Ohhh man I am sooooooooooooo bad for this. I've done this with boats, motorcycles, trucks, race cars, and street cars. I buy something either with obvious needs, or in need of setup work and tuning (in the case of boats and race cars), then spend ungodly amounts of time to get them just the way I want them, running their best and looking good. Then, I get bored with them. Once the challenge is gone, my interest disappears, and it's time to sell. Lather, rinse, repeat.
What dinger said. Love researching and finding that needle in the haystack, getting it running in great condition and doing some light modification, but the second it is "done" I begin to nitpick things with it and find a reason to move on. Why do we do this?
A guy at my office likes to build vehicles - even bicycles - and then keep them almost like museum pieces. He drives a lightly modded RunX, keeps it shiny, won't autocross it. He's building an offroad Sammy now, looks like the same thing's going to happen.
I have an affliction w/ older vehicles, what should be routine maintenance usually never turns out that way... like checking rear brakes: shoes have a little life left but while I'm in there why not replace the shoes and cut the drums. E36 M3 is cheap so just buy new drums and be done for the long run. That flex brake hose is old, better replace it. Hardware kits and wheel cylinders are cheap too, it's old ya know. Clean and paint the backing plates while I'm there. Parking brake cables are cheap, do it. Now that the backing plates are painted the axle might need paint too....
and on, and on, and on
I came up in the car game in road racing so just doing projects to do them was never my thing, it was more goal oriented. I worked on the car(s) between races and fixed whatever had broken the race before and took great satisfaction if the thing I fixed didn't break next time (there would always be something else that would break that would then need fixing). Over a couple of seasons of this accelerated (12 or so races per season) learning program, I reached the point where I could pretty accurately predict what might break or go wrong before it happened and head it off.
If you are wondering how that relates to just doing projects on cars, it means that they go more easily with fewer dead ends and wasted time and money. When I restored my MGA-Jamaican using a GM V6 drive train, something definitely out there in terms of there being no existing knowledge of that engine swap, the engine fired on the first turn and everything I had done worked the way it was intended to. I breathed a sigh of relief and have just been driving it and enjoying it ever since.
I know they type of person you mean though. I knew one guy that did a totally anal restoration on an XKE (he even faked the factory spot welds underneath the floor pans where no one would ever see them), and once he finished it, he seemed to quickly lose interest and sold the car a bit later. Clearly for him it was more a form of occupational therapy and wasn't about enjoying the eventual product. To me that is an odd way of thinking, and pretty close to masochism. I like problem solving, but I like it because I can solve them, not because I want to spend my life just doing that as a pastime.
Takes all kinds - to each his own.
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