I’m still in the Pro: Ecto The Shit Out of This camp. The shoop isn’t dandy, but I have faith in the base car.
What will make or break this Ecto is how you style the actual conversion itself. I feel I should reiterate the speech I make at least once a year about Ecto-building:
Decide what you want your car to be:
Do you want it to be your personal art car, upon which you pour your personal designs with the goal of staying true to your first envisioning, and risk the backlash of a community of highly-opinionated individuals?
Do you want a car that the community almost universally loves, sacrificing your own ideas for the approval of a -perhaps- slightly more generic design?
A lot of the conflict among the Ecto builders comes from design decisions being poorly-received by the community at large. Is impressing the community one of your goals? You can make their finicky tastes work for you by presenting options for your build and analyzing the feedback. In the long run this will build a relationship between you and people you hardly knew to begin with. If you’re strong enough to build your car a certain way and deal with potentially horrendous feedback (jesus christ just dissect the IEGB saga), then go for it.
Example: Every week during my build I polled the members of this site I respected most for their opinions on future mods. I would present photoshops of my car with different configurations, and ask my friends to tell me what they liked and why. I did this with the caution striping, with the red stripes, with the wheels, with the lightbar colors, with satellite dish models, with painted and unpainted pushbars, with pretty much everything. I wanted every piece of feedback possible - but only from people whose taste I respected.
But I wasn’t all about kissing the feet of the other dudes on these boards just so I could get their thumbs up. I knew what I wanted my car to look like and I remained steadfast on certain decisions - I would not put more caution tape above the doors - I would not make the red fin stripe enormous and work against the lines of the car - I would not remove the door trim. And even some of the things I added didn’t go over well. The hatch striping was initially decried by pretty much everyone I asked. But I knew it would look good on the Magnum and went for it, and in the end it payed off.
Having your build in this smaller section is hugely beneficial because it keeps the know-nothings who throw ideas they spent all of 1/10th of a second producing at you. When I had the subaru, I received awful suggestions, not the worst of which was to paint the entire lower trim bright red.
The thing to remember is that you are building a very custom design. You don’t have a 59 so you’re going to build it however you feel looks best on your base car. But I strongly recommend making that a flexible and open process. Do a little bit of photoshop before you apply your vinyl and ask the other builders if the font is too big. Take pictures of your greebles sitting in different places on the rack and ask which configuration looks best. Poll the every-living shit out of us.
I believe that is the formula for maximizing your satisfaction with your project and the potential for people in the community going positively apeshit over a really cool car that you let them help design.
