A couple of weeks ago, I got a call from my friend Alex Maiolo, telling me that he knew someone in Chapel Hill selling an old Porsche. I've had my eye on old German and British cars from the 1960's and early 1970's for a couple of years now, but always dismissed buying one because of lack of time, funds, and knowledge to properly restore one. Still, whenever I pass an old Triumph, MG, Karmann Ghia, or the like, I would always get interested in taking a closer look. With that in mind, Alex's phone call piqued my interest. Porsche 356, huh? The one that preceded the 911? That is a pretty good looking old car. It looks sort of like a cross between a Volkswagen Beetle and the 911. Makes sense, too, seeing as Porsche developed the car from the Bug, and then later applied similar but "more modern" body lines and styling to create the 911 shape. Yeah, it would be pretty cool to own an old Porsche. A car 10 years older than myself! I told Alex I'd give the owner a call. No matter that I wasn't really in the market for another car. The owner told me that it actually wasn't at his house, as he had no storage for it. In fact, it had been stored at a friend of his' house for the last couple of years with the intention of having the friend buy it some day, but the friend didn't have the money and didn't think he would for awhile. So the car was for sale, regretfully. Currently, the car was in front of the old Team Stuttgart/Porschaus shop on 86 in Hillsborough, right near my house. I drove over to have a look.

Pretty rough looking. Rougher than I'd expected. The paint was chipped and fading, there was tons of rust on the underbody, and to top it all off, the car had rolled down a hill into a ditch at the shop and crunched up the bumper and underside of the nose a bit. Dusty, who owns Team Stuttgart, has promised to make good on fixing the nose. That was the least of my worries though.

Dusty explained that the car wouldn't start because the battery was dead and the trunk lid was wedged a bit from the accident, he hadn't tried to open it yet. I asked him how much the car was worth in its current state. He hauled out some old copies of Excellence magazine and we looked over prices. $12 grand for a car in "poor" shape?!? I couldn't really believe it. I wasn't going to spend that much for this car, especially with all the rusty underbody panels that I knew would need to be replaced. Dusty claimed the engine ran well, so at least there was that. I went home to think about it and do a bit more research.

The Internet is a useful place, if you know where to look. Some searching on 356registry.com, eBay.com, and other places quickly illustrated to me how much replacement parts were going to cost (quite a bit), how available most replacement sheet metal for the common rusty bits was (easily available), and how much other rust bucket coupes were selling for (not $12,000). I talked to Katy a bit about how much work fixing the car up not even to concours level would probably be (years), but how much fun it would be and how I had wanted a project like this forever. Like I'm not busy enough. Hmm.

I called the seller up and told him what I had found in my homework, because he didn’t really know how much his own car was worth. I outlined how much money I felt like spending in the first year or two (about $15,000 total, and we'll see how close to that we can stick), and how I did really want to put some TLC into his car rather than just chopping it up for parts to sell or slapping a cheap coat of paint on and flipping it back out to an unsuspecting buyer. In the end, we had a meeting of the minds and I bought the car for $5000. Maybe a bit more than I should have paid, even. We'll just have to see. The car is still sitting in front of Team Stuttgart.

Posted by pbrown at October 31, 2002 03:49 PM