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Well, thanks Milt. WRT your thoughts on flares, consider this:

How many times have you seen an early car without flares command a premium prices, vs. how many times you've seen a flared car get the premium price? By "premium" I mean the top of the value range for that particular year and model. The data are, despite Bruce Anderson's best efforts otherwise, pretty much anecdotal.

Put another way, my 911E is actually built on a T tub with a lot of S parts. I can't flare the fenders, as this would bump me to a higher class. So I tend to overlook flared or "RS Clones."

A concours guy can't flare the fenders either. So you're left with the street or DE enthusiast as your market, which is a smaller market than the whole market. A smaller market tends to diminish the price, the certainty of achieving that price and the speed with which that price can be had. If you want to be firm on value you have to be prepared to walk away and wait.

And this is the point, what it says in all the Porsche buyers books: that modifications of any nature diminish the appeal of the car to the widest possible audience, which in turn means that the "right" buyer is harder to locate. In Southern Cal, you have a concentration of similar-minded enthusiasts, however, and a sense of "car culture" (RGruppe, etc.) that tends to modify in a certain way (period race mods, for example.) So that tends to take some of the edge out of it.

No getting around the point, however, that people are prepared to pay for quality. Who among us wouldn't bid on Jack Olsen's car if it became available? Or that orange car upthread. . . I blush, I burn, I shudder when I think of my own car alongside that one.