One of the by-products of trolling all the sites, looking for and reading about these cars, is getting a sense of the ‘bits’ that go into them. And frankly, once I got a car, well . . . it’s all downhill from there. Seeing some of the stuff people have accumulated! ---- put me in a pretty acquisitive mode.
To keep things from getting too out of hand, I’ve started out by getting just those ‘bits' that actually go into the car. But I’m gonna back up here, for a minute.
I consider myself a hard- (as in rocky) -core originality type. My ideas about a ‘perfect' car go back to this old beater Cobra that I saw in the pits, back in the late ‘70s, between one of the heats of an early ‘vintage car’ race, at Riverside Raceway. Car was this odd-ball bright blue --- not that deep, royal blue all these cars have now --- this was almost periwinkle, and metallic, almost metal-flake --- big white meat-balls, jumbo race tires, and so low, I swear, the door-tops were at my knees. Owner/driver/keeper was this old scrawny dried-out-looking dude, The Marlboro Man --- at 70 --- jeans, boots, t-shirt, rolled-up sleeves. Guy walks up, pops the gas fill, sticks in a sawed-off broom-handle, checks the level, drops the stick, hops in, fires it up ---- I’m standing 20-feet away and the exhaust pulses are flapping my pant legs! --- he bumps the throttle a couple of times, looks at the gauges, shuts it off, stands up in the seat, gets out, walks away. The car? It reminded me of one of those old WW2 fighters you see in the airplane books; sitting out on the tarmac, dusty, a little beat, just waiting to go out and blow something up. Paint on the car’s nose had been pretty much blasted off --- I could see the crunchy, pitted, alu peeking out everywhere. No safety-wire on battered knock-offs. Wheels and tires almost the same shade of brake dust. Paint on the door top and fender was rubbed-off, just about to metal. No passenger seat. ‘Cowboy tidy,’ and all business. My kinda pretty.
1059 will never be restored, at least not by me. Bodywork is gonna fit properly, and I want everything to open and close and work and go on and off like Porsche made it to. If something is broken, it gets fixed. If something’s missing --- it gets replaced. Everything else --- the cracked dash, the pitted chrome, spray-painted sun visors, plus all the tool-scarred fasteners and oil-stained undercarriage ---- stays. I’ll try to keep things reasonably clean, but 1059 is a runner, so if I show up at a show, I expect to be in the parking lot --- unless I’m asked to leave.
Back to the ‘bits.’
1) First up, an NOS tool bag, $400, from Don Ahearn in New York. (Thanks, Don!) Mark can’t find 1059's original sooooo I’m gonna play new owner and enjoy using this brand new one, breaking it in myself --- now all I need are the tools to do it with!
2) Next, a nice used 901 shift knob, $200, from Don Sanderson in Canada (Thanks, Don!). 1059’s is really nice, but this is a genuine bit and ones this nice don’t turn up often. This One didn’t get away.
3) Raid steering wheel adapter hub, $200, from Andy in England (Thanks, Andy!). Uh . . . can’t exactly find it, right now, but a really nice piece, heavy. Fits some of the odd-ball steering wheels I’ve been accumulating (see my contributions on the aftermarket steering wheel thread)
4) Nice used H1s, $625 shipped, Carl Bauer (Thanks, Carl). I needed these soooo bad, after driving cross-country --- but not at night. (Well --- not much, any way.) I know I promised to put these on the car 5 minutes after I got ‘em, but, well, you’ll see . . .
5) Alu rear license panel, $400, from Steve in Florida (Thanks, Steve!) Steve tells me that, when he was shipping the box, the thing was so light that the Guy at the Counter asked him . . . . if he was shipping cotton balls
Reply With Quote
