If you’ve ever put a car back together from rock bottom, you learn a few things in the process. First, bodywork is incredibly expensive. Even using the cheapest guy in town, you still find way more issues than you expected going in. Second, even if you make every sensible improvement under the sun, checkered histories and non-matching engines are value killers. So, if you start with a car like this 1968 Porsche 912 here on eBay that’s said to be numbers-matching and have nominal rust, you’ve likely found an excellent starting point for a project.

Now, a vintage Porsche that is said to have “minimal rust” is always a bit suspect given how prone these are to rotting out, but the floors do look pretty good. Surprisingly, this 912 isn’t in California where all of the rust-free projects are but in Virginia, which is a place that can go either way as it relates to whether a car from the Commonwealth is a rot box or a survivor. This 912 looks to be the latter, even if the bodywork has it share of cosmetic flaws.

Fortunately, those flaws seem fairly minor. There are definitely some rust spots but they don’t seem all that difficult to mitigate, and someone has at least attempted to keep those areas from spreading. The engine lid is likely from another car or has been been poorly painted, but I suspect we’re seeing original paint on the quarter panels, hood, roof, passenger, and driver’s side. It’s an attractive color that will likely have to be re-done by the next owner, unfortunately, unless the nose and engine compartment can be repainted to match the patina.

A numbers-matching engine in an air-cooled anything that hasn’t been lovingly cherished since new is a major score, so the fact that this project-grade 912 is already over $15,000 is not a surprise. There’s a lot of potential in this project, and the seller confirms that the matching-numbers engine isn’t stuck. The reality is this 912 is just a paint job and some carpeting away from being a much different car and I suspect there’s at least a few folks bidding that see the potential of a nice return once the restoration is completed.