Unbuilt B Roadster kit on PCar Market

$15k now.  A couple more zeros?

So this is NOT a fiberglass kit car. It's all metal. Looks like a fun project.

Yes. All metal kit. With Porsche certification of authentication

@edsnova posted:

Yes. All metal kit. With Porsche certification of authentication

... and everything that goes along with that.

I wouldn't call it a kit -- a project for sure but not the total resurrection that we see on some rust bucket ferrous-oxide hulks!

It is the epitome of a kit. The very definition. It is a large selection of parts, all in as-new(ish) condition, meant to be assembled by someone enterprising.

Probably would take about 40 hours.*

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*or for some, years.

Okay.

It may be a kit, but not a kit car.

A kit *what* then?

@edsnova posted:

A kit *what* then?

Exactly.

Current bid $40,356, anyone have deep pockets and grease under their fingernails?

There's a big donut hole, I think, where cars like this fall. They're too much work on top of too much money for a mechanic or body man to buy and fix, but they also make no economic sense to the prospective collector/flipper who'd pay said mechanics and body men and upholstery specialists to make them right.

This looks like something that needs to go to Emory but may not make economic sense for them, I don't know.

@Panhandle Bob posted:

This looks like something that needs to go to Emory but may not make economic sense for them, I don't know.

Nothing about an Emory car makes economic sense.

$41K with nearly 5 days to go.

World gone mad.

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Honestly, I’m just dismayed by the lack of appreciation sometimes shown here for things that are genuinely Porsche.

You’re probably thinking that these are just ordinary steel panels. But you forget that steel oxidizes, and in doing so, is constantly absorbing some of the air around it.

These panels were present in the same Porsche factory where hundreds of artisans hammered out those beautiful machines by hand. The very air they breathed, perhaps even the air breathed by Ferry Porsche himself is now part of these panels. They are irreplaceable. They are Porsche panels.

You replica people will just never understand.

@edsnova posted:

There's a big donut hole, I think, where cars like this fall. They're too much work on top of too much money for a mechanic or body man to buy and fix, but they also make no economic sense to the prospective collector/flipper who'd pay said mechanics and body men and upholstery specialists to make them right.

It strikes me as a great project for a moderately successful, mechanically inclined person to share with their son or daughter and treasure for several generations, like the guy I know on another forum who has the 356B his father bought new which he came home from the hospital in when he was born.

You’re right, it doesn’t make sense, financially. Some of life’s biggest treasures don’t. With due deference to Mitch, there’s millions of Porsches. There’s only one you built with your dad.

OK, Dave -- but none of us came home from the hospital in this one. My dad and I never bonded while working on it together.

This one is just a 65 year old rusty shell everybody is hoping has some magical Ferry Porsche pixie dust sprinkled all over it (even though it came from Drauz). That dust was pretty ephemeral though, and probably blew off sometime in the Johnson administration.

... but if Rod Emory were to touch it (if only with the hem of his cloak), THEN it'd possess some double magic and be worth more than a nice home.

I hate to break it to you Stan, but not everything is about you.

My point is this will only have value to the guy who does it. If people will pay $85K for a plastic clown car, who’s to say someone with the disposable income is foolhardy to get this back on the road. It sounds like the most expensive part of the job is done: securing all the parts. Besides the initial investment, besides paint, all it needs is time. As for rust, if the auction notes are to be believed, that issue has been addressed. Some assembly required.

As for Emory, does the world really need another overpriced 60 year old car to sit in some 1%-ers garage? Rod builds cool cars. But so do 100 others guys without his dad’s reputation. TBH, it would mean more to ME if Carey put it together for me.

I suppose it’s a romantic notion, but there’s almost zero chance that the buyer will be a guy doing the work himself. I’d really like to think he would be, but he almost assuredly will not be.

I agree entirely with the last paragraph of your post. Nice guy and great fabricator though he may be, Rod is riding on Gary’s reputation as a builder of outlaws. Rod’s cars are far, far too precious (in the “overly fancy” sense of the word) to be outlaw anything. The “thumb in the eye of Porsche purists” ethos is lost for good when you become a destination for the LA Toy and Lit show, and when your builds are for jet-set A-listers and sell for three-quarters of a million on up. Overlay the heavy (and heavily curated) Instagram and FB presence, and you have a microcosm of the entire Porschosphere in 2024. It’s a game for style-conscious money guys who happen to like cars (to one degree or another), not car guys who happen to have scraped together enough money to maybe buy one — and that’s a real pity.

That nonsense alone is why it’s so very easy to poke fun at this.

It’s a pile of parts, not the Mona Lisa.

Um, hey Jimbo. got any popcorn left?

@Nolan posted:

Um, hey Jimbo. got any popcorn left?

....what's the best popcorn?  

@MusbJim posted:

....what's the best popcorn?  

the kind that does not come from a microwave 🍿🧂🧈

@dlearl476 posted:

...

TBH, it would mean more to ME if Carey put it together for me.

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Same here.  I always love having a personal relationship with the person who makes stuff I care about.

This looks appealing, but still costly to finish.  Like Stan said, most guys (me be being one of them) would have to pay for a high-quality paint job, an engine overhaul, cosmetic cleanup of the mechanicals & suspension, fresh bushings, new carpets, upholstery work, wire harness installation, do gauges all work? fuel delivery, brakes, trim, windshield install etc...I have the number around 100 to 125K to be finished properly for standard car.  So, if it sold for 41K you would be upside down. And that's ok if that is what you want to drive. These are cool cars. 

I bet  Roadster (which is rarer) is worth quite a bit more than a 2 door coupe too!

My bad I was running out of work when I posted. I also think I forgot about the top redo another 5k.  You can double those numbers for a Roadster. If can do for 150k maybe it's would be good.

Looking at the listing it appears that the motor had been rebuilt not so many miles ago that it would only need a light refresh. It really looks like everything is there, including a new top and frame, though I didn't see a wiring loom (it's pretty simple on these things, I'll bet a VMC one would work). Undoubtedly there'll be a few things missing, but this even has the window cranks and door cards, gauges rebuilt by Palo Alto, heck he's even including the body cart with the sale. If one were an Alan Merkin type it could probably be done for under $30,000... maybe well under.

If I had the space and the tools I'd be sorely tempted. It would be a reasonable challenge, though it's one I'd never take on as an investment. Take it one for the love of the adventure, the sting of busted knuckles, the homey feeling of a garage at 2am.

However, for the investment minded, it is a numbers matching car and the cognoscenti love that.

I'd think you'd want real Porsche (or handmade repro) wiring harness that matches OEM colors and wire gages.  Sierra Madre has one for real Porsche price - $2,477.01.

Years ago I bought a '62 356 Karmann Knotchback for $300.  I planned to "restore" it so I bought lead and wood application paddles from Eastwood.  Had Oxy/Aceletyne torch so thought I sand blast rusted areas and lead many of the rust holes in.  NOT as easy as it would seem.  There is alot of OEM factory applied lead which melts the same as I was attempting to apply so it made a mess.  This was more get it on the road - so several quarts of bondo were applied and I sold it off for 6x what I paid for it.  Ashame of my work effort now - a STOP sign was riveted in as the drivers floor which seemed ok back in 1974 on a shoestring budget.

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@Stan Galat posted:

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...Nice guy and great fabricator though he may be, Rod is riding on Gary’s reputation as a builder of outlaws. Rod’s cars are far, far too precious (in the “overly fancy” sense of the word) to be outlaw anything. The “thumb in the eye of Porsche purists” ethos is lost for good when you become a destination for the LA Toy and Lit show, and when your builds are for jet-set A-listers and sell for three-quarters of a million on up...

Thinking about this a bit, I wonder if Rod had much choice in deciding how his business would change and who his new customers would be.

I'm guessing he's 'following the money' and that today he would probably go broke trying to make the same cars that his dad did, and for the same clients.

The original cars and parts for them are no longer lying around unwanted, practically for the taking in every local junkyard. And the stuff your local junkyard doesn't have you can't order from your dealer's parts counter anymore, either. So... the cost of the raw stuff you start with would be way higher now, even if it originally rolled off the line in Ypsilanti or Dearborn. Which it didn't.

The stuff that was once easy fodder for Emory's merry band of pranksters now smells 'collectable' to folks who like to collect things. Which means it just ain't cheap no more.

And then there's the matter of finding chaps with the skills to work in your workshop. You know, the pranksters. Time was, there was a 'body shop' on every corner where they used to actually reshape your bashed up Buick and have it ready by Thursday, maybe. When was the last time you heard the tap-tap-tapping of little hammers if you happened past a body shop? Dudes who can still do that are starting to get collectable, too.

So, it's a given that this type of work is gonna cost a whole bunch more than it used to — to the point that a whole different type of clientele is required to pay the bills. And that clientele can have some peculiar tastes, which means anything you sell to them will have certain peculiarities, too, that dad probably would not have approved of.

I could go on, but you're getting my drift, no?

Out here, anyone driving around in one of Rod's confections is probably on his way to the French Laundry for lunch with the gov.

If Rod wants to keep doing what he likes best, he will likely need to learn what's in fashion this month.

Plaid, cloth seats, Mr. Galat, with those little metal rings you saw last month at the Villa D'Este?

No problem, sir.

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I begrudge no one actually doing something (as Rod surely is) a good living, and I understand that the entire hobby has moved upmarket (even our strange little corner of it).

It just feels really weird to have a carefully stage-managed and preppy guy pimping "outlaw" 356s to overly-moneyed hedge-fund managers on social media, shaping panels in his steampunk shop under billboard-sized black and whites of old race cars. In LA of all places. The whole thing is vaguely reminiscent of the outlaw biker fad of 20 years ago, wherein the average HD rider might as likely have been an insurance actuary as a legitimate badboy. Rod Emory is a long, long way from Parts Obsolete in McMinnville, Oregon.

Still... he could be Magnus Walker.

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I think Emory would make you anything you want, from LA glitzy to as 'pure' as you'd like (whatever that means).

And all of his stuff seems to work a treat, for real. We all know how much work it takes to get the details right when you're fabricating from scratch (well, I don't know firsthand, of course, but I read a lot).

He's sort of the bizarro world opposite of a certain Mr. Steele.

I also think he's very much in touch with what is needed to get the word out so that his phone keeps ringing.

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$81K with 90 minutes to go. If it stays under $100 I think that’s about what you’d pay for the parts. IIRC, the new repro bodies are ~$65. And I’m not even sure they make a d’Ieteren Fréres body. I think they just make A coupes and Speedsters.

BaT won’t let me separate them out, but it looks like most T-5s converts have gone for $105-$125 and T-6s $125-$165. And this is one of the rarest (125??) 356 convertibles.

eta: $140K.  I think that’s a tad high. Best on luck to the proud new owner. Hopefully it doesn’t sit in a garage until it needs another rustectomy and engine rebuild.

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$140K.

The last $60K of which was in the last hour.

Reserve was met around $130K.

So, the serious folks, all of whom waited for the last hour to make an appearance, knew about where the hammer would fall from the beginning. The winning dude made an offhanded remark about what a lovely color the seller had chosen before moving in for the kill.

This is a curious world that I know nothing about, but it's fun to read between the lines. As passionate as most of us are about our little plastic cars, there seems to be very little passion here.

As someone noted, it's very unlikely that any of these bidders will be doing any wrenching or paint prep with their own manicured hands. If you look at the final bidding, it seems to be done with the precision and caution of an investment banker. And there are probably some very good reasons for that.

As the final seconds ticked away, with time for maybe one last bid, the seller posted not some tearful regrets about parting with his life's love, but this:

"The last sale of a Twin Grille was $324,000 (Aug 24)."

Ah, the commitment of the true Porschephile.

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There apparently WAS some magical Ferry Porsche pixy-dust still left on this hulk (65 years after this left the Drauz factory).

@Stan Galat posted:

There apparently WAS some magical Ferry Porsche pixy-dust still left on this hulk (65 years after this left the Drauz factory).

One of 126 Twin Grill T-6s built by D’Ieteren Fréres.

One of them happens to be here in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

@dlearl476 posted:

One of 126 Twin Grill T-6s built by D’Ieteren Fréres.

My mistake. 1/126 with D’Ieteren Fréres pixie-dust.

@Stan Galat posted:

My mistake. 1/126 with D’Ieteren Fréres pixie-dust.