Yep.
Kurt,
Yes. It is mine--the '51. The three-month interior restoration of my Fresno, California rust-free California rust-free Criterion that was both rust-free and rustless has sapped me of my will to turn another screw driver for the remainder of my life. I am so exhausted from the work (on the rust-free and rustless California car from a very, very dry city where there is no water and will soon return to desert) that I have been unwilling to so much as write about it until now and will try to keep even this short. Try this for fun: remove everything from the inside of your ambulance from the dashboard back. Every single screw. The headliner. The carpet. All trim. Everything. So that nothing is left but the untreated metal that your favorite coach-builder didn't do a whole lot to protect. Now scrape all the metal yourself. Now wire brush it. Now RUSTMORT it! (Wait, don't forget to kneel in the RUSTMORT unintentionally and see what results). (What results?
Thereafter, if you were sitting in a sauna naked across from Jesus (post-crucifixion and also naked) he would look at your knees, compare them to his own and say, "Jesus!") Now hand brush the entire interior above. Spray Bill Hirch's Miracle Paint on the floors and inner rear fenders. Now top coat the roof--two coats enamel. handbrush it. Now insulate it. Now begin piecing everything back together. This all started out as a $1,000/ 1 week exercise. Then my uphostery guy discovered that back in the day when you had to wash out your ambulance, you just threw a bucket of water across the floor. Which is how you get rust in a dry climate. So the project then slipped to $3,000 / 3 weeks. Then it went 10 weeks. I had removed myself and the ambulance from all corporate obligations so I had the time. I am handy. So, 10 weeks, every day and most weekends. I pulled the entire interior out of my Criterion. Rebuilt that entire super-structure above the front seats--because the seal around the AMBULANCE sign was installed incorrectly and guess what seeped in? It took eight hours of labor merely to remove those two pass-through walls behind the seats, keeping track of every screw from all the trim. So I took everything out and then put it all back together again. I was not hoping for a Best of Show award at the CLC event recently. Did not know I was in the running. Didn't want the exposure of winning it. I just did the work because I got snookered into it little by little. I think restoring something of historical importance is an honorable thing. I do. These cars saved lives. I like working with my hands to an extent. There is some therapy to it, but this was way, way over the top. I am sort of a dog with a bone. I clenched down hard enough to crack a tooth and then I wonder why I clench down so hard. I suffer today from such restoration fatigue that although the B&M SuperChief is installed, and cabling run, I haven't hooked it up. So that's where I am. I think you guys need to stage an intervention. Find out where I am, sit in a group, tell me to keep this '51 and git all my emergency stuff hooked up and running. It was just too, too much work. Visualize my showing up at your house unannounced (this could be you) requesting both a couch to lie down on and a beer to drink while I am doing it as I tell you the story of exactly how difficult this piece of work was. I think the CLC judges surrounded by all these beautiful examples of Cadillac greatness took a look inside and realized somebody turned the restoration knob to eleven. And so you don't go praising me for doing good work, I want you to know that I put in a stereo system in it (with a sub-woofer) so loud that it would put a low-rider to shame. It is so, so much fun to drive now. It is. I love it. It's all tightened up. But it is going to take a lot of driving around, having fun, to recharge these batteries. So that's where I am. I probably took 1,000 pictures of the work and lost most of them. I would have to collect what I emailed to Rob Shepard and John Renstrom, aka "Ed," in order to dig up the better ones. These few show the metal work required to duplicate an-overhead cabinet above the passenger seat. Bill Hirsch's Miracle Paint (black) as viewed from the passenger loading door and looking toward driver's side. A view of the red oxide primer out the back of the rig after the RustMort converted the surface rust. Two coats of thinned oil-based white enamel went on top of that. View toward the front of the rig, with the new white headliner installed on that upper bulk head and stretched across the opening of the cabinet above the driver's seat that didn't need to be rebuilt. The jump seats in orange had already been covered. the cost of the new headliner was nothing: $1,100, comprised of $800 labor and $300 in materials with zippers sewn in in a manner acceptable to Rob, Ed, and Paul. It was the ungodly amount of labor to prepare for that new headliner which was just stupid. 200 hours? Something monstrous like that. If I did it again--and I could do it again--you just need a lot of space in which to work. And you need hourly laborers--for scraping, sanding, and painting and you should plan six months to do the work instead of three. What saved me on this project is my daughter labeling every single piece of trim (some an inch long) with instructions as to where everything goes back, and, in some situations, my punching a piece of cardboard with screws the moment they came out so I could leave the screws in order in the cardboard to remind me how everything would go back together. It was that last minute idea that allowed those bulkhead walls to get re-installed so easily. Turns out the '74 had more water-on-metal problems than my '51. Because it was used more. The rear fender seams which hide beneath a strip of trim were not completely sealed at the factory causing me a lot of problems until recently. I found a void in the metal behind the right rear tire not caused by an accident or rust--just two piece of metal which--whoops!--were not closed together and welded on the assembly line. I used $16/roll Frost King Duct Insulation (from Lowe's or Home Depot), which was lightweight, cheap and has an R-Value of 3.0 which is pretty close the equivalent of an inch of fiberglass. (An inch of wood has an R Value of 1.0). 15 foot roll = #FV516. I put it everywhere, after testing it out on a hot day. I then had my uphostery guy put that jute padding on top of it because anything worth doing is worth overdoing. I did use some of that expensive, trendy, heavy metal heat and sound deadener on the front floorpans when I cut those out--extending under the seat and then up toward the firewall, because that area gets so hot. I had planned all this time, money, effort and enthusiasm to get the '51 running, assembled and in the paint booth, but instead dug this hole with my Criterion, jumped inside, covered myself with dirt and called Rob Shepard late at night nearly every night asking him what I did in a past-life to deserve this fate in this one.
I was thinking how you wanted to work a lifetime rebuilding ambulances. I just never thought it would be on one car. 
