Hey, I am not trying to defend the guy as much as I was trying to explain the reality that I saw and was surprised by myself. The guy doesn't have a nice comfortable, rewarding life from what I could see, and I doubt he would have cared whether it was a fuselage, slab side, formal or forward look. He is obviously (to me from what I see) struggling to make ends meet (maybe some of it is his fault, I don't know all that he has to deal with) but when bills are due and customers are slow or not paying like they should (a very common issue with paint/body guys), yeah, he might be more focused on making money than fondling a nearly 50 year old Monaco that not that many people apparently need very badly. You obviously have a very different reality, as you seem to have plenty of time to be on this site 24/7 with responses, whereas I doubt he has 10 minutes each day to look at the internet unless he has too. He didn't lie to me about anything that I bought nor do I know when he found out what about the problems with the body. I also realize this guy is past 50 years old, and given what he does, he has been smelling lousy fumes for most of his working life of 30 years doing this, and his body is probably starting to break down from all the sanding, grinding, welding, heavy lifting, pushing cars around etc. that comes with the job and then dealing with typical customers who don't pay as they should. Frankly, if I were in his shoes, I would probably struggle to figure out why I get up in the morning and go to another day of the job.
I am sure the wealthy 10% in this country don't care about the reality the middle class or poor face either, and they probably just assume that we are all just a lot of worthless fools too, although I wonder if they have any sense of reality of real life that most of us share or whether they could care less to even wonder about it. And as I said, I do not know all the realities he faces, but am surprised at what I see enough, to not be his judge.
The biggest problem many seem to have here is that another 50 year old car (desirable to them (including me) and few others in reality) is going to the scrapper, and otherwise parted out, but they also didn't even care enough to make him an offer that would have been a better deal for him from the time/cost/ possible income realities than the path he decided to take. He seems to have gotten plenty of coverage with the faithful here and elsewhere, and no one stepped up. So he decided to cut his losses. That is all I know.
I have a virtually identical 1970 FK5 Monaco, in much better shape than this one was and with a lot of NOS parts too to make it virtually new. And if someone here is so upset that they need to have one, I will sell mine to them but it won't be for $3500. But I will not wait in anticipation of my phone ringing off the hook or my inbox filling up soon either.
