Emory Motorsports Custom Porsche 356s - Jay Leno's Garage

well really that is really fast well another episode of Jay Leno's Garage today we're featuring 356 Porsches not just any Porsches but some very special Porsches actually one special and an outlaw should have heard these terms when talking about Porsches the outlaw Porsches this is the company that actually coined the term and everybody sort of copied it from them it's Emory Motorsports they were here in California way back in the 40s then they moved up to Oregon and now they're back in fact the right around the corner from us let's meet the rod Emery rod how're you doing I'm doing great Jay thank you for having us on the show today oh thank you I read about you guys on petrol issues and a bunch of the Porsche websites and it's real exciting since I've got my 356 I really enjoy that car so I kind of try to keep up when I can and boy beautiful beautiful work well thank you very much well I brought a couple of different cars out today to show you one is a 1959 356 sunroof coupe as you mentioned you know we're we're the guys that really coined the term 356 outlaws but really the history of our family dates all the way back as you you said back into the 40s right here in Burbank I think it's cool I met your dad your grandfather started this back in the 40s correct correct and he was on the cover of hop-up and hot rod and all the magazines wasn't it yeah my grandfather Neal Emery had a shop here in Burbank called Valley custom shop that was that operated from 1948 until the early 60s and you know he was really one of the early customizers here in the valley that was it was channeling and sectioning cars right you had Barris and Winfield and the other guys that were you know a lot of more chopping tops and doing some pretty radical stuff when you looked at the cars that my grandfather built it was hard to pick out exactly what he did because a lot of times he really just enhanced the design right and so my grandfather had his shop here I was a partnership between him and his brother-in-law Clayton Jensen in in the early 60s my grandfather was given an opportunity to run the body shop at Chick iris and Volkswagen Newport Beach okay I came around in the early 70s and started working with my grandfather and my uncle learning the the craft and trade of bending metal and doing bodywork and and mechanically working on Porsches and so from age 14 I was building these cars and and that was kind of a period of time when the purists were really focused on making sure that the cars were perfect yeah that's what I want to ask you about because you go these Porsche events and you get though this screw head should be turned right a little more to the left I mean to the point we go guys come on so I mean do they come after you are you truly outlaws I mean do they embrace it now and how long did that how long did it take for them to come around and go gee that's pretty cool well in the 80s when my dad had Porsche parts obsolete and we had a one BAE little mechanic shop in the back and my dad had come back and the two of us had you know screw hood straps on the hood and we drill holes and put fog lights on the cars and lower them and polish the drums a group of our friends would come up and say all you guys are outlaws they're never going to let you show up to the events and then and that's really where that badge came about was because a jeweler friend of ours made a badge that said 356 outlaws because when we'd go to these events in the 80s and early 90s there wasn't a class for us there wasn't a place for us and so oftentimes we were parked out in the dirt and I can remember you know them being like oh you know it's sacrilege you know how can you do that - these little 356s but they were out there while they were out there picking lint out of their air cleaners my dad and I were ripping our cars through the hills you having fun so right it took some time for people to catch on and really understand that we're building cars that that are designed to be driven all right so let's personalize them a little bit and do what Porsche has always done and you can take out your stock Porsche engine put it on the shelf or have it rebuilt and put in one of your brand new and you do brand new motors basically billet don't you we do we do a number of different engine combinations depending on what the budget is of the car whether it's a car we're building for ourself or we're building it for a client you know everything from the standard pushrod motor which was a 1600 CC you know push rod with 60 to 90 horsepower all the way up to the four-cylinder 911 version like in the black car that we'll talk about that's a 2.5 liter overhead cam motor that produces up to 200 horsepower so it really gives us the ability to take everything that we love about these cars and and you know Porsche being an amazing design company an engineering company you can take parts and pieces from some of the latest models sure and adapt them and make them work on these early code oh it's the factory do they kind of recognize you give you a little pat on the back so they just sort of stand back how do they early on they you know they they kind of looked at it like you know you know what's going on here but then in 1998 I had just finished building a car that was a very special bodied little 356 and my wife and my at the time two month old son and I hooked up our trailer behind it and we came pulling into the Monterey Historics in 1998 and a crowd came around the first Emory special and I can remember a group of old factory guys and mechanics come around and and talking to each other in German and then all of a sudden one of them looks over at the other it says when did we build this car right and so for me that was a validation that we were on the right track that we were that we were building cars that you know didn't have parts that look like they came from your local auto parts store but instead the parts and pieces and components I try to put on these cars I wanted to look as if our cars were built in the Porsche special build department right so Porsche does embrace it you know they as you as you can see there's a new trend that people are starting to to really a singer I see Magnus Walker I see a lot of companies coming in around Porsche now when I asked you this is an outlaw but that one is a special what's the difference between a special and an outlaw so an outlaw as we've you know been calling them since the late 80s is really a car where the body itself is pretty much untouched you know we've removed the bumpers maybe fill the bumper holes put a gas filler through the hood but you know we haven't changed the rockers we haven't changed the wheel arches we've just taken the car and and kind of raced it a little bit okay yeah you know put fog lights on it giving it additional performance you know capabilities so this particular car has disc brakes even though they're hidden and special alloy wheels even though they're understated I've seen this car racing through malleable all I've chased it a couple of times I've never caught it but I cuz I think I got a fight cup and it's added yeah sorry I would see this at events and I walk up to where's the owner he's around here somewhere I could never find the guy so I was thrilled when I saw it here today we put a 901 5-speed transmission in it right so it's got a 911 transmission okay it's got 911 rear trailing arms so it gets rid of that old swing axle you know oversteer situation and then the motor that we put in it is a two point six liter motor that produces almost 200 horsepower and so it's just a nice driving car with the external oil cooler and and all those things that make it just a great car to drive and the fun part is it looks factory Porsche 1959 I mean I love the classic steering wheel the classic three dials even it looks to be the original radio I'm sure it's probably it is we take the radio and we put all new internal components in it so we can plug his iPhone into it and then you've done the proper upholstery and everything it's really a beautiful car could we see can we see the engine absolutely okay there we go okay now what did you start with here you start with a Porsche motor is it a totally new crankcase made from billet what are we doing yeah so this car would have normally had 16 hundred CCS with 60 horsepower mm hm and so now what we've got is we've got a 914 Porsche based motor their four-cylinder nine four-cylinder a pushrod motor okay that originally was a two liter motor there's a company fat performance that takes those the 914 motor and then turns it into a 20 650 cc motor with you know 44 millimeter Weber carburetors and then a Porsche 911 upright fan shroud to improve the cooling it just becomes a very drivable now fun motor that's what I wanted to ask you with obviously more horsepower comes more friction comes more heat no problem with with cooling none whatsoever because if you increase the fan size then that that brings more cooling over the cylinders okay and then these motors everybody always talks about them being air-cooled but they're really air and oil cried right and so the other thing that we do is we make them full flow and allow the oil to to come out into an external filter and then cooler that also has an auxilary fan so what we end up with is a motor that has increased oil capacity and increased air flow which makes it run much cooler when we originally built this car a few years ago you know this was the motor that that we put in it but this will eventually I think get one of the four-cylinder 911 motors and that's the beauty of of these cars is that you know you can mix and match and interchange is that a point or that modern electronic it has a magnetic pickup okay well beautifully done and of course there's the famous outlaw badge outlaw badge and louvers i-i'll of louver yeah I like louvers too well it's an it's nicely done well thank you nicely done and of course you started out with a sunroof coupe you know it wasn't that long ago 15 years ago you could buy these for forty five hundred bucks now that it's just gotten crazy in it it has you know the the donor cars that we're buying these days I think when we did this we it was forty five or fifty thousand dollars for the donor vehicle now they're 70 or 80 then oftentimes when I'm building a car I'm starting with a car that most people wouldn't be interested in because I don't need a matching numbers car with a matching-number motor and doors and all those pieces because really I'm gonna take and and modify some of those things and change them and I'm because I'm gonna put more power in them more transmission more brakes I'm gonna go through and and on every car that we do we put new floors new longitudinals and we also strengthen the the longitudinal area and give the cars more torsional rigidity so so if the car has some rust issues before we start it's okay explain this here I have I am not familiar with this piece did you guys make this is this a factory accessory that I was not aware of tell me about that so all of the all of the pre 59 cars so any cars previous to 1959 they didn't have a vent wing so it was a one-piece window and so in the late 50s Porsche had an accessory vent wing and then there were some aftermarket companies that also made some that clipped on but they're getting extremely hard to find and there aren't any reproductions out there so what I did is I ended up finding a set of the lower pieces and the Porsche literature event here in Los Angeles and then we hand fabricated the rest of the pieces to be similar in design to the factory accessory alright let's move over to the other car here the the special yeah this is a this particular cars in 1958 it was a non sunroof car and the car had all the typical you know rust issues and had clips in the body nose and tail on this particular car what we did we started with a non sunroof 58 and if you look right here at this b-pillar one of the the most significant things that you see it's been fattened up angled forward okay it does look yeah and then the corners have been radiused as well as I remove the drip rail down the side and then I found a sunroof out of a later 356 that was an electric sunroof but rather than putting it in the stock location I wanted to move it forward so you had a little bit more you know wind in your face when it was open I knew the car was gonna sit low and with the suspension that we put in it I didn't want it to look like it was slammed on the ground sorry I actually raised the wheel arches two inches front and rear because I must say I can't I mean I don't think I can get a cigarette of paper through there well does that not hit the fender when you're just hammering down the road it doesn't the beauty of being able to you know build your suspension and and build your wheels out of a two-piece wheel is that you can set everything right where you want it and so on this particular car it's got 911 rear suspension just like this one so it doesn't have that typical swing axle arch it has more of a 911 rear suspension geometry the other thing is is once we get the suspect and put in the car then I can set the offset of the wheels right where I wanted and this piece here is uh looks like what factory racecars not often well some of the spiders many of the spider had those these side vents and and the reason those vents were on a spider will something even get it and access the carburetors right on this car I wanted to be able to give it a little personality and and a little character and so I love louvers as I said earlier so I built two we built two louvered panels one on the right one on the left the one on the right actually has the oil cooler with a fan that draws air through and then this one rather than having a fire bottle inside the car where it's gonna you know get in your way we actually house the electric fire bottle fire system out here in this louvered panel right I like these mirrors these don't look portions of me what are these from yeah those are inspired by the either the the 356 GT cars right or they're oftentimes that like on a spider three to six were uh you know 550 spiders and and some of the Porsche race cars and so we build mirrors for the cars that give it that racy look and yeah beautiful and you kept the bumpers on this one as well we did and interesting you bring that up one of the things that I do love bumpers on 356s but oftentimes they're too big and bulky and so what I did on this car is we took three quarters of an inch out of the center of the bumper right here stand them up oh wow and then also if you look at the see how tight the reveal is between the bumper and the body they don't really want to bump anything there's no ya know it should be called it don't even come close to this close to a bumper that's not it's it's it's I guess a mount for the fog lights but but oftentimes there's a big gap in here Porsche you know left a fairly big gap so that the bumpers would interchange you know if there were you know on the production cars but we went ahead and tightened all that up and gave it a nice tight room no dumb question is it normally a glass under here which is normally glass there's yeah there's a number of different lights and light options that 356s came with these are actually the headlights that would have been like on a speedsters Oh speedster grills well let's go around to the back let's take a look at the motor on this one a couple little things I love the attention to detail like this Porsche 2500 hey or 2.5 that's got a let's be playing wait a minute I never saw that well yeah you know it's it's one of those little subtle hints oh there's something different underneath its factory and this I'm surprised at this why the outside hinges well those hinges are modeled after the the factory 911 are which you know gave you access to the motor and I figured you know since we have this little hint that there's something else going on in there that I wanted you to be able to open it up and oh I like flip it all the way over now you can actually see yeah how many times have you been under the hood of your career to write you know fiddling with the idols or whatever so so yeah this this gives you better access to the engine and Boyd so what we have what motor do we start with here is it nine 14 and I on 11 whoa did you build the whole thing from billet what so this particular motor is what you would refer to as a four-cylinder 911 motor everybody says well isn't that a 912 well no Porsche never built a four-cylinder 911 motor although in 1962 Porsche had one of their engineers Paul Hendler look at the feasibility of taking the 911 architecture being a you know single overhead cam Knight motor and building a four cylinder version but they found that there were some limitations and so they never moved forward with that design but in the 80s there were a couple of guys that said hey that was a pretty great idea let's see if we can make that happen one of them was Chuck back that builds oh I know chef I 50 I just saw Chuck I was in Atlanta now yeah he yeah he's a real character check was looking for a different type of a power plant to be able to put in his 904 's and the other cars and he was doing so he took a 2.7 liter 911 motor and hacked it in half and removed the two cylinder you know center cylinders and welded it back together and built this prototype motor and there was another guy that was a good friend of ours I've known him my whole life Dean palapa less out of Temecula and Dean did the same thing so it simultaneously these two guys were were kind of going after that same division that Paul Hensley was you know had visualized you know years before this motor is a later version of Dean's idea and his concept and and this is actually one of his latest motors that has a new cast case so he perfected the the package and then built new cast cases and then had new crank shafts bill so this particular motor is based on a 3.6 liter like 964 or 99 3 architecture so all the components internally everything down to the valve train the piston cylinders the rods the heads everything is you know straight out of a 3.6 liter type motor but you end up with this overhead cam you know 200 anywhere from a hundred and eighty to 200 horsepower 4-cylinder 911 package but boy it's just a beautiful job what kind of horsepower are you making with it this motor is a 2.5 liter motor and it makes 185 horsepower about 180 foot-pounds of torque so it's a twin plug 2 v with forty eight millimeter ITA carburetors so you know it's a nice smooth running motor it does have a few little you know driving characteristics of a you know carbureted motor but sure the most part it's a very nice smooth driving motor well it's beautifully done can we can we take one of these alright we're gonna take this one out yeah let's take the black one out for a little Drive today let's take oh it does well nineteen hundred and fifty pounds we've got 185 horsepower and good rates it makes a pretty nice little peppy this is one of John will heights little short shifters yeah they work nice you know they're there they take a little getting used to use to the long throw the three could get six it's funny to have a five-speed another 356 it doesn't like to have another you know it does yeah it really starts to wake up at about you know 4500 and it just wants to keep pulling then you got a nice cruising gear yeah boy really that is really bad wonderful stock steering box it is it's just rebuilt you know because you know how sloppy these things can yeah yeah so we go through the steering box and and make sure that all that stuff is as nice as we can make it yeah what happens is a lot of guys over the years they do fixes on fixes on fixes and then somebody buys a car goes out of their terrible cars no they're not you don't I see that with Vincent motorcycles all the time you know Vincent's are very specific they're very unusual bonus cycle they they have to be set up properly and you give them to a regular bike guy and they just bolt it together and they and they get wobble and they go they're not very good they don't handle they do if you set them up right exactly exactly the guys that built these things went to college they're engineers what I love about Porsche is that these cars give me the ability because Porsche was such an amazing engineering company it gives you the ability to mix and match parts yeah and it's bulletproof absolutely my favorite thing about Porsche is this is the size of sports car could be should be they really should be much bigger than this you know so many cars is so wide even like the big Lamborghini Aventador and something you always have one wheel on the yellow line yeah and just going around a corner normally you cross the line you know there's a kid I didn't appreciate cars like this because when you get a car Vette with 400 horsepower why would you want something with 60 you know right because you're thinking like a teenager well this car is very nice obviously it's not my car and I'm not familiar with 356 but it doesn't seem unpredictable at all I mean a normal 356 you could really feel that wheel tucking under but you don't get any of it here I'm expecting it but it doesn't happen no geez it's it's it's really it's really but it feels like a modern like a modern Porsche I mean it's as fast as a modern standard Carrera I think almost I mean obviously standard car has more horsepower but it's also what a thousand pounds however you learn is absolutely yeah this cars just over 1,900 pounds yeah yeah well that's uh sticker take it up on the freeway oh but I foot it and just fun to hear this thing rev and watch that TAC hit 7000 like that and nothing no valve floating it would probably go higher than that wouldn't it but I know it will yeah I mean you could because it's 911 architecture you can take this thing up to 75 or 8 but yeah I think sevens about then I have to buy it and that's right well if you watch these videos you know sometimes you take longer test drives and others and this was a long one because when a car is just pleasurable to drive it's just pleasurable to drive you know I don't think we've ever had a Porsche that broke down or overheated or will this pull in the SHA you just take them out and you go yeah this is just a wonderful car in some ways it's even more fun than a modern car because I just enjoy the rush of the torque you know the P ones and the Aventadors and those cars are all fine but you put your foot in amigo Rini next thing you're going 150 this you put it in second or third you put your foot in it you just watch the tach come around it's just getting faster and faster close you get to 7,000 to 7,500 boy it's really an enjoyable car to drive it's such a lightweight you know now we think of lightweight cars is 3,000 pounds right that's a lightweight car this is under 2,000 pounds I mean it's just just amazing and go to their website check out the stuff that they do these these are the guys that coined the term outlaw and they do a beautiful job I mean it really is a wonderful wonderful guy rod thank you very much and thank you I love the story of your family when your grandfather started and your dad did it and now you're doing it so it's fun to see these kind of artisans going from one generation to the next because a lot of times when grandpa did something nobody cares anymore those skills go out the window so to see it passed on to son and then to grandson and you have a son I do I have a 17 year old son okay there you go right there threesies cars keep it going for a long time see you guys next week

Channel: Jay Leno's Garage

Views: 1,060,256

Rating: 4.9140611 out of 5

Keywords: Jay Leno, Jay Leno's Garage, car reviews, compares cars, classic cars, vintage cars, sports cars, super cars, cars, car gear, McLaren P1, Porsche 918 Spyder, Camaro Z28, jay lenos garage, nbc jay leno, emory motorsports custom porsche 356, jay leno porsche, jay leno custom porsche, jay leno rod emory, jay leno emory motorsports, rod emory motorsports, rod emory special, rod emory outlaw, watch jay lenos garage video, watch jay lenos garage full episode

Id: jwln2ji-yOE

Length: 25min 32sec (1532 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 02 2015