As I tend to see it, why can one handbag or pair of shoes cost 100 times more than another...MARKETING, or if you prefer hype, and boy do we buy into that big time...? If you want to add peer pressure or imagined status, I suspect we are getting there..Then there is the win on Sunday sell on Monday, and that is the hook that caught me.. (-:
I arrived at Porsche ownership having worked my way through a series of tired old sports cars my fist car being a rotten old Frogeye Sprite that took over a year of learning how to nail it back together crudely.. MGB, then on to Lotus, the 60`s Elan being thought to be the epitome of perfection..and on the road in the early 70`s it sure was... though mine was just another old dog on it`s last legs but boy it could go some..(-:
Spare parts costs, given the price of a genuine Lotus track rod end, on which the only part of it which was genuine Lotus derived, was the name on the adhesive label, the part being from a Triumph Herald/Spitfire and no doubt many other similar vehicles, and which I could have been bought at much less expense if bought from the likely manufacturer Quintin Hazel...? I wrote to Lotus bitterly complaining that I was an enthusiast of the marque trying to keep an old dog alive on a limited budget and felt I was being taken advantage of by sheer profiteering... Yeah I was younger and more naive than am now.. I think. They did at least write back, explaining it costs a lot of money to develop and run a racing team in F1 or some such..Live and learn..?
I arrived at Porsche ownership by the same means, years of reading all the hype relating to LM wins. I tripped over a rotten old 912 and swapped my "self-restored" 6276cc Jensen Interceptor for it at the time of the fuel crisis..!! .After perhaps a year of welding and much else in my spare time, I was the proud owner of a Porsche, all be it one with only four cylinders. Having owned a 60`s Beetle the usual Germanic qualities shone through in the 912, in terms of build quality and material choices, other than the rotten old bodywork, even if the shut lines (those that were still intact), were perfect..Hmm..?
Other than the race heritage, the thing that captured me was the quality of the mechanicals, nuts and bolts that loosened off, where corroded Brit iron would be expected to break off on applying the spanner. Then there were the sophisticated barrels, none of your industrial Beetle cast iron stuff here, there had been a fair amount of thought put into adding lightness, a concept Mr Chapman had educated me on to some degree, but this time with a different level of quality to the extent it would be reliable a design criteria that seemed to be bourne out by Porsche`s LM victories...?
On the basis of engineering quality and race success I was hooked, and that was the start of more than a decade of Porsche ownership, three air cooled in total... The real DOWN side for me was that the YUPPIES chose my favoured marque to exhibit their excesses... Sigh!
Just like Lotus there was a premium on parts £25 for a pair of 911 valve springs, two springs per valve, thus £300 for a 911 engine set, whereas a whole engine set for a 4 cylinder MGB, 8 in total, was £14, and no doubt BL made a profit at that price, and a broken valve spring on an MGB was unheard of.... Though to be fair the old B`s power dropped off as you neared max revs, whereas the Porsche would run in to the red without the slightest hint it was about to begin to suffer engine damage.... Those Bosch spring loaded rev limiting rotor arms would often stick allowing over revs any time you cared to venture into such danger zones..!
So there you have it your pays your money, you makes your choice.... As to whether you think you get enough value for your money... I suspect only YOU can answer that...?
Me..? On arriving at a time when a return to Porsche better fitted the grumpy old man I had become.. Imagine my disappointment to find tales of engine failures which arrived on the scene with the advent of water-cooling the 911 derivatives, and plagued perhaps 3% of my favoured marque over a period of time from the 996 all the way through to the 997.1, Jeez type about disappointment..!!! . OK, OK so air cooled were not perfect but at least they were infinitely rebuildable and did not seemingly self destruct in the way water cooled could do if the IMS gave up the ghost..That seemed to me like a game of Russian roulette, with a circa £15K bullet loaded and a 3-5% chance of an unfortunate outcome...Too much of a gamble for me, at my stage of the game in buying what would now be an old Porsche, perhaps with an increased risk of a rebuild required along with all the other complexities built into modern vehicles as they age..
Back to the expense of repairs, yeah well you only have to look at the showroom/workshop structure of an OPC to imagine that someone has to pay for that... £155 +vat/hr plus somewhat expensive parts...?
I did all my own work other than trim, thus parts were the main cost for me and I would buy O.E. because I had bought into the concept of quality engineering in my time spent with air cooled...I even bought self tapping screws that came in plastic bags with a Porsche I.D. and would be either black or gold anodised as fitted to my cars. Though that changed near the end of my air cooled ownership days, I began to wonder if the then local dealership was cutting corners, or was it Porsche themselves... Hmm..?
Given that which seemed to me to be a possible alteration in the quality and packaging of small parts over the years, that and the time it seemed to have taken to sort out the water cooled engine issues, I am still left just a tad disappointed that something as seemingly simple as the material choices for exhaust fixings appears to be below my expectations... I can accept that some materials more suited to a particular task may corrode in advance of others, and that being the case then it seems reasonable to incorporate avoidance of that as a possible problem into a maintenance programme, BEFORE the corrosion creates any real risk to their removal and replacement such as seems to be the case with the requirement to carefully drill broken steel fixings out of a alloy cylinder head..?
For the above task it seems that the apparently high quality Stormsky jig is a prerequsite for this task, whereas my thinking would be that such fixings might be advised as replaced in whatever time period Porsche decided would be advisable within normal maintenance schedules..?
I think I have read on here where the estimate for replacement of some corroded exhaust manifold fixings was £700 which I think might have been at an OPC, though not entirely sure..?
You could check out the prices of "Genuine" parts and perhaps even improved parts on here..?
Buy Porsche 991 (911) MK1 2012-2016 Exhaust Nuts / Bolts / Studs | Design 911
To finish off this ramble, yeah, my good lady has a few pairs of shoes and more than one handbag, and I am very happy to be back to owning a Porsche once again, so what does that say about me... :?: :floor:
