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Ok, Will seems to have taken a break from his Eye Candy posts, so here's something completely different to look at - maybe eye candy, maybe eye brussels sprouts - depending upon your point of view.

A donut to the first one who identifies this. Spotted at Monterey car week last summer.

As usual, click for more detail.

 

WTF01WTF02WTF03aWTF04WTF05

 

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Will Hesch posted:

my buddy Jim Ansite was bulding an engine for one of those last year, I think I posted a photo

Imagine the day when a "kit car" builder could purchase all the underpinnings: frame, transaxle and engine from Porsche, and rhen put their body on it.

Carey, have you contacted Porsche lately?

You'd have $100K kit cars......oh wait, we have those!

 

WTF06

 

Excellent, gentlemen.

Greg is this week's donut winner.

And Robert will be taking home the 56-piece service for twelve of durable and attractive Melmac dinnerware.

Denzel, like Porsche, was an Austrian who started making sports cars from Wolkswagen bits in the late 1940s. Apparently, he tried making his own engines at first from VW cases and after market internals - notice the odd spark plug placement on the engine in this car.

His car making efforts fizzled after about a dozen years. Who knows how far he might have gone though, if only he'd thought up the marketing scheme of combining all kinds of glitzy stuff the customer doesn't want into a 'Sports Performance Package' as the only way of ordering, say, stiffer shocks and springs.

 

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Last edited by Sacto Mitch

Well, I LIKE IT.  It is a Spydery Speedster.  Just don't show it to Alan, he might rethink retiring, and go for #48.  I especially like the attachment of what I assume is a plastic wind-screen.  Something Cory Drake might appreciate.  Any guess about weight of this rascal?  under 1500 lbs??  And what sort of carbs are here??  Is it really a 1300?  Imagine with a 2110 or 2332.  Hmmm, NICE.  

 

The car pictured is a later model DK 151 - made around 1957. By then, the cars were built on custom steel tube frames - no longer on VW chassis. Here's maybe more than you want to know about these cars from the web:

 

Jim Perrin Editor, Denzel Bulletin:

Denzel – These are great cars! The photos of the two white cars posted above by Mike G. are of the 1957 Denzel DK 151 (has race no. 20 on it) and the 1958 Denzel DK 158. Both originally had 1300 Denzel engines in them, and both still do have Denzel engines in them. Over the years, many Denzel engines were replaced by either VW or Porsche engines as Denzel parts became very difficult to obtain. The last Denzel (owned by me) was completed in mid-1960, over 50 years ago, which is why parts have been so difficult to obtain for many years.

I know of no evidence that the Denzel factory ever put a Porsche engine in any of their cars. An individual owner certainly could, either because his Denzel engine was not running or he wanted the power of a Porsche 1600 cc engine. Incidentally, Denzel made 1100, 1300 (two versions) and 1500 engines (two versions, both very rare). DK 151 (produced in 1957) came with a Denzel engine (see period road test with engine photos of this very car in the circa December 1957 Road & Track), DK 158 (produced in 1958) still has its original Denzel engine, and DK 160 (produced in 1960) came with a Denzel engine.

Peter Denzel’s DK 164 (completed in 1959) also has a Denzel engine in it. When you study period photos of engines in Denzels, you can always tell whether or not it has Denzel cylinder heads, as the spark plugs (and holes for them in engine sheet metal) are at a much different angle than those in Porsche or VW engines. Another feature of the later Denzel engines in Denzel cars was a large-diameter full-flow oil filter, as opposed to the smaller by-pass filter used in Porsche.356′s.

Early Denzel engines were mostly VW parts. However, by the mid-1950′s, Denzel had its own crankshafts, pistons and cylinders (made by Mahle), its own cylinder heads, and its own valve train including rocker arms and push rods. Also, virtually every one of the many sheet metal pieces on the engine were unique to Denzel. The only major component that was still produced by VW was the engine case.

 

And a data panel from a 1957 Road and Track review. They say it weighed only about 1400 pounds. The sketch in the R&T article shows a steel-framed windshield though, not the plexiglass of the car in my photos. (But this may explain why the roll-up 'half windows' start where they do if the car originally had vent windows.)

DenzelRT03

DenzelRT01DenzelRT02

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Last edited by Sacto Mitch

 

Uh yeah, like I said, maybe eye candy, maybe eye Brussels sprouts.

From a half block away, you think, 'Oh, a Speedster', and then as you get closer, you think, WTF?

A good example of the kind of stuff you see at Monterey car week - and this was the freebie show in Carmel for the poor folk. Down the block were three four-cam 356's parked all in a row.

They let the riff raff cough and sneeze and spill their sodas all over stuff like this:

 

Pricey

 

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