Most people would say the restoration I took on with my junkyard find 1986 Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.3-16 Cosworth was incredibly risky. It was; I banked most of my gamble on restoring a highly rusty, poorly repaired Cosworth on the knowledge that there was a small body shop that did proper metal repair for a pittance of professional shop costs. When the owner of that humble enterprise called me and said it was my turn to bring the Cosworth in, I was overjoyed. It meant my gamble paid off - I would be able to restore my high school dream car for far less than it should cost to literally cut out half of its rusty carcass and weld in new metal.
At the end of the day, the car was more or less completed. The hard work was done. The only work not done was repainting the door jams, and I'm just going to live with that for now (they match, but there's a visible masking line.) However, the gentleman who did the work - let's call him Bob - worked for the guy who owned the space (let's call him Bill). Bill, sadly, passed away last year and was a gem of a human being. Bob, it turns out, was really only motivated to work by Bill, and without Bill, Bob seems content to let the whole operation collapse. In the same vein, he will complain that he never has any money, which is tied directly to his ability to start and complete projects in a timely fashion. Bill made sure he kept on task, but on his own, Bob is fairly useless.
Because Bob is perpetually hard up for money, it's hard to not begin to wonder about his ethics when a valuable part goes missing. For instance: one of the best moves I made when I first bought the Cosworth was track down an entire spare body kit. If you know much about these limited-production Mercedes, you may know that the body kit is worth about $4,000 in terms of street value. I paid no where near that - this was 2018, I believe I paid $800 - and so, I happily left the replacement body kit with Bob because it was in much better shape than the one on the car.
However, I told Bob: under no uncertain terms, do not destroy the old body kit. I want it. It will be a useful set of spare parts. Except, I moved to Maryland in August '23. Bob was more or less working with no supervision, as Bill fell ill and stopped coming to the shop. When I recently asked Bob where my front air dam and side skirts were, he pointed his finger back at me, indicating I must have taken them.
Plot twist: I didn't, and Bob knows this. Sadly, I think Bob either stupidly threw them away or sold them on Marketplace for a quick grand. While I couldn't have predicted that I would relocate 7 hours away during the course of this multi-year restoration, I am still disappointed that someone I trusted could be so irresponsible. I'm also mad at myself for not being more engaged and ensuring all of my physical property was accounted for, but up to that point, I had no reason to believe they wouldn't be. The shop had been fairly astute about keeping my old parts and putting them in the car when they were no longer needed.
We've searched every place they could have been left; I'm pretty confident they're gone for good. Lesson learned: don't let your eyes off of your restoration or other long-term project no matter the trust level, and if you can't physically check into the shop on a regular basis, find a proxy to do so on your behalf. It may seem crazy, but if helps keep everyone honest, it's worth every penny to hire your buddy for beer and scratch-off tickets to monitor progress when you can't physically do it yourself. Now, I'm off to eBay to search for some overpriced Cosworth parts to have on the shelf for a rainy day.