Werkstatte

From the original 34 entries, here are the picks for the Dirty Dozen finalists in the We Can Save Them All  contest.  Voting on the 356 Registry Project Forum will go from May 8th to May 22.  

The top four will be chosen during that time and we'll have a second round of voting that will start on May 22nd and will go to May 31st to determine the overall winner.   The overall winner will receive $5000 in Stoddard sheetmetal and an additional $2500 in trim and other finishing parts for their restoration. 

We recently got a very nice note from a customer of ours, Dave DiMaria of Vintage Car Works.  A 1966 911 that they just restored has been doing well in concours events in Southern California.  The pictures look stunning! 

Here's the final rundown on the cars that have entered our We Can Save Them All contest 

We love customer emails like this one from Dave DiMaria at Vintage Car Works, "I just got back from Amelia. We had a great event and won the Amelia Award for our class—finishing second in sports cars from 1955 to 1959. I am pretty sure that we were the only Porsche in our class, which included Maseratis, Lancias and one-off coachbuilt Fiats, etc." 

The best part of the LA Swap Meet Weekend is always Friday’s shop open houses. Some great shops open their doors to let the public in and see the inner workings. Of course, we always love the opportunity to meet with these guys, as many of them are regular customers of ours. Seeing some of the projects they are working on first hand is an awesome opportunity that doesn't come around every day. So, here are the places we visited this Friday.

There are a lot of great shops in the greater Los Angeles area, and while all of the Porsche world is in town for the Literature and Toy swap meet, some of the best ones are hosting open houses so fans of the marque can swing by and see some of the amazing metal they're working on. From Thursday through Saturday night, there are more than a dozen places to stop in for some Porsche ogling and conversation among your fellow enthusiasts. 

When the Stoddard staff isn't busy setting up for, attending to, or tearing down our swap meet tables, you can bet that we'll all be out checking on our customers and their cars. If you see one of us, we'll be wearing our Stoddard polo shirts, be sure to swing over and say hello! 

A few weeks ago, we attended the annual 912 Rendezvous gathering of enthusiasts, this time in Fish Camp, California, just on the southern edge of the Yosemite National Park. It was a weekend we won’t forget any time soon, as those 912ers really know how to have a good time. The roads were excellent, the views were spectacular, and the camaraderie was second to none. 

The SEMA Show in Las Vegas, Nevada has a reputation (rightly earned or not) for being a bit long on the flash and a little light on anything of real substance for the automotive aftermarket. Each year, the Specialty Equipment Manufacturer's Association holds this gigantic convention of all-things-automotive—and it really is a sight to see.  We go to meet our customers, vendors and find new connections that will help us restore old Porsches.  

What started out as a simple clean-up of the front suspension escalated quickly.  We're elbows deep in a complete freshening to make the bottom of the car as beautiful as the top.  

We spent some time on an in-ground chassis dynamometer to make sure that our 1973.5 911T's Bosch CIS fuel injection was performing as it should.