by Preston Brown
As alluded to in previous entries, I am preparing to do a major renovation on my house, where all work on the 356 project has taken place until this point. Part of the work will be a new three car attached garage, with workshop. Because of that, and extensive changes to the rest of the house, we have moved out of the house for the next year into a rental house, and the 356 will be moving to temporary work quarters shortly.
What a nightmare moving is! I forgot what a pain in the butt it can be. We have accumulated so much stuff since moving into our house four years ago, and fitting it all into our smaller rental house was impossible. We are storing quite a bit of things that we want but can do without for a year. Moving out was a good time to go through everything and determine what could be given away, sold, trashed, etc. though. It is amazing how much "junk" accumulates if you aren't careful or truly honest with yourself about whether or not something is useful.
Work on the 356 has been continuous in the past three weeks, but sporadic. I have finished off the left side longitudinal, and rear closing panel. The front closing panel should follow shortly, probably Thursday or Friday. I will follow that up with a complete journal entry describing the process. I just wanted to enter something now to make a note of what has been going on.
The car itself obviously has to move. I am still planning on moving it to Millersport Porsche in Hillsborough, NC to finish the metal work that I am doing. After that, the plan is to get it to Frank Gibson to do the nose, rockers, and paint. However, I'm having worries about Frank's schedule. While I know he is top notch, he is very busy, and there is this 911 that has been sitting in his shop due for somewhat simple (from my now "well-experienced" point of view) work for well over 6 months. That's too long. I have some leads on an alternative auto-body shop in Cary, NC that I have to investigate. Stay tuned...