Initially, we thought we were just going to get this car running and leave the paint as-is. However, we're starting to go down that slippery slope towards a full restoration. As Br'er Rabbit would say, "Please don't throw us in that briar patch..."
We have been a little remiss in our posting of updates. This was partially because we have been deciding what to do with our little brown Porsche. Sure, we knew we needed to fix the rust around the pedal box and under the fuel tank, but once that was done, there was also the matter of checking on how the inner front fenders looked and making sure there wasn’t anything nasty lurking in that typical 911 problem area.
This was the turning point:
The good news is there wasn’t really anything bad to report under the fenders, but once the fenders were off, we decided to start stripping off more paint and getting a good look at how things looked under the older repaint in an incorrect brown. We wondered how much of the original Sepia enamel remained and if we could strip it back to the original finish with any success.
We have been using commercial-grade paint stripper that we purchased at Lowes. We chose the regular strength variety—while it’s not as quick as the more potent versions, it gives us the ability to dissolve one layer at a time. If we’re careful, we can take off the top lacquer without harming the enamel underneath. It’s tricky though–if (when) it gets caught in body seams, it’ll strip everything down to bare metal. Since we’ll be sanding everything anyway in preparation for fresh Sepia enamel, we’re not too worried about it.
The hood had a lot of previous work done on it—but thankfully, it was all superficial scars with no rust involved.
Meanwhile, we had to remove the engine to continue fixing the pedal box area. All of the fuel and brake lines that run through the central tunnel needed to be removed and that required us to drop the engine. That’s a pretty easy job on a 911—and it gave us a chance to really scrub the engine box clean.
