OK, first job is to strip the car back to a shell.....

Car stripped, parts tagged, bagged and put into storage for the moment. the bare shell is then mounted onto a rotating 'spit'. Next job will be to strip off the sound deadening and underseal, ready for blasting.

A day of breathing horse-hair fumes, and the sound deadening and general gunk is all removed ... Time for blasting. A session with the crushed glass media, and we are back to bare metal. Thankfully no hidden nightmares, the shell is remarkably good.. Some 'frilly' bits, but no worse than we were expecting :)

With the underside and inside blasted, time to get the external panels back to the bare metal. In order to eliminate any chance of distortion this is done with a combination of stripping discs and coarse sanding discs on a DA sander. Unusually, the hidden horrors are very minimal. There is some very light accident damage to the rear offside quarter panel, and a couple of poor repairs on the nose, but otherwise it is totally original, straight and rot free.

At this stage we've also started to strip down the engine and transmission. Here you see the engine with the peripherals, cowlings and fans removed, as well as the transmission following a good steam clean!

A couple of the panels require no metalwork at all, so these are being prep'd for paint at this stage. A skim of Stopper to reshape some defective areas is followed by a coat of Max Meyer EcoPhos etch primer and a heavy coat of 2K build primer. This is then dusted with 3M guide coat and flatted down before spraying with slow panel wipe to allow assessment of the shape. it's 99% there first time - just another coat of build primer and a second sanding session will have it perfect.

Now Nat has finished a fabrication stint on the Fiat chassis he is free to move on to the metalwork on the Porsche shell. First step is to sort out the nearside sill and 'B' pillar area. the 'B' pillar was already cut out, so first step was to remove the old sill. There is an old repair to the rear of the front inner arch, so this was removed and a neater repair made up, retaining the original spot welded seam along the front.

Next there were some repairs needed to the inner sill area.

With those bits complete it's time to fit the new sill - this means fitting the door for alignment purposes.

Before the rear of the sill can be attached to the quarter panel, we need to get the 'B' pillar area repaired. We have repair panels for here, but but both required a lot of work to get a good fit.

Whilst the metalwork is proceeding on the shell, the panels are being prep'd and primered. One door was a bit rotten along the bottom, so a lower skin section was made up to repair it.

With the nearside nearing completion, attention is now turned to the offside. This side is a little worse. First task is to remove the old sill, and mark out the areas that need attention......

.......then it's time to get cutting.......

.......and fabricating!

That's it for the areas that need to be completed before fitting the sill. Next the door is refitted and the new sill lined up and attached along the inner edge and to the front wing. The rear will be finally welded in place once the 'B' pillar has been reconstructed.

At this stage Nat was cracking on with the metalwork so quickly that I lost track to some extent! I'll have to let the pictures do the talking at this point!

There is a small gap in my photographic coverage here, where the front 'trunk' floor area was being replaced. That was the last of the metalwork jobs, which means on to seam sealing and the start of bodywork prep! The biggest job here is to get the doors correctly aligned (we had to make up some extra-thin shims to get the spacing perfect), the strikers on, and the gaps tight and even all round, whilst still allowing space for the doors to open without risking the new paint (when it's on!).

There were a couple of previous repairs on the front end which we had previously thought were good enough to leave, but a pinhole aroused our suspicion.... a further look revealed the repairs were rotting out from underneath, so they were cut out and new repairs let in.

At this stage, we need to drop the car off the spit in order to prep the areas behind where it mounts, so underseal is being applied as this is much easier done with the car upturned. We are using Wurth Overpaintable Black Stoneguard as this is the official Porsche approved underbody treatment. The engine bay and trunk are being coated with this also. 8 Litres were applied in total.

Next the car is given an all-over coat of 'Reface' spray filler. This is then block sanded and the car re-masked and moved back into the booth for a good dose of 2K high-build primer. The beige primer and black guide coat give it an interesting 'desert-combat' look!! Note the sneaky wheel suggestion ;)

Once the primer is flatted back, and the car double and triple checked for imperfections, it is remasked and wheeled back into the booth for the final time. No turning back now!

Following completion of the bodyshell, we turned attention to the running gear. all suspension parts were stripped and repainted and fitted with new bushes and joints. the engine has had all it's peripheral parts painted/plated/replaced where neccessary, and below we can see the engine being reinstalled in the car.