The 1971 Porsche 911T Targa
The chick magnet

1994. I had just returned to the US, after being overseas for five years, and I was hot to own a classic Porsche 911. From Germany I'd flown to Los Angeles to link up with Andrew Smith, one of my oldest friends. Other then that they were very cool, I didn't know a thing about 911s. The car's black paint had been wet-sanded to absolute perfection. The classic wheels were beautiful and the interior was fine.  One of the reasons the car was affordable was that it had been parked for 5 yrs so a California buyer was going to have to pay a couple thousand dollars in back back registration.  I wasn't a California buyer.

I was certain that this car was going to be a total chick-magnet.

My intent had been to buy a car in California and then drive it across the country to Georgia, my next duty station. In retrospect, buying an old classic and heading out on a 3000 mile road-trip was a bad idea, but you can't have adventure tales without bad ideas.

A 911 Targa has a removable roof that stowes under the hood. In the couple days that followed the purchase, I was able to fix a few problems, but the Targa roof kicked my ass. It was a folding structure of aluminum, vinyl, and tired weather stripping. One of it's aluminum spars was busted, it didn't fasten well to the windshield, and it's sad weather-stripping allowed in rain and wind. I would also learn later that the car badly needed a wheel alignment.

The epic road-trip begins.
 
At freeway speeds the car was really loud. In my test drives ,"the glorious sound of a Porsche 911", had produced happy grins. But on the freeway, hour after  hour, the noise level was rough. There wasn't much remaining of weather stripping around the doors and Targa roof, nor in the window channels. What sound insulation had once been applied to body panels and the under-side of the car had been removed when a thick coat of some hard rust-proofing substance had been liberally applied. The 1971 carpet didn't have the modern thick foam that absorbs noise. The exhaust was "sporty", not "quiet."

There wasn't anything I could immediately do about the noise volume, so I just lived with it. What I didn't realize was that the noise-level was causing temporary hearing loss. Late on the second night I stopped at a hotel and to my shock, I couldn't hear the lady behind the desk at all. That got my attention.

 I had left Los Angeles on a Sunday morning. By 5PM I was on the side of the road swapping out a flat tire for the spare. To my very great surprise, the flat tire's inside edge was worn through the cords. With some trepidation, I went to the other front tire, got down and found that it was worn just as badly. I got off the freeway at the next exit, anxious that there was no way I was going to find tires on Sunday evening. But it was my lucky day and I found a shop open.

After messing with my car for a while a mechanic came out and told me that they had had to put tubes inside my new tires. He said that there had been tubes inside of my tires and that he'd made some phone calls and it seems that my high end gorgeous Porsche rims were some special design that required a tube. That was news to me, but the important thing was that I had five good tires again.

I got back on the freeway and immediately got a flat.

After swapping to the spare again, I went back to the shop and we found chrome shards inside the tire. That's what had popped the tube. The tire machine had been a little rough on the gorgeous chrome Porsche rims, and that caused some shards of chrome to fall inside the tire. Those shards had popped the tube. With a new tube, I headed out again.

Determined to reach Texas before I quit for the night, I finally pulled over around midnight at a rest stop somewhere near El Paso, and turned off the dim 1960's design headlights. Having lost some time dealing with the tires, I'd only made it around 800 miles. I had not realized how cold it was outside, so I put on a coat. The car seemed to quickly turn into an ice-box so I put on sweatpants over my jeans, a hoody under my coat, gloves and a stocking cap. I had just meant to sleep for 4-5 hours in the driver's seat but it was so damned cold that I spent most of the night shivering between occasional sets of isometric exercises. Finally at about 0400 I declared "fuck it, it's too damned cold to sit here" and I got back on the freeway.

Heat for the passengers of an early Porsche 911 is mostly notional. Being air-cooled, there's no hot water circulating around as a handy source of heat. The car might have eventually warmed up, however, if not for the cold howling wind blowing in the gaps around the Targa roof and windows. It took all day, another flat and another visit to a tire shop, to drive through Texas. Texas is really big.

When darkness finally fell, I was approaching the Texas border with Louisiana. Having gotten almost no sleep the night before, I was too tired to drive into the night. Worn out after another 800 miles of roaring wind-noise, I pulled off the freeway and, uncharacteristically, checked into a hotel. I needed some decent rest and I didn't want to spend another night shivering. I was really quite surprised to find, as I tried to communicate with the front desk lady, that I could no longer hear. Unexpected sure, but not alarming. Youthful optimism is sure that everything heals. 

On the third day it rained pretty hard. The old windshield wiper motor did seem to work, albeit slowly, but the rubber wiper blades were rotted away. Some of the rainy afternoon was spent changing a tire and sitting in a tire shop waiting for a new tube to be installed. Fortunately the rain cleared up by nightfall.

Upon arriving at  Augusta, GA. that evening, ~750 miles completed during the day, I would again find that I'd worn the insides of my front tires down to the cords. I'd just spent most of 3 days driving at 80mph in a car with a suspension design from the 1960s. I'd gotten four flat tires on the journey and only clean living and dumb luck had saved me from careening off of the freeway at high speed due to a front blow-out. This time, instead of just replacing the tires, I asked the tire shop to figure out what was going on that would cause the inside of my front tires to be abraded so badly. They found that my front tires were not pointing in the same direction--my front alignment was off by a mile. To this day, there may be a pair of black streaks from Los Angeles, CA to Augusta, GA. The first new tire lasted a day, the other tire lasted a week.

The problem of constantly getting flats, due to shards of chrome popping the tire tubes, bedeviled me for the whole year that the car was my daily driver. In Augusta I was in a military classroom environment, a world which has no tolerance for students being late. Also, the cadre officer who was in charge of our little group, had taken quite a dislike to me so I was always on thin ice. I very much wanted to avoid giving him cause for another "CPT Gress, you're an unprofessional shithead" tirade. Despite darkness and rain, I became quite practiced at rapidly changing Porsche wheels on the side of the road. The fact that I could never trust my spare was a concern. I always had to assume that my spare tire had a shard of chrome in it that would hole the tube in it's first mile. For the next year I got a flat, on average, every month.

I'd like to be able to report that the results were worth the hardship and aggravation--That the 911 attracted all sorts of attention from girls. But that didn't happen. Entirely hapless as ever, I was on my own.

I bought the car in 1994 for $6000 and sold it in 1998 for $10k. The only car I ever made money on.
 

The Beemer #2

The Saab Rocket