So it's Christmas Eve, technically now the early hours of Christmas day, and I find myself sitting in my office in a very quiet house (not a creature did stir, etc...) looking at paint finishes on the internet. I have become a c***.
For many months before the shell went off to Barry's workshop, I had been thinking a lot about paint. I'd think about paint in the early hours of the morning, like this, or when I was sitting on an airliner on the way to a job, or waiting for an airliner, or sitting in a hotel waiting to go wait for an airliner to come back from a job. And so on. Basically, whenever I had a chance to think about something that wasn't work, or daily life, then it would be paint. I narrowed my choices down to original Sand Beige, Bahama Yellow, or Crystal Blue. All colours that would have been originally available in 1968. It's difficult to choose colours on an old Porsche because they look great whatever.
Then incessantly thinking about paint started to hack me off, so I made a concious effort to stop, and for a few months I did.
The shell then went off to Barry's place for repair, and after it had been there a while, and I had seen the beautiful work that was being done to make it original again, I settle my mind on Sand Beige. As Barry himself put it in a subsequent discussion, you can paint the car any colour you want and be disappointed when it goes out of fashion, but you can't be disappointed with the (not-fashionable-since-the-60s) original colour because, well, it's the original colour (and hasn't been fashionable since the 60s). I have applied this theory to my kitchen floor, which is cork and is awesome. Anyway, like all men of excellent taste, I do love Sand Beige on an early car, and figured his point was pretty valid, so no more decisions were to be made - just pay the right guy to do a mega Sand Beige paint job and be happy with a beautiful original car. At first I really struggled with the idea of spending the money, but the more I looked at it, the more I could see a £10k paint job vs an £8k paint job vs cheaper paint jobs still. Despite having spent a decade of my working life throwing light at car paint, I had never given much thought to the process involved in getting it on the car. Turns out it's quite a thing to do. So it had to be done right, and, unless I got lucky and found a painter with low self-esteem, that was going to be 200 hours of prep and a bill at £10k. Time to dig deep, big hitter.
Meanwhile, during all of this, a plastic 356A shell came up for sale over on a VW forum. I've always wanted a 356A, in satin silver, with some sort of aero theme going on. I love flying (of the non-airliner variety), and I thought it'd be super neat to have a car that channelled that vibe. A proper 356A is too expensive (for me) to mess with, but a plastic one checked out OK.
But I'm not really into owning loads of cars, and I already have this 912 on the go. It needs to get finished, and I'm never going to be able to afford that 200-hour prep job if I go buying another car. So I killed the 356 idea before I had a chance to mention it to anyone, and luckily someone else bought it a few weeks later.
Many years ago, on this forum, a man called Phil McGovern posted a photo of his 912 parked in front of a rapeseed field (I didn't know Phil then, but I subsequently went on to do some work for him whilst he was a PR for Jaguar in Dubai. He left Jag a few years later and started a website called Crank and Piston, which is worth a look if you haven't already). Phil's car was silver, and the way it was lit in the photo made it look like it could have been painted in matte paint. It looked absolutely incredible, the light picking up the sweep of the rear haunch in the most sensual way, and I became a bit obsessed with the idea of a flat silver hotrod. At the time, I owned an original-paint RHD Blood Orange 1972 911T that was a reference time-capsule of a car, and therefore couldn't ever be changed. And all that time, all I really wanted was a car I could f*** around with.
So here I was, eight years on, looking at throwing £10k into putting a totally un-special (yes, I did say that) LHD 912, of which they sold gazillions in the US, back to standard. I rationalised it with the notion that I was getting older now, and that original cars are lovely things to behold, and that... that it would be worth £30k, because that's apparently what good, solid four-bangers are worth in these crazy times.
Those of you that know me well enough will know I hate discussing values. Inflating values slowly took-over my relationship with that bargain-bought 911T to the point where using it became a burden on my conscience. It simply doesn't make sense that anyone with real passion for something would ever celebrate it getting more expensive to buy, maintain and insure. Next time you're talking to someone and they get all sweaty about the value of their car, question whether they love the car, or simply just love money. I like money, but I'm not in love with it, so I avoid, as much as reasonably possible, letting monetary value get too far in the way of my vehicular decision-making process.
So what was affecting my decision-making process, which started with the project being 'fun' and had now somehow ended-up nearer 'now a bit f***ing serious', was that Barry had put 241 hours of his epic skill into fettling the shell back to near perfection, and return, I had paid him 241 hourly gold coins. And now I had a very proper shell, with lots of gold coins invested in it, which really needed to be painted properly to suit.
As I stood in my garage this evening, staring at that rear haunch in bare metal, I wondered - what had happened to the flat silver hot rod dream from all those years ago...?
