Buying and Restoring An ABANDONED Porsche BARN FIND For The First Time in 30 YEARS

This is the most viral Porsche on the internet right now, getting over 100 million views in only three days. Last video you guys saw us pull it out of a barn for the first time in over 30 years. Then we detailed it from top to bottom, inside and out, and now it looks like this. But there's still one thing we keep seeing from you. Does it run? Show the engine. What's it sound like? Does it run? Well, here you go. Guys, this has no engine in it, but we're gonna do something to solve that. All right, guys. Yes, this is now the WD912, and I could not be more excited for what we have planned with this car, although we don't necessarily know exactly what we're going to be doing to it yet, so we're gonna try and figure it out in this video. But this is the first time that Mike has seen this car. Well, I saw this car sitting in the same place that that car was, but I did not see it in all of its glory with its interesting paint job. But I gotta say, you guys did an awesome job. I was actually in Stuttgart, Germany, so I was where this car came from, which is pretty cool. I actually really love the paint. I really love the color scheme. I know it might be a little polarizing, but I think it looks frickin' cool. It grew on me, too, especially after I polished it and realized that it's actually not the worst paint ever. I mean, there's some cracks and crazing on the hood, but overall, it's in good shape, and that's why we went ahead and bought it from Doug. Thank you to Doug Vargo for selling us this car. But the very first thing that we have to address in this rebuild is the missing engine. So as you guys can see, absolutely no engine here, but we are told that the engine might still be in that big barn where there was a ton of other stuff. So it might be buried over there. So I think that our next step is that we actually have to go back there and try to source what is this thing's original engine. Let's stop dilly-dallying and jump in the truck and go take a look. We have a lot of digging to do to hopefully find this 912 engine. Whoa, this looks different than last time. New bike, some doors. I forgot what this thing is. Isn't it a Triumph or something of that nature? It is, a Spitfire or TR7? TR7. Let's get down to brass tacks. Where's this engine at? From what I've heard is that there is, this is an engine stand, and that's what the engine was hanging from at some point. This is what I was told, so maybe let's just dig this out and see if there's a chain on it. No, there's nothing attached to it. I thought there was another engine stand in here too, though. There is, there's one over here, a very big one. So maybe this is what I was hanging off when the engine was pulled. We do know that there were some vandals that were coming here and drawing on the car, so hopefully they didn't walk away with a four-cylinder engine, but probably pretty heavy, that's a long walk. Bike storage area. You think we should look here first? Oh, there's a treasure chest. A legitimate treasure chest. I feel like we're gonna get sidetracked a lot today. I mean, we're on an adventure. That we are. Nothing. Mongoose Akio. That one's got like a crazy seat on it, dude. The teal. Is it this one? Yeah, is that a tandem bike? Oh, this one? It is a tandem bike. So that's a two-seater bike. Hey, here's an engine. But it looks like it is. Mike, what is this? I don't know. It looks like a V8. It's definitely a V8. A CJ335AC here. Both definitely not the ones we're looking for, but what are they? Why whenever anybody collects stuff, it's always really heavy. It's heavy and never organized. Never, ever. Oh, okay. I found another engine over here. Oh, this one is from this guy because it says Triumph on it. Dang it. Yeah. It's so excited. Sorry. So Mike, if we don't find this engine, we're gonna have to have a plan B. Yeah, we're gonna have to figure something out. That's for sure. But let's keep looking. There's still a lot of ground to cover here. Oh, I think I found it. What? No, just this little tiny three-cylinder motor, I suppose. Well, it's missing a cylinder then. Yeah. This is why people should have garage sales. Get rid of stuff. Terrible. Oh, what the heck? Fiberglass packing. Classic roadsters. I can't imagine they put the engine under this. RJ, I think we're running out of luck here, but there's still a scary garage up the hill that they might've stored it in. What is this, a 928? Yeah. I think it's pretty cool. Well, this one probably has its engine in there. Cool, that's home. This one is a recovery. This looks open. Wait, does it have, look. These blocks. Rear, oh. Yeah, I guess I've never seen that before, especially mounted on the hatch like that. Have you ever seen something like that? Visors? Yeah, visors on the rear hatch. That way the people in the rear can see the road when they're driving. Oh, God. That's a lot of stuff. All right, well, the mask is going on. There's an engine right here. That is for a lawnmower. And after much, much more looking, we came up with absolutely nothing. So we had to come up with another plan. All right, guys, so we took the WD Porsche to our good buddy Hussein over at Forza Automotive in order to get a better idea of the paint job that we're gonna end up doing on this Porsche, especially because they are trans-am aficionados. That seems to be all that they work on here. And we actually have a trans-am right next to our Porsche trans-am. I guess, first impression, what do you think of our Porsche? It looks a million times better than it did in the video of it in the barn. I'm actually surprised how well it cleaned up. Do you like the paint job? Honestly, I do. I do like the paint scheme and stuff. Black and gold obviously looks good together. The reason the trans-am came that way. But I do like the custom work someone did to it. And that kind of brings me to my next question is what are we gonna do with the paint on this car? I don't know if we wanna do a full respray and pull the window moldings out and change it back to the original color that it was, which was Irish green. We can kind of see some remnants of it here. Yeah, that's actually one of my favorite colors for these old classic Porsches. So we figured we'd bring it here and get your opinion on how much something like that would cost. I mean, overall, looking at the body and stuff on the car, I don't see any major metal work that the car needs. It doesn't seem to have a lot of rust or anything like that. To get it painted back to the correct color and do it the right way, we'd have to strip it down to bare metal, pull all the glass and the moldings and stuff like that out. Honestly, a paint job like that is probably starting at at least around 12 grand or so. There's just so many unknowns once we strip it because there could be hidden damages. Plus, when we go to remove a windshield or something like that, this is the original window. You can see where it says West Germany and stuff like that in it. Well, and classic Porsche parts are notoriously really cheap and easy to get. Yeah. Yeah, so that's one of those things where you don't know what the total is gonna be until you start getting into it. And then it kind of snowballs because you're like, well, if I did this and that, and the paint job looks nice, why don't we get new chrome? Why don't we get new lights? Sounds like an easy way to start spending a lot of money on a car that I don't know if I wanna spend a ton of money. My goal is to obviously get in this car and be able to drive it. And something kind of feels wrong about changing the paint on this car just because I feel like the paint job really is a part of the story of this car. It's part of the personality. And then you don't have to worry about damaging it when you're going on spirited drives and whatnot. So I guess if we didn't go the full paint route, what do you think that we should do with this paint? Personally, I would definitely keep the patinaed look. Cause at the end of the day, if you go to a Porsche show or something, there can be a hundred restored Porsches there. There isn't gonna be one that looks like this. Someone did this custom one-off job and it's old. It's not like you just did it yesterday or something. It's a vintage look. I mean, there's minor things we can do. So like obviously down on the bottom of the bumper, we have some damages and stuff like that. That can be repaired. We can repaint the bumper as well as like the rear bumper. I mean, obviously this looks real bad and kind of makes the car look less nice. So I think if we went ahead and got the rear bumpers redone as well, and they just did small touch-ups to spots that are chipped or maybe even repair this wing here and kind of blend the color. So without completely, you know, changing the whole look, but being able to kind of blend and do the repair. That way there's not as many big blemishes on the car. So it still presents really well, but it still has that like patinaed look. This car has actually gotten a ton of views on Instagram and Facebook. I think it's approaching a hundred million views on the content that we've been posting. And so I feel like keeping this paint job, makes it recognizable still. Now we put it on the lift at your shop because we haven't taken a good look at the underside of this car. So why don't we throw up in the air and then put some flashlights underneath it and see what we're working with as far as rust goes and floor pan condition and whatnot. We have it lifted and now we can actually see underneath and give me your first impression at overall condition. I mean, I don't see any major holes. So that's a good thing. Obviously we have some little bit of scaly rust stuff starting. This is mostly like the factory undercoating is starting to get rust underneath. So this starts to flake off. I mean, obviously we can see a little bit of fuel stuff here. So I'm assuming the gas tank probably leaked some it's just with the age and it's sitting a long time. I mean, overall, I'm really impressed. Usually the floorboards are just completely shot especially where you guys found it sitting in a barn. We do see a small hole here but this will be a pretty simple patch. It's kind of nice too. Cause this is like square spot from the factory. So that'll be nice and easy to duplicate. Yeah. I mean, overall, I don't see anything major. There's no big worries or concerns. Like I don't see anything structurally that worries me on the car. A lot of this is mostly just surface or scale rust that we can clean up and repaint underneath here. Stuff like that. Oh, we could paint, like put a new coating on. Yeah. So they actually have something called we like to use a Raptor liner. It will look similar in texture wise to what they sprayed originally. This is kind of like an undercoating and basically duplicates a similar look and it'll recode all this. So we'll be able to strip all this old stuff off clean up some of this. We'll spray some rust inhibitor on there to kind of stop any further rust from happening. And then we'll be able to recode it. And that'll basically prevent any more future rust or anything like that happening. You can even see like up on the inside of the quarters and stuff. If they've been like patched over the years or it was wrecked or something, you'd see where they have like Bondo or, you know, smashed in or anything. All that's clean in there. So I mean, the quarters and everything are really clean on it. Yeah. The only other thing that we have to worry about is what we put in the engine bay because as you can see, it doesn't have one. You go with the 911 with the six cylinder to have a little bit more power and it'll kind of fit the vibe of the car being like a race themed car. So it has a little more power. Something similar to what they would have done back in the day to get a little more power out of the car. Yeah. That's what we had heard that the owner of this car actually bought was a 911 motor, but we went and looked for it for like three hours yesterday and we couldn't find it. But we are actually going to be taking this car over to our good buddy, John Sabo, who is going to take a look at it and then give us some recommendations as far as what engine to put in this and then how much it's going to cost. And then we able to drop it back off to you for the paint work? Yeah. All right, guys, we are showing off the 912 to our friend of the channel, John Sabo, owner of Bulletproof Performance, who is an automotive consultant. And we wanted to bring the 912 to him so he can lay eyes on it for the first time because he's heard all about it. He was the one that actually told us to buy the car. What's the initial thoughts? Obviously, this isn't going to make any of the Porsche purists happy because I don't think this was OE paint from Porsche. You don't think that was a CCX out? I don't think so. No. I mean, maybe paint the sample, but. I mean, this is like disco night stuff right here. You have a little sparkle. Well done though. I mean, obviously I wouldn't have- It's interesting. Yeah, it's interesting. I know when the guy had this painted, he saw, he's like, that's what I'm talking about. Yeah, he was a boss. He was a gold chain, man. Let me show you the engine. Let's see what kind of motors this baby's got in it. Oh, man. That's a zero displacement. Get in there, it'll be one jump power. The issue is that we need a motor. We actually searched all morning for this motor. We were told that it was in this barn. I crawled through spider webs and dust and dirt. So now we need one to go in the car. One option would be trying to locate a 912 four-cylinder motor, but I'm not sure what that would cost. 912 motor, flat four, range could be somewhere between five, 10 grand. Then I was thinking, well, maybe we put a little bit more power, make it a little bit more fun and put a 911 two-seven motor, but I assume those are more expensive. There's a lot of 912s that have been 911 converted. There's no question about that. You're going to be probably 15 to 30 grand. That's three times the amount of money we spent on the whole car. So we have a 912 motor that's going to be anywhere from five to 15, a 911 motor that's going to be anywhere from 15 to 30. Now, one of the other solutions we saw is a Volkswagen bug motor. Yeah, you can grab a motor out of a bug, a bus. You could get them somewhere between 2,500. You get a hot one for probably 10 grand. I mean, there's a lot of people that have done crazy things, 911s. I mean, you've seen on, I'm sure online, you've seen people put LS motors in these things. I'm not going to suggest that, but if you want to do something a little bit interesting, you can put a Honda motor in it. A Honda motor? You can put a Honda motor in it. I mean, you can put a K-Series in this thing. Like? I mean, maybe not quite bar, but I mean, you can put a K-Series in here. It's been done. A Porsche with a Honda motor. Yeah, you can. Would that make it a Ponda? It could. How expensive is that? You can go to Junkyard and find a K-Series pretty much at any Junkyard. You know, I'd like to think of myself as a guy that protects the Porsche brand, but this will be an interesting project. Absolutely. It's already a little, it already has so much pizzazz. It's already a car. You got your 73 RS duckbill here. Yeah, it already has a lot going on. It's obviously not going to be a purist Porsche. No matter what we do, it's not numbers matching. It's not original paint. Numbers matching. It's numbers missing. Yeah, numbers missing, absolutely. Let's recap. We have a 912 motor, four cylinder, five to 15,000. We have a 911 motor that's going to be 15,000 to 30,000. We have a Volkswagen bug motor that might be five to 10,000, depending on how crazy we go. Or a K-series Honda. And we make this the Ponda, the WD Ponda. And that's a question mark, five to 10,000 as well. I mean, I'm going to have a real hard time ballparking that, but you can buy the motors as cheap as 500 bucks. So it's the labor and the accessories that are going to cost the money. It's going to be a little bit of fab work and time and money, man. Time and money. Well, we have time. I don't know about money. So maybe that takes out the 911 motor. But we want to hear what you guys think at home. Should we try and keep this more original, more organic to, I guess it's Porsche heritage? Or should we go a little crazy and make this the WD Ponda? Because we really didn't know what we were going to do when we realized we weren't going to find the motor for it. So we need help from you guys as well. Let us know what your thoughts are. But we are going to take this car back to Hussein so we can start the paint work and the touch-up work. We'll have an update for you guys here in a couple of weeks after the paint's done. At that point, I'm sure we'll have chosen a motor. So drop a comment and hopefully we'll see you next week.