Porsche's factory restoration unit bought a gutted 1973 911 T Coupe off eBay, with plans to rebuild the vehicle over the next year. How obsessively precise could they be? They're employing the factory workers who assembled it 37 years ago.
A project of the Porsche Club of America, the finished car will be raffled off then paraded in August 2011. Before that can happen, Porsche's experts have to renovate what appears to be a discarded, partially wrecked race car with birds nesting in the undercarriage.
After hauling the Porsche to Stuttgart, the Porsche Classic restoration unit set about dismantling, cleaning and cataloging every bit of their find. Several body parts were thrown off due to inauthenticity; the rear spoiler was homemade, and the front hood from a different 911. The original gearbox was dismantled, with every part inspected and the magnesium housing given a cleaning by hand with a brass-bristled toothbrush, then reassembled and calibrated using the original factory tools that built it.
Porsche has documented its progress almost as obsessively as the work itself, and you can see its build thread here.