Thanks!
Not sure of the adversity - seems to be going OK at the moment. I think I am getting lucky.
Kind of.
This evening I fitted the driver-side door and front wing. The door went on OK - it's not as flat as the other side, but it settled into its happy place pretty quick giving me a 3mm gap at the rear and 3.5mm at the bottom. I understand that, when the cars were being built, Porsche used to tune the door gaps with a hammer, so I placed a block of wood over the hinges and gave each a quick smack with a mallet. And so the extra .5mm appeared at the rear edge.
The wing went on OK, but it wouldn't sit back far enough against the door, leaving a monster (4.5mm) gap. This was when I had the genius idea of using a ratchet strap to pull the wing back. I have a hundred ratchet straps in a box, where they all make ratched strap love and make more ratchet straps. I found one with big hooks at each end, threw one over the dash and the other into the headlight bucket. It pulled the wing back nicely.
... but the hook at the front left a F****** great dent in the top of the wing. Not deep, but wide and obvious and definitely Not Clever.
I sanded the dent back to reveal the scale. This made it look terrible.
A skim of filler and a rub with a block made it disappear from touch.
To be honest, given the way I've been handling these panels, I'm lucky to have got this far with only this damage, so I don't feel too bad about this.
Meanwhile, I fitted a new starter cable inside the cabin. It's a bit early to be doing this, but the fuel tank needs to be out to allow access, and I want the fuel tank in when the car is being painted, just really to keep the dust out, and also because I'm super bored of moving it around my office where it has been always in the way of something for the last two years.
I noticed that if you cut the outer sheath off the old cable, it makes a good replacement for the plastic anti-chafe covers on the bend-over wire retaining tabs that are present throughout the car.
This is how the car looked after fitting the panels.
Here I tried sanding some guide coat to see how wobbly the panels were. The dark areas are raised, the white areas are low.
I've photographed a lot of old 911s that appear to have 'pillowy' doors - where the reflection in the paint starts to roll in to the gap from several inches out. It looks horrible. I'd always assumed it was crap filler work, finished with a DA sander, but from this experiment it would appear that it would be the opposite - no filler. So all those lovely cars you see with laser-straight reflections running down the side are actually full of very skillfully-sanded filler.
It's one of the many awkward truths of car restoration - whilst the panels on a 50 year old car are knackered, the dies pressing the new panels are also probably 50 years old and also rather tired. You can hammer and dolly dents from the car forever, but you're never going to smooth out the podgy bulge of a replacement wing that has been formed in an ageing press.
I talk like an expert, but it's only what I've been told, and seen at car plants. They use many shite-tons of force to stamp a panel, and eventually, due to equal-and-opposite things, the die goes out of shape.
Continuing on this theme, Barry had mentioned to me in our phone conversation yesterday that he didn't think I was using enough filler on the roof. He was right - it looked good, but still felt wavy to touch. I decided I would bog the whole panel tonight, then cut it back with a very long flexible sanding block at some point when i had more energy. Those of a weak disposition should look away now...
Well, the car was cheap for a reason.
