Chapter 3 (page 39) - One Final Snag!

The car returned home with amazing grandeur! I think this was one of the first times my Mom was clearly taken back by what my Dad had done - I know that I was! For all intents and purposes, the car was done. Once Dad installed the seats, a few ornamental items, the coca mats and a few other minors, the car was basically done. It was drivable and road worthy, well, with one minor exception - the windshield.

The last item to be installed was the windshield. The thought was that this would be relatively “easy” and I mean easy in terms of “Porsche Restoration.” When Dad originally took the windshield off of the car, he decided to store it in a remote corner of our attic. I helped him carry it up, we found the corner, off where nothing was stored and had virtually no traffic when coming and going in the attic and we carefully laid it across several of the house joists along with some protective blankets. And there is sat, for basically 20-some years. Well, our house’ attic, like most attics in the summer, heat up to a scorching temperature unfit for humans and then plummet to sub-freezing temps in the middle of winter. Initially and right up until this point, Dad [and I] thought that this was the best place for the windshield. Well, that was right up until we lined it up for the install. You see, when we stored it, we laid it across the joists, with the curved ends facing up, the most natural way to position it. Remember the summer heat I mentioned? Well, the weight of the ends, bowed it just slightly, about 3/8” and there was no way in hell that this was going to go back in place without seriously flexing the glass and most likely breaking it. We tried for hours to figure out how to install it and make it fit, but it wasn’t going to happen. So after many conversations together and with Bruce, we abandoned the install.

So what happened? Another - and one major FINAL stroke of Luck. Dad wanted to put the car on the road [that year] and that was going to happen. Bruce offered him a racing windshield that he could use temporarily until he figured out the windshield situation and at least he could officially put the car back on the road. (Which is why in some of the pictures you’ll see the short stubby windshield, that’s Bruce’s racing shield). So dejected, we decided to put the windshield back in the attic until we could figure out what we were going to do and Bruce bought us some time to figure it out. In doing so and I don’t know who said what when, but we decided to put the windshield back in the attic and this time flip it over. At this point what did we have to lose? Low and behold a year later, post summer, when it came time to return Bruce’s racing windshield, we revisited the original windshield. We retrieved it from the attic, gathered all of the parts, set everything up and taking a deep anticipative breath, slid the windshield onto the car and in place!!!! It fit snuggly, right in place, like it was made for it - in Germany in 1956! Neither of us could believe it. It appeared that however much it warped itself out over the years in the attic, that one hot summer back in the attic, flipped over, un-warped it, just enough to fit!! Call it luck, fate, simple properties of physics and temperature dynamics - in the end I say that the “Porsche Gods” looked down and smiled upon us……..and my Dad of course, and bent the bitch back in place! Either way the damn thing fit like a glove!

Amazingly, the actual completion was sort of anticlimactic. Yes, the car was finally 100% complete, but I think we were more thrilled that we got the friggin’ windshield back on the car in one piece, not initially realizing that for the first time is 28 years, the Porsche was whole again. Additionally, Dad had the car “on the road” for a year now, so it wasn’t like it was the first time we rolled it out of the garage and drove it up the street. But it was done. There were no more parts that had to be installed, the shelves in the boiler room that held 80% of the parts, for the better part of 2 1/2 decades was empty.

The car was complete.