By Alesha Capone
Mark O’Brien is helping to build a replica 1955 Porsche Spyder, the old-fashioned way.
Mr O’Brien, a freelance patternmaker engineer and automotive designer, and his project partner Brian Tanti began work on the labour of love in 2012.
At the time, Mr Tanti, a coach builder who was working at the Fox Car Museum in Melbourne, asked Mr O’Brien to build him a full-size “tooling aid” for a Porsche replica.
The tooling aid, allows metal to be rolled and bent for a vehicle’s body.
Mr O’Brien said he and Mr Tanti decided to build the replica by hand, the same way the Porsche Spyder German manufacturer would have during the 1950s.
“I think for me, what I have enjoyed is doing it by hand – I think we can rely too much on technology support for all things, these days,” he said.
“For me, it has been therapeutic to build it slowly – there has been no boss hurrying me along and no end deadline I have to hurry to meet.”
When Mr Tanti moved to Sydney the pair decided to keep the project going, and moved the tooling aid to Mr O’Brien’s Truganina garage.
In about a month’s time, the tooling aid will be shipped to Sydney, where Mr Tanti will use it to fashion several duplications of the Porsche Spyder. Mr O’Brien estimated that, by then, he would have spent almost 600 hours working on the project.
