....just take Albrecht as devils advocate(no offense Albrecht)
I'm not even
trying to be devil's advocaat. I'm trying to shoot straight and be objective.
The car is what it is. The full extent of
what it is will be revealed when it is dismantled and taken back to bare metal, so the car will speak for itself in that respect. What I
can't understand - and this is the main thing that triggered my response - is people commenting that the car "looks good". Even the Z Club's Insurance Valuations Officer commented that it
"...does not look too bad." If that's the case then I think we need to re-define the scales on which these cars are judged and re-calibrate the judgment criteria for insurance valuations, let alone any other criteria.
But of course, we should
not have to do that. All we need to do is be realistic, and tell it like it is. The car IS in
bad condition. In fact, it looks terribly bad. Once they get to this state they are very difficult to restore properly and ideally you'd probably want to have it on a professional level body jig for a lot of the work. That firewall rot is - in my opinion - very hard to repair properly as it is centred around the join between the floor of the wiper box / cowl / scuttle and the firewall sheetmetal. It points to long-term blockage of cowl drains with the cowl effectively sitting long-term with wet debris inside, and once the rust takes hold in that joint it spreads along the whole length of the firewall on the
inside of the cowl. To repair this properly you have to take the closing panel off the top of the cowl, drilling out many many spotwelds and effectively removing one of the main strengtheners for the whole top of the 'shell. I've seen it done and it takes tens of hours to do it
properly. That means hundreds of Pounds ( into four figures for sure where I live... ) and that's just on
one aspect of the project.
This kind of work and effort is easily justifiable for a super rare model ( like a 432 or 432R for example ) or a Works rally car / Works circuit racer. Perhaps a very early production model of historic interest and a higher intrinsic value. No offence, but this particular car doesn't seem to be anything like the above and I doubt any of us here - including the OP - would have bought it as a viable resto project had it been up for sale at more than a couple of hundred Pounds.
Getting a freebie is all well and good, but the OP is not really ahead of the game in the long run and may actually be further from getting a decent running and driving Z on the road now than he would had he bought something in better condition. I think the fact that it has cost nothing to acquire is effectively little more than a nice anecdote. In fact it could arguably be seen as a hindrance if there is any kind of implied obligation to restore it from its 'gift' status.
Anyway, time will tell.