Porsche 356A Help Needed!

Dan Sarandrea (Phila)

Waitin' On Parts...
I was thinking there are a lot of guys here who probably dabble in other worlds besides FIATs, and youse guys might know a guy who's got a guy who knows a guy.....

Need help in the form of personal experience with early Porsche engines, or in the form of pointing me to a Porsche early models forum that has Xweb-levels of quality folks!

Here's why: An older gentleman brought a Porsche 356A engine into my buddy's machine shop this past week. It (and its accompanying car) is a wreck, been in a Montreal-area garage/barn for 20+ years. Two of four jugs present, engine does not turn over. We don't even know if the customer has cyl heads for it, as they did not get delivered to the shop with the engine. Just in case you're wondering, customer had a friend's high school auto body students do the body and that's progressed from rust remediation to metalwork to bodywork to primer.

Customer states he would want more power (odd how that sounds familiar on an X1/9 forum) than the stock 65-75hp to keep up with modern traffic, so he started talking about big bore kits. My buddy has done plenty of Porsche and VW engines over the years so any machine work is no big deal, but he's out of his element when trying to advise the customer on which big bore kits are the best for customer's intended application and budget. Customer did get some sticker shock when he did his own parts list!
 
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For a Porsche forum I like the "Pelican Parts" one:

For early Porsche engine performance parts there are a LOT of opinions, mainly because there are a lot of options. As sacrilegious as it sounds, if his engine is missing many of the major components and in really poor shape, he isn't looking for originality, and he wants more performance/reliability, at a reasonable price, then build him a hot VW type IV engine. MUCH better than the old Porsche unit, and can be built to much higher performance levels - and for a lot less money (speaking from experience on this).
 
I helped a friend rebuild a 356 engine in the late 60s. Many of the parts were the same as those used in a Beetle. A few years later, I helped a friend with a 356C. He had to replace one of the headlight assemblies on the cheap. Sitting in the driveway next to the Porsche was his VW bus. We noticed that the bus headlight assemblies were identical to the 356C assemblies but mounted 90 degrees off from the Porsche. He got a bus headlight for a fraction of the price of buying it for a Porsche.
 
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