1968 Porsche 912 (white)

Note: I bought this car a few years ago, and have since given up on it and bought another. The white car is restorable, and it would probably be progressing (slowly) toward new splendor if only I had a larger garage. As it is, I need all my garage space for storing my not-quite-watertight cars, and I cannot afford to have one that's essentially a collection of parts taking up space in there for a few years.

I have always wanted an early 911, and when this (relatively) rust-free 912 came up on eBay, I jumped. (The 912 is essentially the same car as the 911, but with a different engine. I'm in it for the looks, baby. I already have a fast car.)

This is definitely a project car. The 911 line started out as one of the best-looking cars ever built. In the 1980s, Porsche lost its way and turned it into one of the ugliest.

At some point when Porsche was building very ugly 911 variants, the owner of this car must have felt that it looked old-fashioned; the owner must have preferred ugly. The car was (badly) painted white (from its original red); all the little chrome bits were painted black; and the windows were tinted a dark, dark black.

It was turned into a 1980s hell machine, the vehicular equivalent of a Members Only jacket.

And as if that weren't enough, at some point the engine was replaced by an engine out of a 1976 Volkswagen Bus. This engine is larger and develops more power than the original Porsche engine, but as of my purchase of the car, it's so out of tune that the car has a maximum speed of about 70 mph. The intake manifold (see picture) is off something else again; note that the mystery carburetor is attached via radiator hose and hose clamps to the metal bit; there are fuel injectors (not attached to anything else) in the manifold near the cylinder heads. Fortunately, removal and installation of engines in rear-engined, air-cooled Porsches, VWs, etc. is simple (at least relative to removal and installation of engines in most cars). Now I just have to find a remotely correct engine for the thing.

The shift linkage is something truly special, too, giving new meaning to the phrase 'pudding-stirrer'. First gear is very, very hard to tell from third, and all the other gears are just vaguely there. I suspect that there are some bushings worn or missing underneath the car. There's a problem with the throttle, too; the spring feels like it originally might have been used to close screen doors, and the travel is not what it should be (i.e. I when the accelerator pedal is floored, the throttles are only about halfway open). This is a result of the throttle extension rod (under the gas pedal) not being long enough. It's adjustable for length, of course, but pretty well seized.

And there's still more! The kind of person who paints a gorgeous car like this an ugly white, and blacks out all the windows and all the chrome, would have to put a bra on the front of it, right? Of course. And they'd be too stupid to take the thing off before putting the car in storage, right? Right. The result can be seen in the picture at left. Those are huge paint chips, the result of moisture under that stupid bra. There are other, quite inexplicable paint chips elsewhere on the car, but nothing else like this. Fortunately, the metal where the paint is missing is in good shape.

All of that, plus a hole in the floor where the driver's feet go (not uncommon on these, it seems), make for one hell of a project.

On the good side, the interior isn't very bad at all. The brushed metal strip on the dashboard was painted black just like every other shiny bit on the car, there's a tear in the headliner on the left 'C' pillar, and the original steering wheel has been replaced with a more 1980s-Members-Only-jacket version that blocks the driver's view of the instrument cluster. The seats are in good shape, and the glass is all intact and scratch-free. The interior can be left alone, I think, until I feel like getting to it.

I paid too much for the car: I got caught up in a last-minute eBay bidding contest, and paid more than I wanted to. Ultimately, I should not have bought this car. Had I been willing to spend the money up front and bring a car back from California, I could have picked up a much nicer example for about $9000. I estimate that I'm going to wind up investing $11,000 or $12,000 to get the car in nice condition, but this way at least I'll know that everything is done the way I want it to be done, and when I'm finished I will completely understand the car. There's a lot to be said for buying someone else's restoration project: you save a lot of money that way. In any case, I've got the car now, so I've got to do something with it.

I will be posting updates here from time to time, and pictorials of the repairs. First, I've got to go spend a whole bunch of money on books, so I at least know right from wrong.

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