I'll start off with the pre-purchase photos from the USA taken in Sept 2006. The purchase was a fairly fraught process which I will explain later.
Note only rear GT arches which are actually fibreglass ones
Bumpers were like new. Interesting satin black real panel was an interesting idea. Bit like TR6's
Interior was like new as well and hadn't been messed about with over the years
Underneath was nearly as good. So clean you could eat off it. Note twin outlet exhaust and Bursch headers which were very loud
No rust anywhere to be seen
Floors were like new with no previous repairs or welding anywhere on the car.
What I was told by the seller was a 2.2 running on rebuilt MFI pump
Car looked like it had never seem water in in it's life !
Some things left to finish like the GT sill and valance panel fit
And here.
I found the car on 914World in the US having spent the previous 10 years trying to find a similar car in the UK. The only one I found in all that time with a price and spec I liked was the orange 916 replica that Rob Taylor has now. I shook on a price of £11700 with the guy who built it (Adrian Cairns) back in March 2000 before Adrian gazumped me and sold it to someone else. I wasn't best pleased but that's the way the cookie crumbles. I was so unimpressed I went off and bought a '66 CooperS !
I didn't want to buy a car in the US without inspecting it and at that stage I didn't know enough about 914's to trust myself to do it. I was recommended a Porsche dealer in the US (by a well known import Porsche dealer in the UK) who could inspect the car, collect it and help arrange shipping for a fee. All seemed fine to start with and I agreed a price with the seller before sending him a small deposit to hold the car subject to the inspection. Because the Porsche specialist planned to inspect and buy the car on my behalf at the same time, subject to the inspection matching the sellers description, then I had to wire the purchase price of the car and the fees for the inspection/collection. This is where it all started to go wrong. Once the dealer had my money his communication almost evaporated. He took weeks to get around to visiting the car so the seller started to get frustrated. When he eventually visited the car he somehow 'fell out' with the seller and returned home without buying it.
It was only by talking with the seller that I found out what happened and at that point the seller was refusing to talk with the dealer. The seller and the dealer were both acting like big children and refusing to talk to each other. I never really got to the bottom of why but it was certainly nothing more significant than a clash or personalities. All the time of course the dealer had all my money and wasn't replying to my emails.
After much mediating between the 'children' they eventually agreed to meet again. The dealer had a comprehensive inspection checklist to go through based on the sellers description and he was supposed to call me when he had inspected the car and before buying it. He never called me and I couldn't raise him on the phone. Again I had to call the seller to actually confirm I had bought it !
The dealer simply wasn't replying to emails so I ended up calling him. Regularly !! Most of the time I ended up speaking or emailing his wife who always made his excuses and assured me everything would be fine whilst giving me bits of information on progress. I never got the completed inspection report from the dealer despite repeated promises. He just described it on the phone weeks after he collected it and said it was all good. Something that turned out to be far from the truth with respect to the engine.
From the outset I had planned to get a lot of the GT conversion parts I needed in the USA and ship them with the car. This included all the fibreglass body bits, GT body & trailing arm stiffening kits, refurbished S front calipers and 914/6 rear calipers and discs, genuine steel flares and a few odds and ends. It took a further 2 months for all these bits to arrive by about mid November, but it was clear that the dealer was making little effort to sort out the shipping. I eventually had to ask a local shipping agent to help me get the car and parts out of his possession. When I did eventually get the car out of his garage it turned out he had actually taken title of the car. It took some legal shenanigans to sort this out.
This wasn't the end of the disasters. The shipping agent then sold his business to a new gentleman who quite frankly knew nothing about shipping. It was incredibly frustrating. I ended up having to sort it out myself and almost tell him what to do. When the car was eventually containerised it set sail from near NewYork in February only for the ship to breakdown about 500miles off shore and had to be towed back to port !! The container sat on the ship and it took a further 6 weeks for them to repair the ship before it set sail again in March and arrived in the UK on Easter Sunday 2007. Having agreed a price with the car's seller in September 2006 I eventually got the car in April 2007 !!! What an ordeal.
And that wasn't the end of the problems !!
That's it for now. Next pictures will be the stripped car when I eventually got it back to the UK in April 2007 and could check it out for myself !!
