Back in the nineties I was asked to take a look at a Porsche whose owner had taken it restoration ‘specialists’ who went bust with the car in their possession. The owner managed to retrieve it but none of the electrics worked and his gardener gave up trying to fathom it. Fed up with the whole affair, the owner decided to send the car to auction and declined an offer from a friend of mine to buy the car ‘as is’.
The car was a 356A but had a hybrid wiring harness; part original 356A, part from a later 356B, and with electrical items either missing or corroded. Porsche were not exactly enthusiastic about parts supply and with the auction date approaching the owner didn’t want to wait for parts to come from the USA, so I sourced the necessary bits - from a local scrappy; not Porsche of course, but sufficient to get everything working.
At auction it made around £12k on the hammer but he said they screwed him on everything from transport to cataloguing before they deducted his seller’s premium, and my friend’s offer had been significantly higher than the auction net. The car is currently SORN’d, although I saw it for sale a few years ago for around £35k.
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