HOW TO: 996 BODY REPAIR

Following an insurance write off body repair on a 996, at Auto Umbau

Remarkably, the notional cost of repairing the not exactly catastrophic accident damage to this 2001-model 996 was in danger of consigning the car to the breaker’s yard. In the event, a replacement door from one those very same yards, together with some good, old-fashioned bodyworking skills, transformed it back into the svelte beauty you see below – and now it’s for sale for just short of £15,000. Story and photographs by Chris Horton

You might expect, given humanity’s belated preoccupation with our environment, that we would today have a predominant culture of repair and reuse. On the contrary. We lose no opportunity to discard not just vast quantities of single-use plastics, but also many extraordinarily complex machines, from smartphones and DVD players, to railway locomotives and aircraft, that have taken huge amounts of energy and diverse materials – often vanishingly rare – to create. And cars by the million, of course.

For the manufacturers it’s a win-win. They get to sell us something supposedly safer, better-equipped, more powerful, more glamorous, more economical, faster – and so boost their profits on the back of the buying public’s breathtaking lack of imagination. The tree-huggers are happy, too, although for them it can be a Pyrrhic victory. New cars might appear ‘cleaner’ than their nasty, smelly, low-tech predecessors, but there is always an environmental cost in building them, and in scrapping and recycling the old ones.

Which explains why just a few months ago this 2001-model 996 Carrera 3.4 (above) was effectively an insurance write-off, worth just a few thousand pounds. The right-hand side had suffered a swipe impact, from the trailing edge of the front wing to the top corner of the rear apron. The upper section of the rear wheelarch had been pushed in, its once elegant profile seemingly lost for ever. And the leading edge of the door skin had been peeled open like a banana.

But one man’s parts car is another’s project, and the first beneficiary of these unfortunate circumstances – you might even say this madness – was Robin Mckenzie, proprietor of classic-porsche specialist Auto Umbau in Bedfordshire. ‘I had seen the 996 standing, semi-abandoned, at another specialist’s premises,’ he told us. ‘I guess the

insurance company they bought it from had priced the repair at the top of the scale, using a new door and rear quarter section, and that alone would have jeopardised its viability.

‘My enthusiasm for the 996 and 997 –

I have several of each – has led to us specialising in these two models, as well as the air-cooled cars, and I felt this one offered potential to repair and sell on. It looked pretty awful, but the damage was superficial, with no effect on the structure or the suspension. We have our own bodyshop, and an immensely talented man working in it – John Joyce.

I thought he would be able to spend time on the project while waiting for other jobs to come back from the off-site paintshop we use, and turn that into a modest profit. And the door, at least, would be dead easy to fix – all we would have to do was replace it with a good second-hand one.’

Unsurprisingly, and certainly not to Robin, the car had other ‘issues’, cosmetic and mechanical. ‘Our first job was to clean it, so we could see what we would be dealing with. It was mostly good, but servicing had been neglected during the last few years, and

I knew it was going to be an engine-out job, if only to replace the crankshaft seal and IMS bearing – and consumables such as the clutch. Better to put things like that right while you can – and it’s the sort of work we’re doing every day. The air-con condensers would need replacing, too, and we did a full brake overhaul, including renewing the rusted line that passes through the engine compartment.

’Even so, much of the time was occupied not just with the big stuff, but with lots of little jobs. Things that cumulatively make any car feel very tired, and which if you fix them make

a huge difference. Replacing broken bolts and clips, sourcing new or good second-hand trim parts, and even reattaching the dashboard top, where the covering was coming adrift. An interesting one, that. I’ve not seen it before in a 996, but no doubt it will start to become commonplace as the cars grow older.’

Any one of those tasks would have made ideal copy, but we decided this was a perfect chance to show how the collision damage was to be repaired. It’s not a job for the inexperienced. And it’s not, as we’ve said, the simplistic but also quite invasive ‘cut-andpaste’ way a Porsche-approved bodyshop would do it. But it was fascinating to watch John Joyce pulling, pushing and teasing the metalwork into shape, using little more than a few hand tools, such that it would need only a wafer-thin skim of filler. And nothing less than inspirational to see the craftsmen at the paintshop apply that filler such that every subtle curve was replicated to perfection.

Fitting the damaged door, too, was a joy to behold; a victory for common sense over the

lazy wastefulness of a new panel. (And we shall be looking at this aspect of the project in a future edition.) Robin was able to buy a replacement, in the correct Seal Grey and needing no cosmetic work, for just £130 from Douglas Valley Breakers in Lancashire. Perhaps not surprisingly at that price it came as a bare shell, with the lock, handle and window mechanisms all removed, so Robin had to strip those out of the damaged door, but seeing it reassembled and back in position – and in the right colour, too – was a valuable early boost to the project.

The original plan had been to repaint as little of the body as possible; just the areas that really needed it. That sounds something of a compromise, but for simple cost reasons it’s the way the body-repair trade works. The more Robin and his bodyshop team looked at the car, though, the more blemishes they saw, and concluded that, rather than treat those

piecemeal, it made sense to link them and repaint virtually all of the shell. As it stands now, then, the only parts not to have been resprayed are the roof and the engine cover.

If that is not reason enough to buy the car, then the deciding factor has to be the wheels.

As bought, it was on adequate but shabby split-rims from a 996 GT3. But Robin had a set of hollow-spoke 993 wheels – themselves worth around £1100 – and today these set it off to perfection. You will note, too, the now unusually clear headlight covers, in place of

the yellowing lenses in the ‘before’ photo. Yet again that was a transformation achieved not with new parts, or even second-hand ones, but by having the original items professionally polished. Make do and mend. Something we can all learn from these days.

Dates on the image files tell their own story: from derelict (top) on 2nd October to this lovely-looking machine (above) on 4th December. Not the kind of repair that too many of us will attempt, but it shows what can be done. Wheels are hollow-spoke 993 rims. And yes, the front number plate has since been fitted straight and level...

The damage to the front wing, too, responded well to nothing more invasive than a slide hammer, carefully hooked around the trailing edge – the luck of the draw. Even so, there remained a small ‘low’ area, revealed by sanding off the paint (top row, far right), and that would need pulling with the aid of this clever device (this row, near right): an electrode, attached to a slide hammer, that temporarily welds itself to the surface and breaks free again under the sudden sharp pull from the ‘hammer’. This technique would feature strongly in the repair of the rear wing, as well. The leading edge of the rear wing had some superficial but still quite pronounced nicks in it, but John was able to dress those almost flat again by careful use of a hammer and a tyre lever from within the door pillar

Fixing the door was almost laughably easy. Douglas Valley provided a secondhand shell for £130 – in the correct Seal Grey, and with not a mark on it – and it took just a few hours to transpose the hardware from the damaged one. We shall be covering that in a separate how-to quite soon. The new door would also give body man John Joyce (right) a good, welldefined edge to work from when it came to dealing with the front part of the rear wing. The majority of the damage in that area John very quickly straightened with the aid of a special curved bar and a hydraulic ram – with further assistance from a slide hammer, far right – but leaving the area smooth enough to need only a very thin layer of filler would take rather longer, as we shall see

Seeing John Joyce gradually, carefully, painstakingly tease the rear wing back to almost exactly the right profile in every single area was a real privilege; a bit like watching a classical sculptor in action. The secret – or one of them, anyway – is essentially ‘little and often’. Peck away at small areas of damage, basically, rather than trying to right everything in one go. Measure, and check with a straight edge, as often as you can. In one or two small areas of the rear wing the naturally distorted metal needed to be persuaded back to the right profile with the intense heat from this clever tool (middle photo, second row up): essentially an electrode plugged in to the same spotwelding machine that powers the slide hammer

First photo in this sequence shows how remarkably straight John Joyce was able to get the rear wing, using nothing more than basic pulling techniques – albeit honed by his years of experience. Trickiest area was always going to be the deep gouges where the wing meets the top front corner of the rear apron, and in the event these would need a mix of spot-weld slide hammer and welding to fill the voids. Unsurprisingly, the slide hammer depends on good electrical contact, so the surface to be pulled needs to be free of all paint

Satisfied that the wing was now as good as anyone was ever going to get it, John sprayed on a quick coat of grey primer – partly to protect the bare metal surface, but also to highlight any remaining high or low spots. Last two photos in this group show the car at the paintshop, with the first ‘proper’ layer of the filler that will provide the finished profile. It was at this stage that the decision was taken to repaint not just the accident-damaged areas but also a number of other everyday blemishes: everything bar the roof and engine cover, essentially

More of the same kind of work in this group of pictures, and showing how that troublesome area next to the rear apron was filled with weld. It was never going to be possible to execute this entire repair without at least some body filler – as we shall see on the next page – but the aim was always to keep that as thin as possible. Simple pencil line shows where the wheelarch edge will require careful shaping to match the original. It looks crude at this stage – but seriously, wait until you have seen the finished product!

Nearly there: sanding, filler, more sanding, a bit more filler, and gradually the once mangled panelwork starts to look like the rear wing of a pristine 996 again. Last shot in this group captures what we consider the sheer genius of that wheelarch edge. No less perfect is the subtle concave curve at the lower front part of the wing, between the wheelarch and the door, just above the sill. Get that wrong and the car will always betray its past

There is a natural tendency among all of us to avoid cars that have suffered body damage, not unreasonably given the way many are ‘repaired’. You might even say that seeing this one’s secrets laid bare will affect both its value and its chances of selling. It wouldn’t put us off, though. At just short of £15K, and with all other likely problem areas addressed (see panel above), we think it’s a bargain. And dare we suggest that, as a humble 3.4, it is likely to outlive many of its seemingly more glamorous successors?