we bought our first 911 (a 67 disaster) right of out school, with me never having so much as changed the oil on a car. besides all of the rust repair that was needed, we managed to crater the engine after less than a single summer with the car. so I made my wife a deal that, if I taught myself how to fix everything that was wrong with the car, then I could buy something newer and much nicer. so that's pretty much exactly what I did, lol.
found a guy to do the floor pan work that was needed (back in those days this was known in Detroit as a "Hamtramck Special"), I put just about 200 hours into fixing the motor and cleaning up all of the rest of the rust, etc. sold it for 6,000 bucks and then found our lifelong 911 - an 83 SC Targa that we bought in 1994 for a little more than 16,000 bucks.
with the exception of 2 clutch changes in the past 30 years and 110,000 miles, plus an emergency alt / VR swap when our sons were several hours away from home on vacation, I shadetree pretty much all of the work on the car and always have. like a lot of guys, when our 3 kids were younger the car spent its share of time as a bike rack, etc., and it spent some extra years in storage while we lived overseas. so the past 8 or 9 years have been a ton of hours just bringing it back to life, and trying to make sure we can keep enjoying it right up until it gets buried next to us somewhere.
anyway, we still absolutely adore the car. we've had lots of other cars, and still have way too many cars relative to our storage space, but this one is still the best of the bunch. oh, and thanks to Pelican, who has been here more or less since the day we bought the car, and it still sports one of the early steering-column bushings and the collapsible oil return tubes (all going strong after more than 20 years).
