Sometimes even good mates lead you into doing stupid things.
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Gary Powell's mate is a "Fiat nut" and led him into a decade-long restoration of his 1928 Fiat.
"He is the same age to the day as myself, we work in the same place doing factory work, we have the same trade (electricians)," says Mr Powell.
"He has a car the same as this, and to build his, he had two or three, so he had leftovers. So I started with his leftovers. I got his cast-offs," he said.
The gleaming car lined up alongside numerous other later model Fiats on Sunday at Auto Italia Canberra, and the 521C model won admiring glances from fans of Italy's automotive design and excellence.
This is the first time Mr Powell has taken his car to the show. He says the 2.5 litre, six-cylinder, side-draught engine has been purring along reliably for 30 years, since he completed the restoration in his Sydney backyard.
It cruises at 90 kilometres, has four-wheel brakes for its steel wheels which Mr Powell says are nice and rigid. "It is a little bit noisy, you have got a fair amount of wind noise," he said.
Which may explain why it has only 50,000 miles on the clock. Restoration was painstaking. Asked what his motivation was, Mr Powell says: "Stupidity and not liking to walk away from a project.
"Once you make an obligation to do something, you say well, OK I am going to finish it," he said.
He did a journeyman's course for about eight years to tackle all the tin work.
"The majority of stuff we had to rebuilt, the mechanicals we had, I had to play with all of that stuff, rebuild engine, diff, gearbox and so forth and adapt. If it was worn out you would use new parts, if they didn't fit you make adaptors to make them fit.
"I enjoyed doing the timber work, that was good fun, there is not a straight panel on the car. Everything is multi-curves, multi-twists, multi everything."
Mr Powell covered the original back seat, which he said had kept its age well over the years.
