Tuesday, June 7, 2011

Back in the Saddle, part deux

After a long chilly winter (and a very chilly spring for Denver), it's time to get back on the restoration project!

Nothing major has happened in the last little while. Next on the agenda is to use a grinder to remove the heads of the two bolts securing a pair of vertical plates inside the front fenders. The bolts are loose but just spinning in place, grr.

During the good-weather months in my neighborhood, every first Saturday of the month, there's a somewhat informal old-car gathering at a nearby strip mall parking lot. (Oddly enough, I discovered this past Saturday that it's organized by my former next-door neighbor, who sold his townhouse some years back. Small world!) I tripped over to check it out for the first time in a good while. LOTS of Porsche 911s - I counted 22 or 23, about half the total cars present. Makes sense as the gathering basically got started by a local Porsche club.

While there, I chatted up the owner of a beautiful 1937 Buick, and quizzed him at length about the process he went through restoring that car (as it was quite obvious it had been restored top-to-bottom). This fellow turned me onto a body shop not far away, that largely specializes in hot rods. I'm going to be needing the services of such a shop very soon.

I took a trip up there this afternoon around lunchtime, met the owner, got the nickle tour, and got a good feeling about this fellow and his shop. It sounds like this place may well be a good choice to take the old girl to. The owner is going to come down and look over my 220S sometime in the next few days, to get a better idea of what sort of work she'll need, what it's going to run me.