Photography by Felix Liebel
I know that we’ve been a bit Porsche heavy as of late. I know you know I know this. But come on, when it’s raining this hard should we stay inside, or get out there and play a little mudball?
Thomas Lundt runs one of the most respected restorative workshops in the world. His work is regarded by many to be some of the best in Germany, if not the world. It’s with great pleasure that we can feature his 2.7RS restoration, which came over our transom recently leading to a great phone call that’s been published below.
Ted Gushue: Tell me about what it is you do.
Thomas Lundt: I’m a Master Mechanic based in Germany, and I started my company in 1981. From the first day, I used all of my energy on this company. I said to myself, “Thomas, if you repair cars, take the nice ones. Not an Opel, a Volkswagen, or Ford. Take the Porsches”. All the things that we know have been worked out by ourselves. We weren’t taught how to work on these cars. We haven’t had big school lessons to learn about these cars. We did it our own way. After thirty five years, we know more about the old 911 than the factory shops do.
TG: What’s the story with your 911?.
TL: I have known the car for about thirty years. It has been owned by a friend of mine, and about twenty years ago someone tried to fix it and restore it, but he didn’t come far. When the engine was off, the engine was put in park and all this stuff, they quit doing those things. It slept until about 2013, in a big farmhouse in a part of East Germany.
TG: It was just sitting there, like a barn find?
TL: Yeah. Similar, but it was still owned by my friend. Ralph was his name. He was forced to give up the storage where the car was being kept, so he asked me to take it and put it in my shop. I have seen the car, and I said, “Okay, wow. A real RS!” I asked him, “What did you do to the car for all the years? Why didn’t you ask me to fix it, to make it special?”
“No time. No time. No time.” Always the same. So I caved and told him that I wanted to make a quick deal with him to restore it, and then sell it. But then when you are on the way to restore a car you fall in love with it. In February 2013, we started to do the body. We stripped the body. We took all the things off all the axles, all the fenders, all the technical; All the wires, and then we took the paint off and figured out what was wrong with it.
The worst thing on this build is that someone else tried to restore the car. Long story short, he didn’t do a very good job. So we stripped off the fenders in the front and the back, and we stripped all the things they had done, off the car. We started to rebuild the body of the car…the fenders in the front, and the fenders in the back. We restored the doors. We didn’t take new doors, because if you want to buy new doors for a car like this, you will get the ones from the 993 model. You have to replace several things, and it doesn’t look nice, because the inside of the old doors has a lot of things are very, very different. It doesn’t look original when you take new doors.
The fenders, doors, and everything fits very, very well. We then prepared the painting, and did all the things you do before you put the new paint on the car.
TG: Is it the original color?
TL: Yes, this is the color, because there is a famous book with records, Carrera RS from TAG, and in that you have all the bodies listed by VIN, and you can figure out how the car came from the factory, which was Viper Green. Luckily for us we have a painting master in our shop, and he was able to get the old material, which is not allowed anymore in Germany, to use. Poland is very close to us, and they don’t care about that. We got all of the paint. The original paint, and the original materials. We painted the original materials, in the original color.
TG: Wow.
TL: We then restored every other part. There are no screws on the car. There is nothing that we didn’t have in our hand. We checked it, improved it, and we made it better. We checked it, took it out, we blasted them with new paint, we took the original bushings out, all the things that we had in shocks, took them out and restored and refreshed. We put new brakes on, restored the old calipers, and put the gaskets in. Everything on the car looks like new, but it is not new, because we did not take new parts from the factory, we restored all the parts.
TG: Right.
TL: We overhauled the gearbox and the engine. In the gearbox we had to spend a lot of money, because there is an extra oil pump, and the gearbox is from the RS, and the water pump had been removed, so we had to buy it new, and it is an expensive thing. We had to rebuild the engine with the old eight point five, two-one compression.
TG: Sure.
TL: We chromed all the stuff we needed to have. We sent the wheels to Fuchs. They have a restore shop in Germany, and they make the old used Fuchs wheels like new, and of course they look new. We then left those to the side and used 7 inch wheels in the front and 8 in the back. It looks much nicer, but if you want the original look they are right there to change back to. The original sport seats, we restored, and all the interior stuff we made new again.
