Patrick,
I am glad to hear Dick got in touch with you. I am sure he is now watching this thread. I also spoke with Dan Lawson this morning and he reitterated your comments on the type of Rometsch and limited market for expertise on these cars. I let Grady know about both Dan and Eric Meyer (who Dick recommended he contact).

I don't know much about Rometsch cars, but in my conversation with Dan it sounded like one of the types Beekow or Lawrence was more desirable than the other, not sure which is the more desirable one.
Regards,
Chad

Hi Chad,

I allready contacted Eric Meyer about the car. He keeps the registry of the Beeskow cars in the US and ownes a very nice car. I am also in contact with 5 other people who might be interested in the car depending on condition and prize.

The beeskow models are more desirable than the Lawrence models. I own a rometsch Lawrence convertible. Nr 561 in the overview and I really like to have a Beeskow. That's why I hope to see some pictures soon and if the car is in a fair condition I will make a good offer.

regards
Patrick

Patrick,
Likely you are in contact with Grady and getting the information you need in due course. As I am sure you will find out, Grady is very deliberate, knowlegable and fair in his dealings. In the interim, out of curiosity, how did you find this forum? It would seem that this is the random sort of barn find that we all hope for in our respective realms. I have a late model ('73) hot rod Ghia Cabriolet that I built and will always have a place in my heart for type 1 based cars. I recognize that this is a pretty rare event and I want to relish in it.

How many of these Rometsch barn finds do you think are still out there? How complete are the registry's for these cars and how many are missing? I can tell that you are very knowlegeble about these cars and I hope you feel you can share more about them even though I know that there will be some serious deals going on if it turns out that the car is of value. I appreciate your comments and I am glad you found your way here.
Regards,
Chad

Hi Chad,

If someones writes the word Rometsch in a forum and Google finds it, I will find it. :)

As registry holder, I am searching constantly for Rometsches or information about rometsches.

It is hard to tell how many are still out there. I know 1 Rometsch Lawrence Coupe and two Rometsch beeskow convertibles that are still in barns waiting to be released and shown to the main public.

For the Lawrence model, there are 85 build. 30 of them are known to survice. For the Beeskow model, there are around 180 build and currently 35 are listed in the registry. most of the Beeskows are convertibles.

I hope the cars turns out to be a beeskow model, but I think it is a Lawrence model.

There are two type of rometsch batches. The silver ones for the Beeskow and the gold ones used for the Lawrence.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1294261807.jpg

If you look to the batches it looks like the gold ones:
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1287419836.jpg

regards
Patrick

Patrick, No disrespect intended. BADGES not Batches. Or, name plates

WOW, i just registered on this forum, and this is the first thread i clicked.

i thought i just found the 'DEAL of the century' on my new 1970 911T...

that was an amazing read!

His english is better than my Dutch :)

Patrick,

I have no insider information from Grady, but based on your badge analysis and the fact that more Lawrence's were sold in the US than Beeskows (read that somewhere), you are likely correct.

Based on the production numbers, I would think that it is reasonable to postulate that 60-75% of the total production could still exist and that maybe 1/2 to 2/3rds of those are in restorable condition so I would guess that there are still some more out there waiting to be saved through estate sales. What a great quest, finding Rometchs.

I have to admit i am having a hard time waiting for details here, Grady please help.

Regards,
Chad

My bad Grady.

Grady et al,

Eric Meyer here. The Rometsch Registry has just about as much info as can possibly be had on Rometsch, the cars, restoring them, who owned them then, who owns them now, the distributors in the US... the designers, blah blah blah. Patrick, Oystein and I together share this registry. I am also a 356 nut.


here is a shot of my Rometsch Beeskow Cabriolet... a 1956. These cars were designed in 1949 and built from 1950-1957. Many of their details showed up in later cars... yet they are widely unknown.

Best, Eric Meyer

http://images.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/555218.jpg

another view...

http://images.thesamba.com/vw/gallery/pix/277540.jpg

Eric,
Do any Rometsch have Porsche engines or do they typically have Okrasa?
Regards,
Chad

They are are coachbuilt cars... The Beeskow and Lawrence styles were built on a VW chassis. Some came with stock VW engines. Some were ordered with Okrasa engines.... and many were upgraded with Okrasa's or other speed equipment by their owners.

(For those that don't know...Okrasas are VW case... larger pistons... larger crank... dual carbs... larger cam blah blah blah. Similar to a Pre A two piece 356 engines.)

I don't know of any Rometsch cars built with a Porsche engine other than the Spyder mentioned earlier in this thread built for the Renngemeinschaft Berlin.

There is RUMOUR that Rometsch built some prototype 550 Spyder bodies... We at the Rometsch Registry don't know anything about this nor have I ever seen anything to confirm this except in some italian references which haven't yet been investigated further. The fact that we don't know about this doesn't mean that it isn't true though... we just don't know yet.

Rometsch built a wide variety of custom bodies for a variety of customers based on the chassis of many different German and Italian manufacturers.

At least one Rometsch Beeskow is currently running a 356 engine... but this was installed by the current owners... the Grundmann Family in Hessich Oldendorf, Germany. Traugott Grundmann, along with his son Christian... are in in possession of the ENTIRE Rometsch Archive which they acquired along with all the remaining assets of Rometsch a few years ago. They own a great number of Rometsch cars... including the first and the last... and the Gregory Peck car.

The Grundmanns have an AMAZING private museum and own what most consider to be the best private collections of VW cars in the world. They put on one of the two best Vintage VW shows in the world once every 4 years in Hessich Oldendorf. They are also responsible for saving some of the rarest VW's on the planet.

Eric

I think I saw a photo gallery of this Treffen(?) a while back but I could never locate it again. It was the first time I ever saw a coach built VW. They certainly are works of art.

Hallo grady,

Any news, It is so quiet from your site.:confused:

Patrick

Grady, glad you got to spend more of your precious time helping Uber.

After hearing this story from you last year and now seeing the pictures,
I know you have to be just having a grand old time.
Plus your schoolin most of us younger ones.

Thanks so much for making a difference in so many peoples lives,

Keep Em Flying!

somewhat of a Bump... waiting to hear more... in the meantime here is a long blathering diatribe to tide you over... regarding how many may survive...:

I'd guess that less survived than you might imagine. I'd also bet that there are maybe 5 or 6 more left hiding... I hope more... but I don't think so. Somebody somewhere would have seen it in the last 50 years... and taken a photo of it... and probably that photo would have been posted on a VW or Porsche forum in the last 20 years. So I think we know about most of them now.

We have kept track of the rumours pretty good... and we have been tracking these rumours for decades... The VW online community is HUGE and omnipresent worldwide! All but three of these rumours have turned into actual known cars in the last 10 years or so via this community...(because of the internet and cell phone cameras!) and are now in our registry. I doubt there are many more cars... other than these rumours we are already tracking.... maybe a small few...

I question the exact production numbers given by the factory also. This affects the survival rate. My survival rate based on the quantity of cars I think were built... is higher... because I think less cars were built than the factory said were built.

Of the surviving cars... there are groups of body numbers where no survivors are known. In most cases... there are survivors a few body numbers apart... but here and there are places where we see whole groups of sequential body numbers supposedly built... but no survivors in that body number range exist. I am pretty sure there were less built than we think. This is only an educated guess.

Since 1980 the registry added about 30 cars. For total of approx 70 cars now between Beeskows and Lawrence models... from 35 known around 1980. The internet really helped us all find each other. Of late we see about one new car pop up every 4 years or so... which is always really exciting news! With each passing decade... we see fewer and fewer new discoveries. We had a real flurry in the early 1990's when the internet became widely used.

The oldest of the original owners are all passing away right now... and their children are inheriting the cars... so we see a few coming out of the woodwork over the last 10 years in this manner... that were here-to-fore unknown. Like the car in question on this forum

Rot:

These cars are Coachbuilt. They are aluminum bodied... over a steel sub frame... with a large inner wooden wooden structure around the hinge post and under the base of the rear window. ("Coachbuilt" refers to the fact that they were built like a coach... ie over a wooden frame.)

In moist climates the steel and aluminum reacted with one another...via electrolysis. This formed large eroded areas where the aluminum met the steel The aluminum body is "hemmed" around a steel wire along the fenders and around sheet metal steel in many areas. The repair is to remove the aluminum body from the steel inner frame and wire.. and weld in new aluminum panels where the electrolysis took it's toll. This is difficult. The wood suffers it's own issues... usually dry rot... sometimes cracking. Subsequently there has been a high attrition rate for the cars simply because they rotted away in foul climates.. and were too expensive to repair.

To restore the car right you need to completely tear the car down to nothing. The only comparison I can give you is: Imagine taking your 911 and unfolding all the outer door skins and hood skins apart from the hood and door inner structure. Then removing all the fenders... and then cutting the base core shell of the 911 apart so that you could reach both sides of every inner part of the body.

Next you have to make all your own rubber, if you are missing any trim you have to make it. Nobody sells any part for the body. You have to make it all. If you have a cracked windshield... you have to make your own windshield. etc etc. Difficult.

The aluminum body will basically dent even if you just look at it really hard! ... it is soft. accidents really destroy these cars... The glass is impossible to find...and so the fix is just too expensive. They are rare though... so they usually got saved after a wreck... if they were salvageable at all.

in the end...TurboChad's guess is a good one... but I bet it is more like 50% based on the rot and accident attrition...of a lesser number of actually built originals. So I think we have found almost all of the remaining survivors.

-------------------------------

Sure hope we get a photo of this new secret car here soon! Hopefully I have not bored you to tears!

Eric

Wow Eric. Your description of potential materials degradation and the challenges of restoration is at once depressing and amazing. Depressing in that it seems like cars not cared for well or just not stored properly may never be resurrected; amazing in that there are such beautiful examples (as those in the photos above) left in the world.

-- Shawn

Eric,

Well said.

We should all appreciate the ‘coach-built’ ancestry of our cars. The earliest Porsches were ‘coach-built’. The steel chassis were fabricated at Gmünd and the aluminum bodies built there and by Kastenhofer, Keibl, Beutler and Tatra as far away as Switzerland.

The significant difference between Ferry Porsche in Gmünd, Austria and Friedrich Rometsch and Johannes Beeskow in Berlin is Porsche succeeded using VW components as he (Pïech) was VW importer into Austria. Rometsch and Beelskow were at loggerheads with VW and were cut off from chassis at a commercial level. Porsche also recognized the necessity to transition to real production manufacturing. Rometsch continued with fine ‘coach-built’ creations built on VW chassis (entire car purchased retail) into the ‘60s.

Porsche packed up most everything and moved back to Stuttgart (next to Reutter – actually into Reutter at first) and started manufacturing all-steel cars. Sure, they ‘farmed out’ the body/chassis manufacturing to Reutter, Karmann, D’Ieteren, Drauz, and others but generally on an industrial scale. For prototypes and limited production, Porsche used ‘coach-builders’ Wendler, Beutler, Abarth, Gläser, Heuer and others. By 1963, Porsche purchased the main production from Reutter but still retained outside production. My 911 was built by Karmann in 1968.

Through the ‘50s, Rometsch was still hammering out aluminum bodies, one-at-a-time and found it difficult to buy VW chassis. Hand-built bodies are excellent for ‘fine’ cars, limited production and prototypes. The technique is still used today. It is usually economic suicide when building 4-door taxis.

If not for our VW enthusiast brothers and a benefactor-enthusiast like Traugott Grundmann, many of the Rometsch cars would have disappeared. The Rometsch craftsmanship and story could have been lost to the world’s automotive history.

Everyone here should visit the Rometsch Registry site:
<- R O M E T S C H -- R E G I S T R Y -> www.rometschregistry.org


We are fortunate that there is high worldwide interest in Porsche and vintage racing where engines like uber’s 4-cam can be found and put back into real service. The fact that care was lavished on uber’s ’58 Speedster means that it has survived more than half a century in good condition.


I’m sure that uber’s Rometsch will ultimately find the ‘right’ caretaker, be properly restored and join the world’s automotive history driving as new.

Nothing new to report.

Best,
Grady

Wow! I stumbled on to this thread from a link in a thread about 4 cam heads over
on the Early S board. 15 pages and growing!
The photo of the two 4 cammers together brings back memories. When I had
#0123, I also had two of those sitting on my garage floor, along with boxes of
spare cams, carbs, distributors, etc.
This thread has been a solid hour of enjoyment just reading and seeing the pics.
Grady, as usual, you have done a great service, not only to uber and alles, but to
the world of Porsche and especially, the Pelican forum pages. Thank you! Mike