Before:

After:

There is a very dangerous illness that affects many Porsche owners, known to doctors as While we're at it syndrome. Which is how a simple bit of derusting turned into a full-on exterior restoration job ...

It all started innocently enough. The car had two rusted-through wings and some surface-rust and poor-quality repairs on the shell. The plan, then, was to replace the wings, remove the surface rust and then blend in the paint.

The problem with rust is that the full extent of it only becomes visible once you start stripping back the paint. When things turned out to be worse than expected, the bodyshop recommended a bare-metal respray, to be sure we'd got it all.

The rust-removal

Some sections had completely rotted through:

There was bad surface-rust in a lot of areas, especially where seals had leaked:

And finally there were areas where rust had not yet broken through the paint but could be seen bubbling under:

Since we needed to go back to bare metal, I decided to make the best of a bad thing and use it as an opportunity to change the colour of the car.

The respray

While red never looks wrong on a sportscar, especially an 80s Porsche, my absolute favourite Porsche colour is silver. So I asked the bodyshop to do that. They said they'd sent me a paint sample book. Did you know that there are 26 Porsche silvers? No, neither did I. But several of them had that gorgeous 'polished bare metal' look, so I stuck a pin in one of those.

Anyone who knows anything about car paints will be smiling right now. Little did I know that I had opted for the most expensive respray possible. That deceptively simple bare-metal look is actually achieved by spraying the car white, then doing four very thin coats of 'wet on wet' silver, and then 10 coats of laquer. The 'wet on wet' bit means that each coat has to go on while the one beneath is still wet: make a single mistake with any of the coats, and you have to strip back to the bare metal and start again. That's why it's expensive.

But I decided that I would be keeping this car, so it made sense to have it be exactly the way I wanted it. So I said yes.

The seals

As the car needed to be taken apart for spraying, and quite a few of the seals were showing their age, we decided it made sense to replace these at the same time. The most expensive of these was the 'smile', the large rubber seal behind the front bumper:

The trimmings

The bonnet badge didn't want to come off without a fight so needed to be replaced. There are a few different variations, so I made the mistake of visiting the type911 website to take a look. There, among the standard gold ones, was a gorgeous black-and-silver one. It had a beautifully understated look that was clearly perfect for a silver car. At more than three times the cost of a standard one. Sigh.

Then there were decisions to be made about such things as door handles and the rear badge. Matt silver? Chrome? Black? Jon helped me decide by sending me photos of both the parts concerned, and different finishes from bits and pieces he had laying around the workshop:

I opted for black for the rear badge. This was matt silver, looked fine on a red car but was lost on the silver one, so it went off to be powder-coated, changing it from this:

to this:

The bodyshop guy, Scott, now works full-time for Jon Mitchell, so all enquiries to jon@9xx.co.uk.

The roof

The rather tatty Targa roof was replaced with a painted fibre-glass one. More details here.