Living the Legend
Our contributing enthusiasts from around the world share their real-life experiences with their Porsche 911s
Our real-world Porsche 911 owners update you on their latest flat six escapades
Our third 911 restoration project is under way and
I’m super excited.
It’s also tinged with sadness as it’s something we’re never likely to repeat, so I’ve been visiting Riviera Autobody nearly every other day to take photos, chat with the guys and keep them supplied with doughnuts.
The upshot of morale-boosting snacks is that progress has been rapid! We’re four weeks in and the car sits sans interior, front wings, doors, bonnet, bumpers, every scrap of exterior paint and all the big welding completed.
Due to Steffi the SC’S age it was decided to go deeper into the restoration process, so the interior was ripped out. It was that lovely, Chocolate brown snug that attracted me to the car because of its great condition, but it had to go in case it was hiding corrosion in the sills or bulkheads. It will be replaced by a new matching interior from Southbound Trimmers, so the inside will be as fresh as the outside. The headliner was removed due to a stubborn dry mould patch beside the rear passenger window, and I wanted to know what lurked beneath. I thought the sunroof drain tubes had perished, but the mould was caused by water ingress from the rear screen. I discovered later that a replacement brown headliner was no longer available and scouring the world for NOS material has proved fruitless so far. There’s a ‘plan B’ for that, though…
The front inner wings look almost new, but both front outer wings were shot under the headlight bowls, and I feared what would be revealed upon removal. Riviera has another SC in for work and on that car I can get both fists through the hole where the bumper recoil mount and inner wing were. In the same places on Steffi, there’s only the lightest surface rust that’s been ground off and treated with corrosion inhibitor. Evidence was found of several bodged repairs in the driver’s side wheel well, and the lower section of the wing support panel had a big hole at the bottom. All that shabbiness and crumbly coachwork was removed, with fresh steel grafted in. Considering she’s only had the benefit of aftermarket wheel arch liners for the last three years, she’s in amazing condition, and the passenger cell interior metalwork was found to be intact.
There was a collection of festering rust bubbles coming through on the driver’s side ‘B’ post where it joined the outer sill. Nothing yet showed on the passenger side, but rust was present when the rear wing was cut away for access. The brief to Riviera was to replace the inner and outer sills, kidney bowls, jack point support plates and ‘B’ posts on both sides, regardless of their condition. New metal all the way was
the plan, and only OEM panels to be used, including the front wings.
She was looking more like a skip than a Porsche until the new wings were offered up for initial gapping. This revealed that the bonnet wasn’t closing properly over the frunk. The luggage section’s leading edge was shifted about 6mm to the passenger side, which correlates with the small dent in the front oil cooler and tells of a light impact on the front driver’s side corner. The front was pulled straight and the gapping process continued unhindered. The car’s undercarriage is unaffected; any fault there would’ve been picked up immediately when she was on Center Gravity’s flat floor.
Another mystery was two small dents in the corners of the windscreen scuttle, perhaps caused by the bonnet coming unfastened at speed. There was a lot of filler and paint on the scuttle and an inexplicable 5mm depth of paint on the dent-free bonnet! Slowly but surely, Steffi is being forced to give up some of her little secrets.