THE KNOWLEDGE
There can be no doubt that to start with this car looked a real mess, in large part because of that peeled-open door skin, and you can probably understand why the majority of us – insurance companies included – would shy away from even attempting to repair it.
In the event, though, the door was replaced for the sake of £130 worth of second-hand panel and a few hours’ straightforward mechanical work. And it was much the same for the front wing. Careful use of a hook-ended slide hammer quickly had that back to almost exactly the right profile, and a few minutes’ work with sander and a special spot-weld slide hammer (see photos) left the surface almost perfectly smooth, even before a final thin layer of filler.
It was a rather different story for the rear wing. The worst of the distortion was dealt with by means of a carefully judged straight pull via a curved bar and a chain attached to a hydraulic ram, itself anchored to an immovable post in the workshop. But such had been the force and extent of the accident, and the resulting stresses transmitted through the entire area, that it would take several different techniques gradually to ease those out again – plus, of course, the skill and long experience required to avoid creating still more problems.
The tiny nicks on the leading edge of the panel, for instance, John Joyce was able to eradicate with a hammer and, from inside the door pillar, nothing more than a tyre lever carefully to dress the edge back to the required clearly defined profile. To the rear of that he set to work with the spot-weld slide hammer again, inching his way methodically across the damage to pull it straight. In a few areas even this technique failed to work satisfactorily, so he used a source of intense but localised heat (again, see photos) to shrink the metal back into shape.
By far the trickiest part of the entire process, however, was where the wing meets the front top corner of the rear apron. Attempting to describe in just a few sentences how John resolved that would be akin to explaining how Leonardo da Vinci painted the Mona Lisa, or Edward Rutherford split the atom, so we shall let the pictures tell the story. Suffice it to say that yet again it’s all about identifying and dealing with tiny individual areas of damage, slowly but surely pulling them together, rather than trying to correct everything in one over-ambitious ‘hit’.
Even more impressive than that, though – and to this writer the real magic – was first John Joyce’s almost free-hand reshaping of the subtle but absolutely vital flattened edge to the wheelarch lip (think Rodin, Michelangelo…), with the final thin skim of filler, back to a profile that is genuinely indistinguishable from the original, by the bodyshop team. The only other way of achieving this profile – and without which the car would be almost unsaleable – would have been to cut off the entire rear corner and weld on a new panel from Porsche.
And that, albeit the way you might think your own car ought to be repaired in similar circumstances, is as costly and as profligate as this method is thrifty; as brutally invasive as this solution is subtle and essentially even gentle. What you might call the cut-and-paste route is also utterly dependent for its long-term success on the skills and ethics which are all too often lacking in those bodyshops seemingly best equipped to provide them. Old-school the process shown here may be, but in the right hands it works wonders.