Stanguellini, Aston Martin DB2, 356 Cabriolet, and an El Camino at the Porsche Club meeting...

Yesterday, I attended a PCA meeting at a company called American Dry Stripping. I'd seen their displays at a local car show for about 20 years and was anxious to check the place out. In addition to being able to blast all kinds of small stuff, they have a couple of booths that allow them to blast complete cars.

The meeting was crowded and, unfortunately, I left my camera on the counter as I was leaving the house, so I was limited to iPhone photos.

This car is a 1957 Stanguellini Bialbero Sport 1100. It hasn't been blasted yet and you can see that a bit of a hack job restoration was started. The car has a long way to go, but it will be a beauty when finished.

I love looking at the exposed chassis of cars like this to see how they were designed and built.

At one point, I nearly had a stroke when the guy in the white shirt set his cup of coffee on the cowl.

Later I would learn that his name is Steve Hall and he was one of the guest speakers. He started working in the panel shop at Rolls Royce in 1972. These days, he owns a restoration facility known, appropriately enough, as The Panel Shop. He brought along some aluminum pieces that he had made by hand and his work is amazing. He mentioned that The Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum is flying him down to do some restoration work and metalworking seminars on site. I asked if he does seminars in this area and he handed me his card and told me to just stop by the shop sometime.

I decided to cut him some slack on the coffee thing...

In another corner of the shop stood the body of an Aston Martin DB2.

One half of the body had been blasted to give everyone a before and after look at the process.

Again, it was interesting to see how the body was constructed. The rockers and door jambs were cast aluminum, the rest of the body was framed in steel and then everything was skinned in aluminum. And again, Steve Hall was charged with recreating sections of the bodywork.

There is not a great deal of structural support for the roof skin.

Here you can see the cast aluminum door jamb, the steel wheel well and bracing and where a section of the 16 gauge aluminum body had been removed.

Steve mentioned that he had built a number of aluminum Lotus bodies that were ultimately polished rather than painted, which precludes the use of fillers. He said that he makes his own welding rod out of the base metal, cutting 1/16" strips on the sheet metal brake, and then joins the sections by gas welding, allowing the seams to be indistinguishable from the surrounding surface.

He's good.

In one of the blasting booths was a Porsche 356. I looks to me like a 356C Cabriolet. Like the Stanguellini, the paint had been ground off by someone else, but it hadn't been blasted yet.

It's always good for me to see them stripped down like this because pictures like this, combined with a lack of money, are generally enough to keep me from getting involved with one of these beautiful little cars. They have a nearly unlimited potential to require complicated metal work.

Looking down into the frunk:

In another booth was most of an El Camino (68-72). I didn't get any good shots of the car, but I really liked the jack that they were using to work on the undercarriage.

Very cool. That's also why I'm such a big proponent for clubs. Through their events, you can get to see some cool stuff. A while back our PCA group visited a shop in Orlando that does a lot of Lamborghini work--and I'm talking about stuff like the 350 GT and 400 GT. The shop event provided lunch.

Oh yeah, all of those people that you see in the background are scarfing down sandwiches and salads. I've found that no group responds to free food quite like Porsche owners.

Free food is good food. We had BBQ at the Lamborghini shop tour. It was good, local fare, too.

We're not really known for our BBQ up here...

Man, those are some cool cars and pics. Thanks for sharing!

Thread title sounds like the start of a joke...

Cool pics! Looks like an interesting time.