There's a term of art in the collectible car business Over Here in the UK, "numberplate jacking" -- in the US it would be "license tag jacking". What you do with a big renovation job is you take the car being renovated, jack up the numberplate and roll a brand new car underneath it. Eventually everything on a car/truck/van wears out and it's usually easier to replace it all in one go rather than bitsy-bitsying it at the side of the road on fifty different occasions over a period of years. See Vimes Theory of Boots for the definitive SFnal example.
If Lisa doesn't want to spend her declining years extinguishing engine bay fires and rewiring the BOV or the little pickup every time it gets dark and she needs the lights to come on then she either needs to jack up the tag or look at what she's got and reinstall what's worthwhile into a Mark 2 version in a new(er) chassis. My most complex van setup had waay too many toys that were either not used much or didn't work too well when push came to shove -- the motorbike hoist for example. The next van used a ramp to get my motorbikes in and out of the cargo box. It was simple to ship and unship and it worked even on sloping ground unlike the hoist. Ditto for the pneumatic antenna tower which required the electric compressor to work which needed a 24V contactor set to provide enough juice to run it and which blew lines and joints on a regular basis and... I went back to a manual lift system. Etc. etc. The toys were nice but KISS came back and bit me in the bum too many times.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2011-09-07 10:25 pm (UTC)If Lisa doesn't want to spend her declining years extinguishing engine bay fires and rewiring the BOV or the little pickup every time it gets dark and she needs the lights to come on then she either needs to jack up the tag or look at what she's got and reinstall what's worthwhile into a Mark 2 version in a new(er) chassis. My most complex van setup had waay too many toys that were either not used much or didn't work too well when push came to shove -- the motorbike hoist for example. The next van used a ramp to get my motorbikes in and out of the cargo box. It was simple to ship and unship and it worked even on sloping ground unlike the hoist. Ditto for the pneumatic antenna tower which required the electric compressor to work which needed a 24V contactor set to provide enough juice to run it and which blew lines and joints on a regular basis and... I went back to a manual lift system. Etc. etc. The toys were nice but KISS came back and bit me in the bum too many times.