You’ve done it. You are at the nadir! Anything you do from this point forward will temporarily counteract the entropic tendencies of that system known as your car -assuming an asteroid or flood doesn’t stop by for an afternoon chat. From here on you’ll be moving closer to that first turn of the ignition key, that first drive, that first stone chip. Or: your car is as apart as you can get it without employing cutting tools. Everything from here on out is part of the process of putting it back together.
As with any process, there are things that need to be done in preparation, things that just need to happen at some point for the process to be considered complete, things that can be done simultaneously, and things that need to be done in a specific order because if they are not, they either can’t be done or a lot of time will be wasted. Some are obvious -you wouldn’t paint before the rust repair or torque the head before putting the head gasket on for example, but others are a little more subtle, like assembling the front turn signal lights - but mostly it’s a matter of not doing things more than once or twice if possible, and taking advantage of big blocks of time the car will spend with experts -such as when getting rust repair and paint. If you are doing every single thing to the car yourself then the process will take however long it will take because you can’t do more than 1 hour per hour.
Car manufacturers are keenly aware of the dependent and independent processes that go into putting a car together. Everything is prepared and on hand for trained staff to do the job efficiently. Here some Montreal’s and Dino’s (?) get coupons for Pizza delivery tucked under their windscreen wipers. I got this image off Alfa-male, a great Alfa site.
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