It’s been awhile, but today was a major milestone.
Windshield
The guy in ATL continued with the ‘you’re still on 2 week back order’, so I began looking elsewhere. A local glass shop said they could get the windshield for me and in fact had one in their warehouse in KC. I specifically requested an 85-88 with the antenna. Yep, they had it and would have it in OMA the next day. Could put it in at my house on the following Tue. Before I committed, I needed to see if I could get out of my ATL commitment. I was able to, so ordered up the local w/s. Everything is good.
Tue arrives and so do the installers. The main guy’s done a 928 w/s before and says mine looks good & shouldn’t be difficult. They pull their stand out of the truck and put the new w/s on it. I look and say it’s the wrong one. No radio antenna. Crap! They call the boss and he says he’ll do some calling. To their credit, the w/s has a tag on it that says 84-95, so it probably showed it would work in their computer system.
Several days go by & I don’t hear back from the boss, so I call. He says he has a couple more contacts he needs to talk to. A week goes by, still no word. I debate whether I should buy the $350 w/s and deal with a different antenna. Not sure how the earlier models do the antenna, but in 89 they did a shark fin antenna on the roof. However, I’m not too excited about this for 2 reasons: 1. I have to drill a hole in the roof and 2. I’ll have to remove the leather headliner to fish the wire to the antenna. The leather may be shrunk in its old age and may not want to go back into place. Kind of a defeatist attitude but nothing has gone to plan with this project.
My other option is to bite the bullet and bye the uber expensive factory Porsche w/s. I’ve had a good run of Wheeler Dealer sales lately, so I decide to splurge with the factory model and get this part of the project to the done sign. I stopped at the dealership Mon afternoon and place the order. $1366 (after PCA discount) + $160 for primer (whatever that is) + $220 for shipping from Germany. With tax, it comes to $1872!!! The parts guy tells me it will probably take a week to arrive (yeah right, I’ve heard that before). The local glass company happens to be next door to the Porsche dealership, so I stop over and set it up for them to install it when it arrives. Yesterday morning I get a call from Porsche and the w/s has arrived. Wow! 3 days. I asked if it was already in some warehouse in the US and they said no, it shipped from Germany. I call the glass people and they can come this morning.
A different guy arrives this morning and goes to work removing the old w/s and the glue that held it in. Pulls out the new w/s and yes it has the antenna. That’s as close as I got to it after verifying, as I didn’t want to accidentally bump it off the stand. He gets the new w/s installed and charges me $168.
It’s been a long haul to get to this point. Hopefully you’ll indulge me while I show off some pics of the final leg of this adventure.
Current w/s. I think some kids beat it up with a baseball bat. (Or the prev owner got upset with a project not going well.)
Out with the old.
In with the new.
Looks sooo much better. I still have to put the trim around the w/s, but I like admiring it even with the trim off. Will need to rummage thru my box of parts in the basement for the rear view mirror.
The shark has been gathering dust lately while I shifted my attn to my Wheeler Dealer activities. Now I should have more time to get back to her. With the new w/s, she looks significantly better and may be the impetus to get back into the ball game.
Post Script
It looked to me like the installer used his own primer on the window before he dropped it in. So I went on a mission to track down my $160 primer. After a discussion with the glass place and then the dealership, I got $160 refunded on my cc. Yay! Takes a little of the sting off.