Stripped in Sussex
IN OCTANE 166 I described how I bought my 912 in California and shipped it over to England. Parked in a damp yard in the listless outskirts of Woking, 5000 miles from its home of 45 years, the shabby elegance of my 912 had evaporated entirely. Meanwhile I had recently bought a house of similar age and condition, and its restoration was now feasting on every scrap of my free time.
In a bid to get the car project underway, I disassembled the rotten mess into boxes and hurried the shell away to be stripped to bare metal. A company called Enviro-Strip completed the task at a very reasonable cost, and I was surprised and delighted to be returned a shell so clean you could see machining marks from the stamping dies. My first attempt at a full car restoration was looking straightforward.
After a few months’ wait, I delivered the sparkling-but-ragged shell to my favourite panel beater, Barry Carter, in Sussex. Rust had penetrated the tops of the sills, rear seat pans and parcel shelf – evidence that the car had likely been sitting for a long time with water accumulating inside it. The roof had been jumped on by children, and the front and rear showed damage from impacts.
Even though it was the cheapest Porsche ever to grace his jig, Barry went through it as he would a ’73 RS, working to retain as much original metal as possible. The end results were industrial sculpture as new and crisp as the day this 912 rolled off the Karmann assembly line in 1968.
A chance encounter with a local engine builder started promisingly but ended abruptly, albeit with the engine largely completed. A non-matching-numbers block gave licence for a bit of hot-rodding, including a forged crankshaft and rods, billet pistons, and heads flowed by ex-Buzzcocks drummer and VW drag-racing specialist John Maher at his workshop in the Outer Hebrides.
After two years of mostly project management, my office bookcase was overflowing with reconditioned, plated and powdercoated Porsche parts. So far I hadn’t done anything except ferry bits of metal around the country, and the journey had, to this point, been a wonderful breeze. The car now needed paint, and my desire to get more involved had peaked just in time for a thumping great karma slap. More next time.