Well maybe if the prices would make you drop your beer , then it is possible to do a car up and not lose money on it .
We use to call innocuous cars with a big motor - sleepers as they looked nondescript at the lights but would burn off the hotrods.
I spent around a decade in California and Modesto was famous for that plus little old Winters near Davis .
The give away for the jail bar type pickups was they would often have independent rare suspension rather than leef springs.
My next do up will be my 1961 tractor so I can do vintage ploughing competitions with it .
For a car I would probably just take the motor out put it on a stand and just spend an hour every night with a little file and grinding paste porting and polishing the head , blue printing the parts for balancing , and changing out the parts that could not take the heat or stress ier replacing with forged pistons and crank, then letting it breathe a little better with carburation and extractors , an old Rover (Buick) V8 maybe .
