As much as I hate to admit it, you're probably right, but I still can't make up my mind for some reason. The stubborn and emotional part of me is convinced that this is all very simple and I'll be able to round up a few friends to help me and get the whole thing swapped by spring.
Here..we put this one here just for you..
A pro painter, an experienced chassis fabricator, and several others here with years of experience are telling you that the car is a disaster, and you keep right on heading for the cliff.
Mike's right. In this thread, that I know of, you have an actual automotive restoration expert and professional painter (
@Davedacarpainter ), someone who tows cars to and is in shops daily (
@General karthief ), an ASE-certified automotive technician (myself), an AMAZING fabricator/welder/customizer (
@CarMichael Angelo ), an actual engineer (
@Mustang5L5 ), someone else who has done extensive rust repair on a fox, but it wasn't anywhere near as bad as what you've got, and even he's saying use it as a donor (
@LILCBRA ), all telling you
THIS CAR AIN'T SALVAGEABLE.
That doesn't even take into account the guys I don't know any of the background of who agree with us. Up until now, everyone's been nice and polite in telling you to learn from your mistake and move on. That stops right here.
The cold hard truth on that car is that nothing short of a complete stripping to a bare shell, sandblasting on a rotiserrie, and then welding in new metal where all of the holes show up is going to fix it correctly, it's that far gone. You've got rot in the floorpan where it meets the subframe, meaning you have rust above, and possibly into the subframe. You've got a strut tower that's so far gone that I'm frankly amazed the strut hasn't shot through the hood yet, and though it hasn't, I'm fairly sure the metal around that hole has deformed from the stress it's under due to the lack of structural integrity (in layman's terms, even if you patch the hole, it's going to be a bitch to get an alignment done on it, and it'll still be structurally weak). That passenger side door is rotted in two at the bottom, that seam is gone. The right rear quarter has visible rust, including penetrating rust, all the way from the tail lamp to the door itself, and that's not including what likely lurks inside the wheelwell and/or under the paint. As bad as the visible rust is, there's a REALLY good chance there's even worse lurking where you can't see on a car this bad. I'm willing to bet I could poke my pocket screwdriver right through some of the panels that still look good from the outside because the paint is probably all that's intact in a few places. A rotiserrie restoration's going to set you back tens of thousands of dollars, not a few thousand, not even the $12k that shop you visited quoted you.
If you're a beginner,
this project isn't for you. The reason that shop quoted you $12,000 is because they didn't want the work. They knew what they were looking at, and wanted to blow you out of the water with a price you'd be so shell-shocked at, or would be so far out of your budget, that you'd move on to the next and let them get back to work they could make money on. I do the same thing to customers that bring totalled garbage to me, I get them out of my hair and move on to something that will make me money. It's the polite thing to do.
So either use it as a parts car, or sell it as a parts car, but either way, move on. You let emotions cloud your judgement when you bought this rust pile, (and trust me, I understand completely, the "74" in "74stang2togo" was a '74 Mustang II in nearly as bad of shape as your fox that I bought as a teenager back when I didn't know
. I kept making the stupid emotional decision to keep trying to fix the damned thing, an eventually parted it out when I realized how over my head I was), and continuing to let emotions cloud your thinking is just going to cost you time and money you'll never get back.