Award Winning Patina: 1959 Porsche 356A
Patina can be an interesting topic as some are for it, some are against it, and there is definitely a grey area on what is and isn’t suitable patina. What if I were to tell you this ’59 Porsche 356A has been mechanically restored, and repainted with a faux patina paint job? Well that is exactly what the owner of this Porsche did. Appearing like an original condition find, this Porsche is rust free, and even has a hopped up engine. With no bids as of yet, this Porsche is currently sitting at $85,000, or you can select the buy it now option of $105,000. Check out this unusual 356 here on ebay out of Braselton, Georgia.
Looking under the deck lid there is a freshly rebuilt engine that wears a faux patina as well. Although not stock, this 2.0 liter 912 engine certainly appears vintage. A set of Weber 40’s have been added, as well as a 12 volt alternator that looks like an original generator. The gear box was rebuilt 1,500 miles ago, and the engine 4,000 miles ago. In excellent health, this patina rich Porsche is ready to roll.
Although quite tidy inside, the steering wheel and dash are in unrestored condition. There is some minor paint chipping along the bottom edge of the dash on the driver side, but otherwise this dash is shiny and even has a groovy old peace sign sticker. Absolutely beautiful the steering wheel looks like an NOS unit. The carpeting is a bit worn as it is also original, but additional sound deadening has been added. A set of 12 volt converted LED gauges have been added including a 904 multi-gauge. All in all the interior of this Porsche is very nice, with some mild patina to compliment the cars overall look.
For some the patina may be just a little too much for this car. The seller purchased this car in its original state and really appreciated the patina’d look. So he decided to repaint the car and add a faux patina. A great deal of time and money was put into the mechanical restoration of this car, and the seller went above and beyond with maintaining an “as found” look. The seller even had the factory wheels power coated, and added a faux patina to them as well. Although this Faux patina may not be for everyone, it is certainly an interesting look on this 356. What are your feelings on this intentionally patina’d 356?
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Comments
They have been doing it to jeans for years- and although I don’t mind wearing pre-faded jeans I draw the line at pre-ripped jeans. I guess this car for me creeps into the territory of being “pre-ripped”…
But what about Nordstrom’s new $425 pre-mudded jeans?!
Why. Just why?
But hey, it’s his car. I just hope he didn’t do that to it thinking it would increase its value.
Fake patina is the epitome of bad taste, its “me too” exercise in style. I’m all for faded paint and naturally occurring patina, but I’m cheap and wouldn’t want to spend the money on new paint.
Steve R
Exactly. If it’s really there, enjoy it — if not, faking it is just sad.
Can’t like it at all, interior is awesome though.
Check this. Seller couldn’t tell what happened.
Hmm. I have a truck that needs valve seals/rings and the trans slips too. Maybe I can market that as “driveline patina” ? I guess I don’t understand the fad of well worn, never mind intentionally trying to replicate it. I’ve also got some socks and underwear with huge patina , probably worth a fortune…
Patina looks very fake. Obvious
Agree. I don’t think it succeeds in looking like real patina. Had they painted it brown, then white, then sanded off places to reveal brown, would look more realistic. But still not like the real thing. Some of the well used, somewhat maintained shop trucks with business lettering that have been polished over the years until the primer is showing- now that can look really nice.
I’ve seen some really well done fake patina jobs. This one is just cheezy. I’d be embarrassed to drive this car. You’d look like a doofus showing up at a car show in this thing. It’s kind of sad.
I’d be too embarrassed to drive that.
The patina is gone…..just blotches of mismatched paint in it’s place.
I hate to tell the owner/painter that i could tell in a nanosecond it was fake. Nice try, but no cigar.
IMO, not even a nice try.
Fake patina is like fake breasts, fine for some but not for me
That “new” jean look makes me wonder who would spend that $$ for that look. If I see someone with a pair I will have to ask them why!! In my old school mind, put a pair of your favorite jeans on and go do some real dirt work with them on. I cant think how many times I came home and looked at myself with all that real dirt on. Didn’t think that was a hip look. Heck when I work in the fields I would come home and could not come in the house. I was given clean stuff and told to go in the garage and change first. (live with the g-parents then). Great memories.
As for the nice 356,i will buy it when I buy those jeans so I got the complete look. This might be a get rich idea that might just might work short term. Kinda like the pet rock.
Terrible!!! This car should, nay MUST be painted. Is this what the hobby has become? I’m not the biggest Porsche fan, but come on. Coming from the land of rusty cars, I can’t for the life of me, understand how this fad caught on. California, that’s where. On a recent visit to L.A., a very nice man in my daughters apt. bldg. was shining his classic 21 (?) window VW bus. It was lowered a bit, mags, beautiful blue, I told him, it was the nicest bus I ever saw. He replied, “thanks, but the VW club ( he belongs to) didn’t think so”. He said, at a recent VW show in Huntington Beach, the best he got was “honorable mention”. The winner? You guessed it, a rusty panel van,,,
Cali-PHONY has been in my vocabulary since I first visited in the 80’s.
I just puked in my mouth a bit…..gross
To find a real barn find with 50 to 60 year paint and to re-commission it for road use maintaining the ”original” doesn’t work for long. As soon as you move the Artifact Car, the environmental relocation will change everything on the car fast. If its a California car, subject to dry climates and you bring the car to another damp climate, the paint will quickly change. Blending original paint with a ”preservation” theory does not work. Chemicals are different and the old paint surpasses your newly added ”attempt”. If you are restoring a VALUABLE you try to perform the restoration as a part of the original, making your work the same level and age as the existing aged original. If you take this route with a car, as this Porsche, it’s perfectly fine but the added rust is like adding holes in a canvass that has none. In my opinion adding the rust makes it look cool, but is to far in reverse to the preservation role model. Had he repainted the ”perfect” body and polished it down, would have been better and brought more money, and easy to explain . His car is a great one, but much like a painting of his ex-wife that he commissioned when in love, ie: hard to explain why she was so beautiful after the divorce. It’s all about taste and the thin line between reality and fantasy, conservation and preservation and most of all the experience of custodianship.
To me the point is to make a car driveable but not so perfect you fear driving it. This smacks of trying to avoid the actual labor to make a car a driver, when he was going for a reliable hot rod. I would do all the basic work needed, like hot tanking the engine parts, but put it back together without repainting it. The car’s body would not receive a fresh paint job. Not knowing what condition it started in, one would assume he wanted a driver class car but wanted to eventually sell it as a high buck restoration, so the faux wear was commissioned. Upon learning of the extra steps taken to generate the ‘look’, the value would go down in my mind. Like the blue jeans with the fake mud for someone who wants to pose has having done real work. Having done the work to honestly have the jeans attain that look, I find those fake pants offensive. My opinion of the person who put those on would be less and like the breasts, it is succumbing to a “me too” mentality D cup when a nice C would look better and be sexier.
please somebody explain the ‘patina’ BS to me- i dont care if its european american or japanese, its effen rust / rot / paint fade, this all looks like dog waste to me . especially when its a nice rare classic car or even the antique. finish your cars off in the way it deserves to be. stop being a cheapass bastard.yes i know its only original once and after you do ALL the other repairs to your vehicle its no longer original or perhaps thats a news flash to some.ok,im done with my rant-let the critics all jump in here with their version of importance.
Hi duke, simmer down now, I’m no critic,,,( cough) but as far as I can tell, nowadays, we are surrounded by pristine examples of classic cars. Cost usually no object, make it better than new. This is different and some folks think different (aka rusty) sells better than the “run of the mill” pristine ones,( there are 84 ,356’s on Hemmings, one nicer than the next) and for some vehicles, that may be true, old trucks for example, or a Rambler ( sorry, just kidding) But some folks take that too far, thinking EVERY rusty classic is the next big thing, when, I feel, and as do others, it’s a fantastic car, and a 356 should be nice. It’s a slap in the face of the marque to drive this car like this.
I suppose you could label me a cheap ass. After putting two kids through college and making sure that they graduated with ZERO debt ,I still had enough money left to enjoy and drive my classics sans perfect paint. Patina was a necessity not my first choice. It’s easy to poke fun at a car that goes against everything we take for granted, like concours paint jobs and high-dollar restorations. Yet original cars like mine have a unique story to tell, a story that only evolves over time. Every spot, chip, and dent recalls an earlier trip, a miscalculated parking maneuver, a run-in with a stray stone, too many days put away wet.
You simply can’t make up a car like an original. Its exterior shows the scars of an earlier life well lived, not something that’s been manufactured to create interest.
Keith,
You missed the point. He painted his car to look like this.
This was not about he can’t afford paint so he has to make do with patina.
He paid money for this.
Jay, I didn’t miss it. But Duke asked for an explanation of the “whole” patina thing. That’s what my comment was about. The Faux-Tina on this thing is just nonsense.
Why not leave the original patina?? Doesn’t do anything for me either, but like the man said, it’s his car.
It’s his car until he tries to sell it. I’m sorry but I don’t get the concept of taking a pretty expensive car and doing an expensive restoration and then spending extra to make it look like it wasn’t restored. WTF. I just can’t imagine he’s going to find someone with the same tastes BUT I never say never.
Paint is a waste of time,energy and money…
Adding simulated patina to a restored car is an enormous waste of money, especially when done as poorly as this example. I knew it was fake before reading a single word. When have you ever seen a car with exactly the same depth and hue of surface rust all over the car? Front-to-back, top-to-bottom, left-to-right, it’s all exactly the same. To quote the late George Michael, “If you’re gonna do it, do it right.”
Not a fan of faux-tina, but at least he didn’t sand it and let it rust like some knobs do. If the body is already prepped and straight, a coat of non hipster paint is easy done. Nice car.
In this context, the use of the “P” word for me is “price”. And as far as I’m concerned, he cheapened the price by that “paint” job. My $.02 worth!
Ahhh……
The “power” of the Velocity Channel on cable tv!!
Owners probably pissed it took more than a 1/2 hour to do.
I’m going to buy a new Dodge Demon and do that to it. I’ll post it here as a ” barn find”!!!!!
I don’t know about you guys, but my personal preference is to be seen in public with people with painted-on facial scabs…so why not a car like that? Hubba-hubba!
Things are getting strange.
If I lived next-door I would have no choice but to spray paint it in the middle of the night. This is just stupid since it started with real patina to begin with.
I’ll be curious if he gets any takers at his price. I know 356’s can get stupid money these days. But this car is a mixed bag of new and worn, original and non-original and then there’s the paint. I like the Ivory and ox-blood red combo though.
C’mon folks, “fake patina” is just a trend and will eventually fade away, no pun intended. When was the last time you saw “truck nuts”? Unfortunately, fuzzy dice seem to be here to stay.
Actually saw truck nuts yesterday on a brand new truck. The driver did not have a mullet though. Gotta love a redneck.
They made them illegal in Tennessee a few years ago. Considered them ‘indecent’. So you won’t see them here.
I see “truck nuts” every time I go to Eastern PA.
They’re pretty common in Houston, too. As a woman, I’ve always wanted to ask the driver if he has to put them on his truck’s bumper ’cause he doesn’t have the real thing, but then again…Texans pretty often pack heat.
Just terrible.
This does look totally fake. I can appreciate real wear, the kind that says “I wasn’t going to wait till I’m too old to drive so I could afford perfect, and I’m having too much fun behind the wheel to leave it at the body shop for six months,” but this is not that. I don’t buy torn jeans, I wouldn’t buy a “Road-Worn” Stratocaster, and even if I had the money, I wouldn’t buy this.
I don’t know Andy? I have a couple of Fender precisions that were well used even before I acquired them. The wear and cracking of the enamel and just the pure age of the pickups tend to create very different sounds. I also have two saxes, one an alto another a Bari that have heavy patina. They definitely produce a flatter more “fatty” sound, plus the keys are bent just right and the pads are not perfect. New and shiny , not my thing.
That reminds me of one of those larger die cast models a friend of mine gave me. It is of a ’56 Studebaker Hawk, and is supposed to be representing a ‘garage find’. There is one wheel off and in the trunk, and their representations of distress down the side are this same mono-color, where you wonder if what you’re looking at is supposed to be rust or smears of primer. You have to be artistic about these smears. For the true patina experience, the capper would be to put red emery down while the paint is drying in those locations so it’s rough enough to strike a match or snag a polishing rag. Slit any dash padding at the seams in a couple of places. Pop some mouse sized holes in the back of the seats to pull some stuffing through and *voila!* Just like you hadn’t spent all that money–no one ever need know.
Years back when I was restoring a 67 E-Type Jaguar coupe, I bought two 1:18 scale models of the car. One to put away as is and the second one I ruined to create the look of the car when I found it – painted rust on the sills, bent one door to sag, cracked the plastic windscreen, dulled the chrome plastic, etc. But that was for fun and it was $20 – not real money.
Boy ,looks like I m not the only one that thinks fake patina looks like crap ! I haven’t seen one fake that looks good . See y’all .
You really can’t buy patina
I’m speechless. So confused.
Maybe it’s me, but I own a 1968 Porsche 912, (All original,) and the engine is a 1600cc unit. To my knowledge, Porsche never put a 2 liter engine in a 356 or 912. This guy needs to get his facts together if he expects anyone to seriously consider his horrendous asking price. Speedsters command that kind of money, tacky 356’s without the original engine do not. Just saying…
This is a terrific car that now has “fake” painted all over it. Fake is almost never good. Can you imagine constantly explaining to admirers of the car that the paint is a faux finish? Ugh.
I think the zero bids speaks volumes about his choice. But it is his vehicle.
I bought a ’56 356 A Carrera 1500 GS, in Hawaii for $1100. Four overhead cam motor, and Rudge knockoff chrome wheels. Was hard to keep tuned-up. Two distributors and two plugs per cylinder. This thing had a 10 qt dry dump oil system, and roller bearing crank. Would rev to 8000 rpm. Sold it for $1800 in 1963. Was a de-tuned for street , motor from the 550 Spyder race car. Same color, sand beige.
Looks like a Browns Velvet dairy promo car.
I saw this car at Watkins Glen Vintage weekend and it look pretty fake in person.
I drive by an early 70’s C10 stepside, yellow with beautiful patina. The rust follows the curve of the rear fenders, looks amazing. The only problem is the shiny clear coat. It looks like it just got caught in a rain storm, constantly. Kinda ruins it. Shame.
I drive by an early 70’s C10 stepside every day, yellow with beautiful patina. The rust follows the curve of the rear fenders, looks amazing. The only problem is the shiny clear coat. It looks like it just got caught in a rain storm, constantly. Kinda ruins it. Shame.
If the asking price was half the number stated, all the previous comments would still apply. The seller? wants to show his car and not really sell it. The platform exists and was used. Let’s move on.
Sorry, NO. If he intended to have it look sun/weather faded, the dark areas would be more symmetrical. If it’s intended to look rusty, it doesn’t really fit the patterns that 356s are known to rust in. In front of the doors, bottom edges of doors, etc. And I don’t think luggage racks were ever painted–aren’t they chrome with rubber inserts? (Ours is, anyway.)
Then again, I buy new jeans to have new jeans. I’d never buy a pair that was already torn. I’m too old for that nonsense.
Good luck with the sale, buddy. You’re going to need it.
Owned 16 356s in my lifetime. This one is just plain dumb…..
The latest fad in my neck of the woods is a rusty looking full-body wrap. I have a rusty 2017 Colorado next door, and I passed a “rusty” 2017 ZO6 over by the speedway. I always hate when my plastic rusts.
This reminds me of the trend of “road-worn” guitars. My 75′ Fender Jazz Bass is worn through the paint after all the years of my playing it and it has dings and paint chips through actual use on the road. Why people spend large amounts of money for a new guitar that looks like an old guitar escapes me. If you want that look go out and play a lot for a few years and eventually it will happen. I can see in cases to not repaint a car (as its a big chunk of the budget) but to actually paint the car to look aged seems sort of fake to me (just like with guitars). Maybe I’m just getting burned out seeing the word “patina” being used as a replacement for “rusty”, “broken”, “dented” and “worn-out”. I would’ve liked this car better with just a simple paint job.
I agree with everybody else here. This is ridiculous. For the right price this may be a great opportunity. You could paint it any color you like without having to do all the usual rust repair.
I washed my TD for the Bicentennial. Never gave it much thought. Now it’s patina I am told. Patina must be earnned
The front end of this car was damaged and it does not appeared to be fixed or is this also the Faux look? You could have at least fixed the pan and bottom of the fenders.
Relax guys. It’s just paint. To each his own. Buy it and paint it. It’s not that complicated. Just use Monopoly money to pay any premium for the faux patina. Real original is worth more, but this ain’t it. The interior is righteous and that’s cool.
Auction has ended with 0 bids!
Hopefully the owner will come to his senses and relist at a lower BIN price. With a reasonable respray this would be a blast as a fair-weather daily driver assuming everything else checks out.
i have a 356 that was very very very rusty , but it hat racing history … how to drive an restore and have the original patina look ?
so i have desaturated completely and have done patina look to it
now i like my 356 moer and more with every additional dent and scratch
i would like to poste a picture of it but do not now how