My father was an aeronautical engineer. He built aircraft his entire life.
I had an inclination toward technical work
so I started my career in a design office for car parts.
My first hand-on experience was on my 2CV
which I would use to go to work and on holidays.
It would break down regularly so I spent every weekend fixing it.
Even though it was only a 2CV it already had a cooling system.
Then the Buggy arrived in France and it triggered a new project for me:
to build a Buggy from scratch.
I started with a British reproduction of a Buggy body, a big Buggy,
and of course equipped with the 2CV.
Then Nicholas arrived.
New projects arrived with him, always mechanical ones,
but this time it was a father and son project.
When we talk about construction it is completely different than restoration.
A restoration is a long process, with good and bad surprises,
full of pitfalls, euphoric moments, and sometimes despair.
It is a long journey, often longer and more expensive than we expect.
This project was for us the journey of a father and his son.
From an early age my dad used to give me carburetors to disassemble.
I would take my little screwdriver
and I would try to assemble and disassemble them.
I was introduced to mechanics at a very young age.
Then for Christmas, I got a Piwi 80.
That Piwi allowed me to follow my father wherever he would go to do repairs,
so I already enjoyed mechanics and loved all types of mechanical sports.
Once I had my driver's license I bought a 1962 Beetle,
which I went to pick up with my dad in Touraine.
I made a lot of modifications on that car.
We had a shed in the garden that we transformed into a workshop
where we could work and stock our pieces.
We set up all the tools we needed like a drill press and a compressor.
Our friends would come over to change their oil
or work on their mopeds or Vespas.
This is how we came to call it "The Modern Garage."
For an aficionado of the brand,
the logical continuation of a more ambitious project would be the A356.
The idea started emerging in the early 2000s.
By chance, we followed the tracks left by a gas leak
and we ended up at this farmer's house from Orleans who had a tractor collection.
He was a bit of a scrap dealer.
When we visited his shed, between all the tractors,
three unusual shapes appeared.
It was nothing less than an SP, an S90,
and an AT2 with an open roof.
We started negotiating with the farmer.
However, he was only willing to sell the cars in one batch.
We had very long discussions with my dad,
and I finally managed to convince him to buy the entire batch.
So we went back to the scrap dealer’s house and negotiated
until we became the happy owners of three cars
and around twenty boxes of loose parts.
After 15 days of doing inventory,
we realized that the boxes of the A were complete
and matched the vehicle.
So we decided to sell the other two cars
in order to finance the restoration of the A.
For the body of the car, we decided to put the A356 on a rotisserie
in order to restore it as best as possible.
For this we called our friend Jules who is an expert.
He and my father spent no less than 800 hours working on it.
For the gearbox, we called a well-known gearbox specialist in France
who made the necessary adjustments.
For the color of the car body,
we wanted to avoid the classical gray from the catalog.
We realized that the color chart at the time had a color called auratium green.
This is the color we finally chose.
Finally, for the leather parts of the interior,
we met Jean-Philippe Duval, who is still today a very good friend.
We spent a lot of time with Jean-Philippe
deciding which color would go best with the auratium green.
We finally opted for a mocha color.
We decided to add a few technical modifications
in order to make it more stable, like a high flow pump,
a full flow, B brakes, and convert it to 12 volts.
We also added a bigger exhaust pipe.
We really wanted a car that would fit us, one that we could personalize,
so we also added aluminum plugs that my dad crafted.
Today we have a car that really shows who we are.
I’ll always remember the first time we took it on the road.
As you can imagine after seven years of restoration with my father,
the first time we put the key in and took the car outside the garage,
we were like kids.
We drove in circles around the neighborhood the entire day.
Those moments will stay with me forever.
My name is Nicholas de Meerler and I drive a 1959 Porsche A356 AT2.