Porsche 356C Restoration.
This article describes the restoration of, and the upgrades made to, a 1965 Porsche 356C that was purchased from Connecticut in 2009. Amazingly, Shane - the owner of the Porsche - hadn't, at the time of writing, actually seen his car, or even driven a 356! The restoration was farmed out to a professional company in Martindale, Texas, with updates being provided on a regular basis by phone and email. Shortly after sending this article over, Shane was due to visit his car for the first time, and take it for a spin at a track day.
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Here is the brief story behind the restoration of this classic air-cooled Porsche.
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Shane's Porsche 356C.
I have been following your site for some time and I just finished my own
nearly 2 year restoration and I had to share with you.
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I will start by saying that I have never driven a Porsche 356 and I have
never even seen my car in person. That will change this Friday when I
travel to Martindale Texas to meet Bill Hamilton of Hamilton Classics and
see the car, meet Bill, and on Saturday take the car to
www.harrishillroad.com for a Track Day.
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We have taken the 95HP stock motor upwards of 150HP with our performance upgrades, this is still the same case
and heads, just been CNC modified and with other performance parts to get us
to achieve this type of performance from a pushrod engine.
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I always thought it
was going to be a 911 that I wanted to restore, but then I did some research
and found that the 356 was the first Porsche model ever made from 1948 to
1965, I just fell in love with the heritage and race history of these
early cars. So once we decided it was going to be a 356, we needed to
decide what model, that was easy because we wanted the best they had done with
this model, and the last couple of years Porsche made some improvements with
the 356 including disc brakes which is a great advantage over drum brakes,
so when we found a '65 356C Coupe in good condition, although completely in
parts and not running for 25 years, we'd found our starter car from Connecticut.
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I then had it transported to Martindale Texas into the able hands of Bill
Hamilton from Hamilton Classics who has restored only 356 cars since 1971.
It has been down there ever since getting a high end media blasting on up
restoration. I was not too particularly interested in the stock look but
wanted to do what is called an Outlaw, essentially a racing version of the
car, lighten it up, improve the performance. So that is what we did, we
have used only period correct parts and completely restored the car from the
ground up. We modified the block to accept larger Nickie's Cylinders and JE
Pistons giving us 1883cc of displacement instead of stock, we also equipped
the car with new Weber Carbs, scat lightweight crankshaft, a wilder cam and
a full flow oil filter system. We also had the heads modified and port and
polished to give us more fuel to the cylinders, all while keeping the stock
case and heads. We will dyno the motor in the next month and see the
results but we are expecting about 150hp from the motor over the stock 95hp
the SC motors came with.
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We used Dynomat throughout the car to give it a quality feel, custom leather
trim, instead of putting wheels and the stock hubcaps on the car, we went
with period correct MiniLites that were used exclusively for racing back in
the 60's. New Koni racing shocks with a new sway bar should help with the
handling. There is not one aspect of this car that was not thought about or
improved. The website below documents some of the story behind the 356 cars
which is also very interesting Shane's Porsche site.
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Thanks for the write-up Shane, I hope the first drive of the car went as planned!
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Find more owners' stories in the Your Cars section of oldclassiccar. Elsewhere on the site you'll find an original photo of a Porsche 356 in the 1960s.
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