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It's been a great summer. The weather has been as warm as expected with rain outs few and far between. The climate in New England is one of the reasons that I embarked on what has become known as the C 2 project. Open cars are the absolute best on a warm sunny day but I have spent some time this year crouched behind the three inch windshield of the Speedster in a rainstorm and that's never a lot of fun. The actual convertible top for 84354 hangs from the ceiling of the garage carefully protected for some future use. I'm not sure what that use would be or how far into the future that might be but at least it's safe for now. Sort of reminds me of the people who leave those plastic covers on their lampshades. What are they saving them for? I started looking for a closed car a few years ago . The whole idea was to be able to enjoy more of the New England seasons, not just summer. Not to give up entirely on the open car mindset, I was looking for a sunroof coupe. My very first Porsche had a sunroof back when no American car offered such an option and it always appealed to me as a great feature. After looking for a number of years as luck would have it, two cars popped up within a week. The first one was a '65 356 C tucked back into a garage up in Rockport following an 18 year sleep. That one needed to be brought back to life which just meant fuel and brake systems. Not a small job but something that I could do in my garage. So off went the flatbed and the prize was retrieved. No sooner had the '65 been unloaded but a friend of mine called to tell me that he had found that sunroof coupe that I had been seeking. This was after looking seriously for three years and finding nothing, suddenly two show up practically together. I explained that I had just found one but was told that I was definitely going to buy this one because it was a '63 Carrera 2. My friend was right, and suddenly I owned two sunroof coupes. The Carrera 2 was running but with a 1600 cc Normal engine and needed extensive body work. It's original Oslo Blue had been covered back in the early '70 with the then popular Datsun 240Z orange which had faded to a kind of dried Campbell's tomato soup. The books told me that only about 225 of these cars had been built between '63 and '65 and the best guess was that only around 100 still survive. Of the 100 that remain, the experts say that less than 30 have sunroofs. This was going to be a great project. Since the C2 was going to need extensive metalwork, I set about disassembling the car so that it could be sent out to my favorite paint and body guy. That would be the fellow that redid the paint on the Speedster back in '99 that got us a second at the national parade concours. Terrific with a paint gun but he was a biker that was short a few teeth, had lots of tattoos, and only took cash. It turns out that this project was more that he could handle, but it took me a couple of years to figure that out. The floor needed replacing along with both longitutionals. The parts are not expensive but the job is labor intensive and in turns out that because of that my car never seemed to make it to the top of the list. We got upstaged by Corollas with dents in the doors and pickup trucks with rusty beds. It was pretty clear that the cash flow was exceeding the work being done so I had to haul Ole Blue out of there. It took me a while to find someone that was willing to have a go at the project but finally a hot rod shop in Bridgewater said it looked like fun. Between correcting what had been done wrong and the actual repairs it took another year to put Humpty Dumpty back together again. And that was just in primer. This metal expert didn't do paint, even on his own cars which included a trophy winning '51 Studebaker pickup with a turbo charged slant six in it. The shop was certainly wasn't Boyd Coddington size but there were some interesting projects going on and lots of gearheads with great ideas being put to metal. Enough people had walked around Ole Blue (when he was actually Ole Gray) that eventually an accomplished painter of American show cars agreed to lay down the correct Oslo Blue paint. There was very little to do in the way of body work but this guy found some imperfections that I didn't even see and set them straight. I'll be the first to say that Oslo Blue (or any blue for that matter) would not have been my first pick but now having lived with it for a year I'm glad that we went back to the original factory color. Back in the days when 356's were built the popular colors were red, white and silver but now days some of the seldom seen shades draw more attention. Even those early 911's in colors like Viper Green and Talbot Yellow now look cool and we used to point at them and laugh. Strange how our tastes seem to change as the years march along. Or maybe we're just getting older and more tolerant. Or not. Looking like a bright blue Easter egg the completed shell was towed back to Medfield in Sept. of last year for what I thought was a few months of reassembly. Like they say, restorations always take longer and cost more than you expect. I had built up an engine while Ole Blue was away and figured that it wouldn't take long and he'd be up and running by spring. Sort of a plug and play with a few variations. After all, I had done this before with the Speedster so I had an idea how many winter nights would be spent in the garage. Turns out there are a lot more parts and pieces in a sunroof coupe that a Speedster. Things like windows, window frames, and a headliner. The extensive metalwork required that most of the wiring harness be removed and few of the wires still had their carefully recorded number tags on them. This car even came with insulation in the front and rear compartments that had to be created and installed. Interesting to do but very time consuming. The 356 community is very extensive, the vendors alone number over forty and you can practically build a car from their vintage parts. I think that I talked to every one of them at lest once and ordered parts from most. By far the most time consuming part of the job was cleaning the original parts that I intended to reuse. That was not because I'm cheap (which I am ) but because while the quality of the replacement parts is excellent they are still not the same in some cases as the original. For example, the small Philips head screws that hold the door threshold plates in place can easily be replaced with the now improved stainless steel versions. But the trouble is that the new screws look different than the ones that were made 42 years ago, the slots are bigger. No problem, just put the little screw gently into the teeth of a small pair of vice grip pliers and caress it with a spinning wire brush mounted in a drill press. That cleans it right up. I can't really say how many hundreds of fasteners that I polished up this way but I can say that say that I went though seven wire wheels in the last eleven months. I cleaned every nut and bolt that went back on the car and there were a bunch. Before I installed the horns, I took them apart, polished all the original screws (and washers!), painted the housings, replaced the paper gaskets inside (after the original gaskets were wire brushed off) and tuned them on the workbench to make sure they sounded like a 356 horn. The cleaning part I did late at night like most jobs but the horn tuning could only be done when nobody was home and as it was the dog wasn't happy. But it got done and it only took a couple of weeks (and that was just the horns). For the first time in all the years that I've been doing this column I will continue this tale next month because there is so much to tell that you would fall asleep reading if it was all done in one installment. Besides if I tried to finish this up in a couple more paragraphs I know that I would leave out all the mistakes that I made along the way and therein lies the most interesting part of the story. Like the transmission that came out for cleaning but was replaced with a KD version (factory rebuilt) that was no good. Or the number of times that I replaced the covering on the dash pad until I got it right. Let me assure you that Ole Blue is alive and well and puttering around the streets of Medfield so wave if you see an Easter Egg going the other way! KTF |
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