Restoration of a 1968 Porsche 911Back in February 2009, I concluded a deal to buy a very derelict ’68 Porsche 911 from Florida. The car had been used as a ‘hangar queen’ for spares and bits of trim needed for other restoration projects. It was largely complete, but there was a lot of work required. It is alleged the car had lived its life in Georgia and had an original 65K miles. The car came from a known source and I was told the bodyshell was very sound, except for some damage to the front support for the fuel tank (where the car appears to have hit a high gate post or something similar), some rust to the floor of the gas heater cavity and some superficial corrosion elsewhere. The 2-litre 130 horsepower engine and the 5-speed gearbox need complete rebuilds and there was no part of the car that would not need work.
I’ve taken cars apart since my teenage years (and that’s a few decades ago now!), so I’m planning to do all the blood, sweat and tears unskilled work myself and leave the experts with the right tools, and experience, to do things like the bodyshell, painting interior and so on. The plan is that I’m going to do the engine and gearbox rebuild myself, although that will involve sending out things like the Webers and the cylinders etc to specialists. I don’t claim any film making expertise, so I’ll apologise in advance for the quality of the camera work. I’ll just turn the thing on and talk while I’m working. It’s not Le Mans or The Right Stuff, but I hope you’ll enjoy following this 911 story. If you want to contact me about what you see here, my email is peter@porscheinspections.com. If we get the hang of the interweb technology, we’ll set up a page with Q&As on it. We’re also running a series of features in 911 & Porsche World in the ‘Our Cars’ section, but you don’t get moving pictures and my swearing (apologies in advance!) in that. The first stage is to strip the car completely, so that it can be prepped for a full bead blast and assessment of the bare bodyshell. There's a huge amount of work to do and once you've started something like this, you have to see it through to the end or you just end up wasting time and (a lot) of money. Peter Morgan
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I picked the
car up from the
shipper in Southampton in May 2009 and my plan is to
either build the car up as a club racer/trackday car or to go all the
way and
restore it as an ‘as-new’ 1968 911 with the engine suitably tweeked to
around 190-200hp. Building the car as-new will obviously be a
significantly more
expensive way, so I’m not taking any decisions until I have to.
I plan to
have a movie camera in my garage throughout the
process. The idea is
that the restoration will be available for all to see and hopefully,
when I run
into the inevitable brick wall on what to do next, somebody will come
to my
help!