A sort of Barn(es) find

[Parkview911]

Greetings all.
I'm Matthew.
I've been lurking here for a while.
Here's a link to my 'Hello' post, from late 2014!

viewtopic.php?f=17&p=428376#p428376

I started a restoration in 2013 and have been documenting my progress (or lack thereof) on Pelican under the subject: A sort of barn find. Early on someone from this forum suggested I document my mad undertaking* here rather than there, so to speak. Once again, I failed to heed good advice...my mother would attest to a theme here.

To be honest, this whole adventure wouldn't have started if it were not for the carefully recorded adventures of Chris Jury and Mr Neilsen, Fishcop and Speedo and their threads on Pelican. Fantastic forum, great collection of Grey Beards. But without boring you all with the detail, the short of it is that I'm moving my restoration thread to DDK.
[ Someone in the crowd yawns...]

I'm in the process of moving my entire library onto Photobucket and once that's done I will start to share the story of my Barn(es) find and the adventure to get it back to a useable state.

Here is the first pic...let's see if this works.

[Parkview911]

[Parkview911]

Passed the first test: uploading a picture via Photobucket....and to think I make a living out of telling people how to use the internet.

[hot66]

if you've mastered posting pics, you're now in the elite of ddk'ers

[Parkview911]

So the backstory goes like this:

I have a 1983 SC.
It gets t-boned.

All repairable but the downside of upwards movement in prices means my appreciating SC is under-insured and I run the risk go the insurance writing it off. So I start hunting for second hand parts: a complete door, sills, etc etc etc. Whilst hunting for parts I come across a few stashes of pre73 and SWB parts. And one things leads to another, I chase down a lead for some parts and end up finding three cars in a shed in the corner of a big steelworks south of Johannesburg (think Sheffield).

Scary to think these days but we (an equally obsessed mate of mine...he his restoring a factory 66S prototype) bought the lot for nothing, plus a whole bunch of spares and an extra engine. The Rand / Pound exchange rate is silly at the best of times, but even back then it worked out to about 8 grand English. Silly money. The seller didn't need the money I guess.

So we split the cars and the parts.
I got a RHD '67, the spare engine and some of the batch of parts.
He got the 1970 matching numbers Targa hidden under a rather awful 80s widebody kit and we shared the remaining Targa rolling shell.

Some pics:

The Targa


The front of the Targa:


As an aside, at the time we both thought the Targa was less desirable. And it was sold to a collector for very very little money (makes me cry to think about it now) after 6 months of very little interest. Hate to think what it would be worth now!

Anyway. Bygones.
Here is the pile of rubbish I held onto.
In my defence, I assumed the whole thing was rotten in all the usual places and was glad for many of the original parts. The idea was never to return it to concourse or display quality so the mismatched engines and lack of interior didn't really bother me.





15 x 5.5 Fuchs....only three of the buggers.


The list was as follows:
- 2.7 K-jet of dubious history
- 2.2E with complete MFI of dubious history
- Mag case 915 box of dubious history
- Complete running gear and original green dials.
- No real interior apart from the dash and knackered rear interior panels
- All the glass, thankfully (with that lovely green tint)
- All window frames
- All steel panels (bar the cheap Burzel on the back)

Apparently it was about to be turned into an RS replica.
The PO had run out of interest thankfully and the only damage done was one of the rear SWB flares had been cut out.

While my missus was extremely understanding, we had slight problem in that we had no place to keep the car as our garden looked like this...



And so there was only one place to park the new creature....on the front lawn.



And there it stayed while the old garage was torn down and the new one was built. Did I mention how amazing my wife is?
Amazing.



If you look carefully you can see the portable toilet for the builders in the background. So to be honest, having a rusted Porsche on the front lawn for 4 months wasn't as bad as having a builders' crapper right next to the front gate.

[Parkview911]

if you've mastered posting pics, you're now in the elite of ddk'ers

Thanks James, to be honest I almost spoke too soon!

[Parkview911]

Here are some pics of the state of the thing.





It only got worse!








The missing flare (luckily in with the other random spares)


Strange piece of history under the dash.

[Parkview911]

I traded the ropey 2.7 with a mate up the road (he's a bit of a local racing legend and a fellow Porsche incurable...he deserved his own thread). In return I got two 901 boxes: a 5 speed and a 4 speed. The 5 is a 1970 E/S spec so will be perfect to go onto the 2.2E I got as part of my half of the deal.

The 2.7 was going to go into Mr Vos' (in the picture) 910 tribute, but was sold to finance suspension for his 917 tribute. I did say he was a complete Porsche nut. Although is affliction centres around the racing cars. He also has a 908 tribute that he built from a 1:18th model!



When working out complicated Porsche trades it is important that you write things down on Vintage Porsche note paper!


So all that was left was to start striping the creature.
By now it had been christened: The Lawn Ornament.
Ot LO for those within the circle of trust.
A name that has stuck.

So between finishing work and the sun going down I would put in an hour's work getting the LO stripped down to bare metal.
Slowly the horror of the rust I had imagined revealed itself from under layers of filler and fibreglass.

[Parkview911]

Rear window corners:



Floorpan. Driver's side not great but passenger side pretty much perfect....go figure.



Gauges all good knick:



Paint stripper first and then a face-off disk:







The sills were interesting!





The roof was in good condition:



And as I stripped it appears that whilst the PO's had parked it submerged in salty water, they had at least not smashed it into anything solid. So result there.

Flares and light boxes pretty good too:



And yes, did I mention the sills:



And in the background, the garage was slowly rising from the ground. At this stage my lovely wife - who had paid for the garage - didn't realise that her parking within said structure would be occupied by the LO and the repaired SC.

[Parkview911]

The garage. Soon to be home to a noble adventure (and much swearing)



Not quite the Northern Hemisphere, but it does get frosty up here at 6000 ft in Johannesburg.





I suspect it's not just me but these flat beetles look utterly gorgeous in bare steel.







Apart from making your joints tingle for hours afterwards and rendering your hearing useless, stripping away the remains of paint stripper to reveal steel is quite therapeutic.

Stripper:



Then the disk.



The bad repairs started to reveal themselves:



I assumed the sills, half the floor pan, front suspension pan and window corners would need doing. I was right about those, but failed to extend my assumption of rust to at least 10 other places.

[Parkview911]

Stripped the doors using the same mind-numbing, nerve-damaging but ultimately very soothing technique:





And original doors. Nice result.



With some rot in the bilges.....



That's the nice thing about bad repairs: You get ample warning of what you are about to find. As you grind away you first get the strong smell of filler...then the unmistakable fumes of fibreglass (which I quite fancy after years working on boats) and then, finally, the rust.

And the front suspension pan:



Rear half not too bad:



Battery tray, not so good:



But it certainly didn't look as bad as it did when I eventually got around to sandblasting the whole thing.
Only then were all the issues revealed to me.

[Parkview911]

After avoiding the interior (and that b%$stard bitumen) I pulled myself together and started to tackle the monster.
Heat, stripper, chisel, rubber mallet, steel wheels, face-off disk....sounds like a recipe for an episode of Breaking Bad.

Extraordinary now well preserved the original paint was underneath the sealant of Mordor.







Paraffin also works quite well....although it makes a rather flammable mess. Not ideal for stripping sealant with a fag hanging out your mouth.

Still life of stripping.





I spent a few years working on yachts and small ships. Cleaning and painting an engine room after a fire and a Halon system discharge
was a walk in the park compared to doing this. Hopefully my sons will be old enough to do this job on the next outlaw.

So no sooner was the roof on the garage than the LO was moved into position.
I my wife says she has never parked in the garage I can offer this one photograph as evidence.



The suspension came off and I made ready for sandblasting.
Factory front anti-roll bar.





Here you can see the damage done when 'they' cut off the LHD flare.



Green paint for the blaster: 'ONLY BLAST HERE!'





And that was the first stage done.
A small milestone that at the time I thought was quite an achievement.
Little did I know.

[KS]

[Parkview911]

Thanks Keith.
Your own project and the publication you steer are supporting actors in this story.
I am still very disappointed that our postal service interrupted my reasonably steady flow of Classic Porsche.
Getting it digitally is lovely, but being an incurable traditionalist -at least in matters Printed and Porsche - means there is no substitute for the printed page.
I intend to ask you some detailed questions about that 2.2 build of yours.
Hopefully learn, at a lower cost, from your hard-won and hard-earned school fees.

[Parkview911]

Since I am reconstructing this thread retrospectively, I have the luxury of hindsight.
So I can pause the narrative to add a little detail here and there.
This is one of those moments.

Up to the point of the car returning from the blaster i think I had lived in a bit of a dreamland.
I had bought a project car for very little money.
I had a batch of spares that pretty much covered what I needed to keep the soul of the outlaw project going, and supply me with a stash with which to trade - for either labour or jewellery - my way to a complete build.
The rust and rot I had uncovered was mostly expected as I had factored it into the build in my head.
And perhaps most critically, everything i had experienced up to this point confirmed my virtual experience so far.

I say 'virtually' because up to buying this car I had never done any work of any consequence on a car. I had refurbished the brakes and suspension bits on the SC, but my restoration cv stopped with anything that couldn't be unbolted, cleaned and bolted back on. I'm reasonably handy with woodwork, having spent my school holidays alongside my dad making all sorts of stuff, steel and its mysterious ways were foreign (and still are to be honest)

While the principles of metalwork from all my forum reading and youtube watching seemed simple, the truth was still hiding over the horizon, waiting for the dust of sandblasting to settle.

If I had realised the scale of commitment and patience required, I would have stuck with just my SC and found a more sane hobby; one that doesn't demand stumbling about in garages, having deep connections with grumpy old buggers twice my age, or trawling forums late into the night for vintage racing parts. But that's the glorious curse with which we are afflicted.

And there is no rhyme or reason to the way I (we) behave in the face of this thing called Porsche.
Despite seeing what others go through, we risk life, fortune, family (and very often sex for those who are married), to sate ourselves.
What I have realised is that there is a finite point at which this madness begins.
In hindsight, it is easy to spot.
I think this moment is best identified by answering one question:

Why Porsche?

Graham Vos, one of my longest-serving Porsche Boyfriends, reckons that it was the wheel nuts that got him started. As a young mechanic he was asked to remove the wheels from a Porsche. Nothing that used roads as their primary playground interested him in the slightest, particularly anything that had four wheels. He was racing mad then as now. But when he removed the wheel nuts he was astounded by how light they were. Why would a road car have alu nuts? He quickly realised that there was racing running through this flat beetle road car in front of him. There was something special.
And so began his adventure. Still unfinished 40 years later.

We all have a different answer.
I am lucky to have many Porsche Boyfriends, as my wife calls them; men of more and less age than myself with whom I engage in passionate late night conversations, about a set of rusted seats rails, or the compatibility of different cranks and compression ratios.

My symptoms have got worse over the last 7 or 8 years but in hindsight the answer for me lies in 1967.
I have found my answer in the rusted mongrel Frankenstien shell that sits in my garage.
I have always maintained that the 60s were the pinnacle in Man's engineering and aesthetic achievements, so finding my Porsche spring in the 60s is not that surprising.
Some of my favourite things were born around then: from aircraft to watches to architecture to technology to music.

In the late 1960s Porsche was doing some extraordinary things. In so many ways my rusty, forgotten, registered as a tractor, repaired with unskilled labour 912 is a perfect encapsulation of what Porsche was then and what it has become.

(I'm trying to make a short film about it...but that's another thread)