Carrera Classic bought this Rubin Red 1965 model Porsche 911 in 2015. When we saw this car for the first time, it was a real “barn find” from USA. The car was taken out of the container in the very same condition that it was stored for a very long time ago, maybe 20+ years. When looking at it for the first time, there was just the bare metal frame left of the steering wheel. When we opened the door we saw that the both wooden sides of the steering wheel had dropped to the floor in front of the driver seat long time ago.
This steering wheel was the original early version of the wooden 420 mm Porsche steering wheel with the aluminium frame. These early wheels are much lighter than the later steel / wood steering wheels. We restored the car, but it was not so easy to find a skilled carpenter who could restore the original steering wheel for us. The additional complication was that the original wood parts were in such a bad state that they could not be used anymore. We finally found Mika Rautasaari from Tyvi Oy who took on the job. Mika has also done wooden dashboards for our early 911’s. He first selected the correct wood materials: Mahogany and Wenge. The two sides of the wheel both have 8 layers which have been laminated one by one on the aluminium frame. This means that there were in total 18 lamination rounds to complete the wheel. Each lamination needed 40 small clamps next to each other to support the layers and the whole lamination process took 2 weeks. Then the wheel was formed with hand tools including the finger grooves. The result of Mika´s work is just great. It was important for us to get the original steering wheel renovated. You could find easily replica steering wheels, but the original aluminium ones are super rare and this wheel really was the original steering wheel from this car.
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