With the metal work completed in December the restoration of 1976 Carrera MFI 2.7 #9050 has entered a new phase. I've felt fortunate to be working with a really passionate and talented team that cares about the level of detail required to restore a car to how it left the factory and, wherever possible, taking steps to preserve what originality remains after decades of use. For those that haven't been following from the start the Carrera needed a complete repaint due to being covered in primer, other paint, and dust from sitting in body shops for over a decade.

The body and all panels have now been painted with the initial layer primer. Next all the body panels, lights, trim pieces, etc. will be fitted to the chassis. While Porsche never had perfect gaps, I'd like to have them be a bit closer to the uniform gaps that a factory craftsman would aspire to on their best day. With everything fitted everything can be adjusted to get the gaps as close as possible before filler is added to sand back down to get an even gap. Since changes to one gap impact the gaps on the other edges of the panel this requires an iterative process of adjustments until the gaps all are roughly equal. The final step is block sanding, a critical but very labor intensive step of ensuring a great finish.



At the same time we are spraying out a few final test samples of the silver metallic paint (936 / Z2). Properly duplicating Porsche's period flake is always a challenge given how fine the original metallic flake was. Leading up to this point we've studied and photographed several original Carreras to determine how they were originally painted, where there was over spray, where primer showed through, how thick the paint is, and the exact textures to reproduce where we couldn't save the original texture. It is easy to over restore a car and paint it perfectly, or at least better than how it left the factory. However it is much harder to get the details to more closely match how a 911 left the Porsche factory given how poorly they painted many parts of their cars in the 1970s.

In addition to all the original body panels we are also painting a few spare body parts including an extra driver's side mirror, a plain engine lid, and a duck tail. While not original to the car, the extra engine lid and ducktail allow swapping out the whaletail in the future as the mood strikes. Each was carefully fitted to the body before hand and adjusted to get even gaps. Since silver is a very hard color to match later we wanted to do this when the rest of the Carrera was being painted.

I'm really looking forward to seeing the Carrera finally painted and the body panels reassembled on the car. Stay tuned in the coming weeks as the overall restoration picks up pace.