It was one of those spur of the moment things. The seed was planted at this year’s Historic car races when I was looking at
the row of Outlaw 356’s in the pits. Aligned in a row and protected by an awning, they flanked a 53-foot auto transport
trailer. At the end was a 1968 Porsche 908 and a Porsche KMW SP-30.
The Outlaws are regular attendees of the event. They look just a shade to the left of normal, kind of like outlaw bikes. The Speedsters often have streamlined headrests and hard tonneau covers. These are not the Stuttgart soldiers, all in a line. They are more like the Katzenjammer Kids. It is hard to put any specific attribute to them; they just don’t conform to the purist’s version of a Porsche.
Neil Emory started the Valley Custom Shop in the late 1940’s. It was (predictably) a customizing shop and was located on Victory Boulevard down in Burbank, California. In 1974 his son Gary bought all of Porsche’s obsolete parts and opened his own business in Parts sales. It is called Parts Obsolete and he bolstered his inventory with used, re-made, and OEM parts. I joined the PCA in the late 1980’s and can remember seeing his advertisements in the back of their Panorama magazine. In 1993 he moved his business to McMinnville, just south of the airport. He has a 50-acre ranch located on a rural two-lane highway.
In 1998, Rod Emory started Emory Motorsports. Housed on the same ranch, Rod offers custom builds, bodywork, and tuning for Porsche 356 and 911 racers…plus a few others (like that boss VW that I wrote about in this year’s race report). They are a full service restoration and race shop and, if you were really into it, this would be the way to go. They provide custom parts, store, repair, tune, and transport all those wonderful little tubs. All ya gots to do to play is have the dough. They will also build you a car if that is your desire. As I said to open this story, their ideas don’t always capture the concours points for authenticity but, when you see the work they do, who the hell cares? One example is the nifty Speedster that they are building for Tom Anderson, the owner of Carrera Motors, the Porsche dealer in Bend, Oregon. Starting with a 356 Cabrio, they are crafting a beautiful little machine for him. Given the costs of today’s high end Porsches, Emory is giving Tom quite a deal with this car. No, it is not cheap. Probably around $150K or so but the car is essentially a new one; custom bodywork and all the latest in mechanicals. It’s nice, very nice.
So I’m out on my bike one weekday afternoon (and don’t you wish YOU were retired?) and I found myself near McMinnville.
Well, says I, let’s see if I can find this place. It would be easy to drive by without seeing it but there is a rusted
356 body sitting atop steel-spoked farm wheels to catch your attention. At the end of the lane is the Emory ranch. Pretty
neat. There is the house and some original out-buildings plus a large metal-clad shop in which the customer cars were
stored. The horse barn behind the house was where most the action was going on. Inside the main
barn was the Tom Armstrong car, looking to be close to being finished, and the 908 from the race weekend. I asked Gary why
the car wasn’t running on Saturday or Sunday and he said that the driver had bent a valve earlier. That’s gotta be
expensive. Right near the custom Speedster, upholstery was being cut. In the attached building, where the stalls used to
be, they were welding and, a little farther down, doing some fiberglass work on a 935 front end.
They were busy. I didn’t have an appointment. Gary had to stop to take a customer phone call so I waved goodbye and drifted back out of the barn and towards my bike. Off in the distance I could see a couple of teepees, one with a VW Microbus parked nearby. In the grass to the side of the barn was a 1950’s style custom sports racer body, complete with weeds growing up through it. The whole place exudes this kind of bucolic speed shop atmosphere. Very cool. Thank goodness for those spur of the moment impulses.
