A buddy of mine writes a column for the local newspaper - The Orange County Register. He just wrote one about a local Porsche shop and I thought some might be interested.
Frank Mickadeit's opinions about local people and events appear Monday through Friday. He has been a Register reporter, editor and columnist for 18 years. Contact him at (714) 796-4994 or fmickadeit@ocregister.com
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Last weekend was one of the biggest of the year for devotees of a certain German car, with several events around SoCal, and it was at a 5:30 a.m. gathering of gearheads at a Long Beach Denny's on Sunday that I heard the almost unfathomable: Andial is shutting down after 31 years in O.C.
Andial, which was profiled on the front page of the Register just last year, is one of the most respected, if not the most respected, independent Porsche shops in the world.
Founded by three German- Americans who combined letters in their first names - ARnold Wagner, DIeter Inzenhofer and ALwin Springer - to come up with "Andial," it has built racing engines that repeatedly won the 24 Hours of Daytona and others that power street cars owned by people for whom a stock Porsche just isn't good enough.
This was no rumor. The person talking about it was Inzenhofer himself, who quickly drew a crowd of guys wanting to buy his special tools. I talked to Wagner yesterday, who told me:
"I will be 70 this summer, and I've been thinking about closing down. Dieter is a little behind me (in age), but not too much. (Springer left the business some years ago.) It has a lot to do with age, the type of business we're in and the Internet," which, he says, has made coFmpetition cutthroat.
So, they'll be out of their 9,000-square-foot building on South Shannon Street (just off the 55) by May and into a small Fountain Valley building, where they'll still run a new-parts operation and sort through a massive collection of tools and old parts that they'll eventually let people bid on.
For the second year in a row I had to miss one of the highlights: the Toy and Literature Show held at a hotel near LAX. No cars or parts. Just car toys. And literature.
And while literature is meant in the loosest sense of the word, please note that the first two volumes of the Porsche workshop manual for 911s cost about the same as certain Hemingway first editions. Anyway, I also missed Porscheophile Jerry Seinfeld, who was browsing the rows largely unmolested. My O.C. Porsche buddies said he was there with a manservant of some kind who gathered up whatever stuff Seinfeld pointed to as he worked the room like a Gabor at Tiffany's. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
After the breakfast, we caravanned over to the European car show at Veterans Stadium, where I scoured the stalls for three things I need to complete my original 911 tool kit: A small off-white shop towel that has "Porsche" stitched on it in red, a combination 10 mm/11mm wrench and a standard red-handled screwdriver. I found the towel and the wrench at $5 each. I passed on the $75 screwdriver.
Then I ran into Tool Kit Eric, who had flown down from the Pacific Northwest for the event, and asked him to evaluate my purchases.
"That's what everyone calls him?" my wife asked later as I told her how my day went.
"Well, that's what I call him, but, yeah, that's his specialty - the tool kits that came in the trunks of early 911s," I informed her.
"Did he think you got a good deal?" she asked, masking her indifference pretty well.
"Well, the wrench was the right size, but it had the wrong finish on it. It had a bronze cast to it, and it should be silver. But he told me how to blast it with walnut shells or a 'plastic media' to get rid of the bronze and see what's underneath. Then he recommended a finishing process that sounded kinda involved. On the other hand, he said it was a good thing I didn't buy the screwdriver."
"Why not?" she said.
"He said that for my year, the handle is supposed to have a bulbous shape, and the ones I saw, the handles were straight. And he said that if I hadfound the bulbous one, it would have cost $300."
"Three hundred dollars for one of those little tools you use?" she asked, incredulously.
"Use it? Are you crazy? You'd never use it. What if it slipped and you bent it or scratched it up or something? ... He did say my towel was fine."
"You don't know how weird that sounds," she said.
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Originally Posted by 911scfanatic
