no mechanical skills/tools. I pull a motor and transmission out of a truck for him. He gives me the motor for getting him the transmission out. Motor is priced at full FMV and my labor does not reduce the cost...correct?

You can't trade labor. It has no value (in Challenge terms). You can put as much of it as you want into your own car without hitting the budget, but you can't trade it.

If labor could be traded, I could trade construction services on someone's house for the 2010 Vette sitting in his yard and bring it to the Challenge for $0 budget. No good.

About FMV... does FMV trump actual cost? For example, say I have the opportunity to get a big parts stash off craigslist for pennies on the dollar of FMV; like paying $200 for $1500 worth of parts. Hey, it could happen (again). Would I be required to give any of the parts from that purchase their FMV, or can I use the parts and assign their value as a percentage of the actual cost (based the FMV of the individual part divided by the FMV of the whole stash)?

The reason I ask is that I've had fairly decent luck scoring awesome deals like that and it would be nice to be able to benefit from good shopping/bargaining skills.

Assuming that it was a legitimate CL deal and you could prove it (ad and so forth) and not some "find" of a set of Volks and R-comps that your friend "sold" you for a dollar, then you paid 200$ for a whole mess of parts. Those can then become trade fodder, or, you could sell off 200$ worth of said parts and have some parts for free, while taking a hit to your selldown cap. Same concept as buying a parts car. You bought the whole thing, anything donated from it to said new car=whatever you paid for the car, for everything.

So no way I could take say, a $100 FMV turbo from the stash and value it at 1/15 of the parts stash purchase price? That would make it a $13.34 turbo.

Nope.

The price was discounted because of the volume. The bulk was a contingency of the sale, and it could not be purchased for that price without buying all the rest of the crap.

^that.